Marx at the Arcade

This book tries to answer one question: how does the political writings and thoughts of Karl Marx relate to the world of videogames?

Videogames are a terrain of cultural struggle, shaped by work, capitalism, and ideas about society. Through the pages that follow, I will draw out the struggle and resistance that has marked videogames from the start, thinking about what that means for today.

"To start at the very beginning, the National Museum of Play in New York claims that the very first videogame was a custom-built computer in 1940, the Nimatron." Since then, things have changed, including how videogames has become a major industry.

Another interesting point about the birth of videogames, is this:

The technological basis for videogames was laid by the US military. As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter have argued, “They originated in the U.S. military-industrial complex, the nuclear-armed core of capital’s global domination, to which they remain umbilically connected.”

Since then, things have changed, including how videogames has become a major industry. For example, videogames currently make up the majority (51.3 percent) of entertainment spending in the UK. Woodcock ends his historic recant with "Fortnite", in 2017. In other words, this book is current.

This place in the book, to me, is where it becomes interesting:

Imagine again, you sit down at your games console to play a game. Yes, your own play may become an important part of the game if you are playing online—after all, online games are no fun if you play on your own. But imagine if all the people whose labor contributed to that moment were standing with you there too. How many people would that be? This notion, that each part of the labor process becomes “congealed” (to use Marx’s term) within the videogame, gives us a sense of how complex contemporary videogame production has become.

I now turn to discuss the role of the videogames industry within capitalism. However, it is important to remember that the videogames industry “is an exemplary global business in that its dominant organizations share a strategic orientation which exceeds any particular territorial affiliation.” This means that the largest videogames companies operate beyond national boundaries, combining work processes across the world to maximize profits.

The capitalistic structure that is favored by most videogame studios, along with knowing that streaming is today fairly essential for non-console based gaming, makes for a highly competitive and volatile world:

The majority of profits are made on videogames in the weeks after they are launched, making product placement in physical locations key—along with launch events and so on. As one industry analysist explained: For the publishers it’s driven by the amount of time they have to make back their money. . . . On a big 100, 200-million-dollar launch, they only have 2 to 3 weeks to make back their initial investments.

Woodcock writes a little on how the military-industrial complex makes haste to help videogame studios:

The military saw the early potential for videogames to train soldiers and try out strategies, as with earlier kinds of war games that have been used extensively in the history of war. For example, in the 1980s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began working with developers to make training games.

Similarly, as a way to train the US Marine Corps modified Doom II, renaming it Marine Doom. The military later continued with this idea through extensive iterations, including Virtual Battlespace 2, used to train “thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan.” Similarly, the British military has “had to radically improve some of its simulated training war games to keep the attention of recruits” who grew up with the latest videogames.

The connection therefore strengthens through “game developers and war planners” having “overlapping interests in multimedia simulation and virtual experience,” resulting in greater collaboration and the subsidizing of the production of new games. This has involved direct crossovers between the games industry and the military—for example, a recruitment ad for the British Army features an unbranded Xbox controller flying a drone.

Not far from the US military developing the hand grenade to feel like a baseball so that young men can easily start throwing them, right?

The next bit says a lot of how capitalism meets military secrecy:

The process of finding military consultants proved easy for the developers of Call of Duty. As one of the developers explained: “We’ve been fortunate that the series has a lot of fans across military organizations, and within the entertainment industry.” They continued to note that “this draws a lot of interest, and a great deal of desire to help Call of Duty.”

However, offering an “unfiltered view from ‘the trenches’” has also proved problematic in practice. The use of Navy SEALs in Medal of Honor: Warfighter apparently involved divulging classified information, leading to official letters of reprimand. This “unfiltered view” appeared to involve information to which the public was not even supposed to be have access.

That fades away in comparison with the following:

Simon Parkin notes the history of companies sponsoring “imitation adult products to children,” citing the examples of candy cigarettes and Gibson’s licensing of plastic guitars. While this approach may make sense with computer peripherals in general, or sports cars in racing games, or even equipment in sports games, this is not as obvious in videogames about war—particularly when many gamers are children.

However, perhaps this may not come as so much of a surprise to readers in the US as it does to someone living in Britain, a country in which the idea of buying a gun is almost as unlikely as seeing an advert for one. Parkin found that “licensed weapons are commonplace in video games, but the deals between game makers and gun-manufacturer are shrouded.” None of the publishers he contacted were prepared to discuss the practice.

So, marketing weapons to children is commonplace in big parts of the videogames industry. If we think that's ludicrous, think about this instead:

Many arms companies have sold their products across a variety of conflicts, with the UK exporting over £7 billion of arms annually, and often to “repressive regimes.” However, the issue of who are considered “friends” and “enemies” serves the interests of the state, and is now reinforced in videogames too. As a result, “consumers have, for the past few years, unwittingly funded arms companies that often have their own military agendas.”

[...]

These connections between the military-industrial complex and the videogames industry go beyond simply consulting. In some cases, the coordination involves the direct involvement of the military, whereas in others it entails indirect involvement, including payment. However, this development marks an important divergence between the development of AAA games and that of indie games, particularly with regard to the differential levels of resources and (potential) access of AAA developers to military sources of funding.

Moving from how videogames are funded by people who like to sell killing machines, Woodcock writes of the extensive use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Naturally, software-development companies don't want their code to be revealed, nor their products talked about. However, NDAs seldom exist to consider the individuals behind their work role, and hence, NDAs hamper how badly videogame workers are treated.

This use of NDAs acts as an initial block to research, the sharing of information for purposes of comparison, and, of course, organizing. As an anonymous games developer explained, “I’ve lost count of the number of cold calls I’ve had from recruiters who can’t actually say what a project is, only that ‘I’ll like it.’”

They continued: “In interviews a couple of times, I’ve signed an NDA before I even took off my coat in a studio, and by the time I leave I still have no idea what they actually wanted to hire me for.” It is hard to imagine going to an interview without being told (or then being able to share) the details of a job in many other industries.

Marx would undoubtedly have had something to say about worker rights, especially to voice their opinion about their work conditions.

Woodcock writes about sexism in the videogames industry, which is rife:

Another aspect of this kind of relational or emotional labor is found in the work required to maintain videogame communities, with more women likely to be working in these roles than in the field of development.

Community managers have to use their skills to “mediate a range of problematic user behaviors,” ensuring that a healthy community is developed and sustained. This involves “passion, community, and online social relationships” that are “employed directly in both the recruitment and the logics of cultural production,” and therefore crucial to many videogames. Yet, despite this important role, “their creativity, translation, reporting, and management skills are undervalued while flexibility and instability are common.”

Woodcock goes into the monetary differences between female and male videogame workers. He also goes over issues of sexual abuse, of which women—regardless of profession, really—are subjected en masse.

According to the results, most of the workforce consists of young individuals, with 79 percent under the age of 35, and only 4.7 percent representation for Black and minority ethnic (BAME) workers. Only 14 percent identify as women—who also earn on average 15 percent less than men.

Yet another survey found that 45 percent “felt that their gender had been a limiting factor in their career progression, offering a significant barrier to their progress. A further 33 percent said that they had experienced direct harassment or bullying because of their gender.” This shocking set of statistics highlight the importance of considering gender, both within videogames, but also in the workplace itself.

Temporary workers are also gone into, and how "unskilled labour" is outsourced to workers who live in countries so that the employer can make as much money as possible.

The more industrialised a capitalist company becomes, the more it is likely to pigeon-hole its workers:

The result is a more regimented and managed labor process in which workers have lost the creative freedom that they may have had previously. However, management still faces a problem with standardizing work in the studio as “no one project resembles another,” with each still having differences.

These kinds of changes were also reflected by another developer, Jean-François Gagné, in his recollection of working on Assassin’s Creed: Basically, I didn’t know how to do “anything” anymore. I’ve worked on six Assassin’s Creed games. That was what I was doing since Brotherhood. AC, AC, AC and AC games. . . . I really knew how to do AC games but that was it! When you are doing the same thing over and over for years . . . you forget everything else. . . .

The concept of "crunch time" is explained; this is commonplace abuse in the software-development industry. Crunch time is long working hours, often unpaid, that end up changing people to their core. Stressful work, not only performed over long periods of time, but often expected by some companies, leads to depression, long sick leaves, and suicide. Web search for "Letter from an EA spouce", and you will see one oft-quoted example.

The best part, as Woodcock explains, is that "crunch time" is never a good idea:

Despite these clearly abusive policies, with all the personally devastating costs they incur, crunch time has never even been proven to be an effective managerial strategy. In one study it was found that “no matter how we analyze our data, we find that it loudly and unequivocally supports the anti-crunch side.” Not only did the study consider the negative effects for workers; it also demonstrated “that crunch doesn’t lead to extraordinary results.”

Furthermore “on the whole, crunch makes games LESS successful wherever it is used, and when projects try to dig themselves out of a hole by crunching, it only digs the hole deeper.”

The question, then, is why is the practice so widespread? If you ask the Fryes’ friend Karl Marx, the answer is simple: this extension of hours is an attempt to increase the value produced at work.

In view of this framework, it is clear that crunch is therefore a deliberate managerial strategy, not some sort of mistake or aberration. It is one of the major points of contention in the videogames industry. As Tanya Short, the cofounder of an indie studio, explained, “Many teams (indie and AAA alike) seem to start a project already calculating in crunch to the schedule for added content or productivity.”

Woodcock does bring one of Marx's maxims into play: the importance to allow workers to come together to have their voices heard. If their workplace cannot be partly owned by themselves, i.e. in another way than the capitalistic (which is, by definition, fascist in the hierarchical sense), workers must unionise:

Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) is one example of this process. TWC is a “coalition of workers in and around the tech industry, labor organizers, community organizers, and friends” that is based in the US, and particularly active in the Bay Area and Seattle. In the past few years, the network has gone from strength to strength. As R. K. Upadhya, a member of TWC, explained: “Since the 2016 elections in the US, there has been an unprecedented level of visible unrest among workers at all levels in the tech industry, from food service workers to programmers and engineers.”

He goes into detail by using a French videogame studio as example:

On February 14, twenty-one workers went on strike at Eugen Systems, a French videogames studio. Their statement, released through Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV, the Videogame Workers Union), read, “In the face of the refusal to pay us as required by law, and the manifest lack of consideration for the value of our work, we have come to the conclusion that, in order to make ourselves heard, we have no option but to go on strike.”

After thirty days on strike, one of the activists, Félix Habert, reflected on their experience by that point: “It’s rather hard when you’re just a bunch of people with no political experience.”

However, they had also discovered mistakes in how the company organized payments, crowdfunded $10,000 in strike funds, and made international news with their campaign. As one journalist reflected at the time, “It’s a small but symbolic labor dispute in one of the country’s most often praised economic sectors that could have ramifications for workers at other studios.”

The strike, which Habert described as “a very spontaneous movement,” ended in the second week of April, even though the strikers’ demands were not met. Some then chose to take legal action against the studio.

The STJV has continued to build from this strike, representing not only workers in the industry, but also students and unemployed workers. The union is now focusing on campaigns against unpaid internships, low wages for starting workers, and precarious contracts.

Woodcock provides both arguments for and details of what Marx would make of the videogames industry, in persuasive terms. However, he keeps a cool head, and envelops his theories in modern-day examples that anybody can understand, interested in videogames or not (I'm not).

This is something that should be read by all persons who have anything to do with the videogames industry, industries overall, but perhaps mainly by persons who think nothing is wrong in the videogames world.

I'd love to have read a bit more on diversity in the videogames society, but other than that, this is a very current, workplace-applicable, and likeable book. It's also easy to read, unlike a lot of politically argumentative books.

This book tries to answer one question: how does the political writings and thoughts of Karl Marx relate to the world of videogames?

Videogames are a terrain of cultural struggle, shaped by work, capitalism, and ideas about society. Through the pages that follow, I will draw out the struggle and resistance that has marked videogames from the start, thinking about what that means for today.

"To start at the very beginning, the National Museum of Play in New York claims that the very first videogame was a custom-built computer in 1940, the Nimatron." Since then, things have changed, including how videogames has become a major industry.

Another interesting point about the birth of videogames, is this:

The technological basis for videogames was laid by the US military. As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter have argued, “They originated in the U.S. military-industrial complex, the nuclear-armed core of capital’s global domination, to which they remain umbilically connected.”

Since then, things have changed, including how videogames has become a major industry. For example, videogames currently make up the majority (51.3 percent) of entertainment spending in the UK. Woodcock ends his historic recant with "Fortnite", in 2017. In other words, this book is current.

This place in the book, to me, is where it becomes interesting:

Imagine again, you sit down at your games console to play a game. Yes, your own play may become an important part of the game if you are playing online—after all, online games are no fun if you play on your own. But imagine if all the people whose labor contributed to that moment were standing with you there too. How many people would that be? This notion, that each part of the labor process becomes “congealed” (to use Marx’s term) within the videogame, gives us a sense of how complex contemporary videogame production has become.

I now turn to discuss the role of the videogames industry within capitalism. However, it is important to remember that the videogames industry “is an exemplary global business in that its dominant organizations share a strategic orientation which exceeds any particular territorial affiliation.” This means that the largest videogames companies operate beyond national boundaries, combining work processes across the world to maximize profits.

The capitalistic structure that is favored by most videogame studios, along with knowing that streaming is today fairly essential for non-console based gaming, makes for a highly competitive and volatile world:

The majority of profits are made on videogames in the weeks after they are launched, making product placement in physical locations key—along with launch events and so on. As one industry analysist explained: For the publishers it’s driven by the amount of time they have to make back their money. . . . On a big 100, 200-million-dollar launch, they only have 2 to 3 weeks to make back their initial investments.

Woodcock writes a little on how the military-industrial complex makes haste to help videogame studios:

The military saw the early potential for videogames to train soldiers and try out strategies, as with earlier kinds of war games that have been used extensively in the history of war. For example, in the 1980s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began working with developers to make training games.

Similarly, as a way to train the US Marine Corps modified Doom II, renaming it Marine Doom. The military later continued with this idea through extensive iterations, including Virtual Battlespace 2, used to train “thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan.” Similarly, the British military has “had to radically improve some of its simulated training war games to keep the attention of recruits” who grew up with the latest videogames.

The connection therefore strengthens through “game developers and war planners” having “overlapping interests in multimedia simulation and virtual experience,” resulting in greater collaboration and the subsidizing of the production of new games. This has involved direct crossovers between the games industry and the military—for example, a recruitment ad for the British Army features an unbranded Xbox controller flying a drone.

Not far from the US military developing the hand grenade to feel like a baseball so that young men can easily start throwing them, right?

The next bit says a lot of how capitalism meets military secrecy:

The process of finding military consultants proved easy for the developers of Call of Duty. As one of the developers explained: “We’ve been fortunate that the series has a lot of fans across military organizations, and within the entertainment industry.” They continued to note that “this draws a lot of interest, and a great deal of desire to help Call of Duty.”

However, offering an “unfiltered view from ‘the trenches’” has also proved problematic in practice. The use of Navy SEALs in Medal of Honor: Warfighter apparently involved divulging classified information, leading to official letters of reprimand. This “unfiltered view” appeared to involve information to which the public was not even supposed to be have access.

That fades away in comparison with the following:

Simon Parkin notes the history of companies sponsoring “imitation adult products to children,” citing the examples of candy cigarettes and Gibson’s licensing of plastic guitars. While this approach may make sense with computer peripherals in general, or sports cars in racing games, or even equipment in sports games, this is not as obvious in videogames about war—particularly when many gamers are children.

However, perhaps this may not come as so much of a surprise to readers in the US as it does to someone living in Britain, a country in which the idea of buying a gun is almost as unlikely as seeing an advert for one. Parkin found that “licensed weapons are commonplace in video games, but the deals between game makers and gun-manufacturer are shrouded.” None of the publishers he contacted were prepared to discuss the practice.

So, marketing weapons to children is commonplace in big parts of the videogames industry. If we think that's ludicrous, think about this instead:

Many arms companies have sold their products across a variety of conflicts, with the UK exporting over £7 billion of arms annually, and often to “repressive regimes.” However, the issue of who are considered “friends” and “enemies” serves the interests of the state, and is now reinforced in videogames too. As a result, “consumers have, for the past few years, unwittingly funded arms companies that often have their own military agendas.”

...

These connections between the military-industrial complex and the videogames industry go beyond simply consulting. In some cases, the coordination involves the direct involvement of the military, whereas in others it entails indirect involvement, including payment. However, this development marks an important divergence between the development of AAA games and that of indie games, particularly with regard to the differential levels of resources and (potential) access of AAA developers to military sources of funding.

Moving from how videogames are funded by people who like to sell killing machines, Woodcock writes of the extensive use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Naturally, software-development companies don't want their code to be revealed, nor their products talked about. However, NDAs seldom exist to consider the individuals behind their work role, and hence, NDAs hamper how badly videogame workers are treated.

This use of NDAs acts as an initial block to research, the sharing of information for purposes of comparison, and, of course, organizing. As an anonymous games developer explained, “I’ve lost count of the number of cold calls I’ve had from recruiters who can’t actually say what a project is, only that ‘I’ll like it.’”

They continued: “In interviews a couple of times, I’ve signed an NDA before I even took off my coat in a studio, and by the time I leave I still have no idea what they actually wanted to hire me for.” It is hard to imagine going to an interview without being told (or then being able to share) the details of a job in many other industries.

Marx would undoubtedly have had something to say about worker rights, especially to voice their opinion about their work conditions.

Woodcock writes about sexism in the videogames industry, which is rife:

Another aspect of this kind of relational or emotional labor is found in the work required to maintain videogame communities, with more women likely to be working in these roles than in the field of development.

Community managers have to use their skills to “mediate a range of problematic user behaviors,” ensuring that a healthy community is developed and sustained. This involves “passion, community, and online social relationships” that are “employed directly in both the recruitment and the logics of cultural production,” and therefore crucial to many videogames. Yet, despite this important role, “their creativity, translation, reporting, and management skills are undervalued while flexibility and instability are common.”

Woodcock goes into the monetary differences between female and male videogame workers. He also goes over issues of sexual abuse, of which women—regardless of profession, really—are subjected en masse.

According to the results, most of the workforce consists of young individuals, with 79 percent under the age of 35, and only 4.7 percent representation for Black and minority ethnic (BAME) workers. Only 14 percent identify as women—who also earn on average 15 percent less than men.

Yet another survey found that 45 percent “felt that their gender had been a limiting factor in their career progression, offering a significant barrier to their progress. A further 33 percent said that they had experienced direct harassment or bullying because of their gender.” This shocking set of statistics highlight the importance of considering gender, both within videogames, but also in the workplace itself.

Temporary workers are also gone into, and how "unskilled labour" is outsourced to workers who live in countries so that the employer can make as much money as possible.

The more industrialised a capitalist company becomes, the more it is likely to pigeon-hole its workers:

The result is a more regimented and managed labor process in which workers have lost the creative freedom that they may have had previously. However, management still faces a problem with standardizing work in the studio as “no one project resembles another,” with each still having differences.

These kinds of changes were also reflected by another developer, Jean-François Gagné, in his recollection of working on Assassin’s Creed: Basically, I didn’t know how to do “anything” anymore. I’ve worked on six Assassin’s Creed games. That was what I was doing since Brotherhood. AC, AC, AC and AC games. . . . I really knew how to do AC games but that was it! When you are doing the same thing over and over for years . . . you forget everything else. . . .

The concept of "crunch time" is explained; this is commonplace abuse in the software-development industry. Crunch time is long working hours, often unpaid, that end up changing people to their core. Stressful work, not only performed over long periods of time, but often expected by some companies, leads to depression, long sick leaves, and suicide. Web search for "Letter from an EA spouce", and you will see one oft-quoted example.

The best part, as Woodcock explains, is that "crunch time" is never a good idea:

Despite these clearly abusive policies, with all the personally devastating costs they incur, crunch time has never even been proven to be an effective managerial strategy. In one study it was found that “no matter how we analyze our data, we find that it loudly and unequivocally supports the anti-crunch side.” Not only did the study consider the negative effects for workers; it also demonstrated “that crunch doesn’t lead to extraordinary results.”

Furthermore “on the whole, crunch makes games LESS successful wherever it is used, and when projects try to dig themselves out of a hole by crunching, it only digs the hole deeper.”

The question, then, is why is the practice so widespread? If you ask the Fryes’ friend Karl Marx, the answer is simple: this extension of hours is an attempt to increase the value produced at work.

In view of this framework, it is clear that crunch is therefore a deliberate managerial strategy, not some sort of mistake or aberration. It is one of the major points of contention in the videogames industry. As Tanya Short, the cofounder of an indie studio, explained, “Many teams (indie and AAA alike) seem to start a project already calculating in crunch to the schedule for added content or productivity.”

Woodcock does bring one of Marx's maxims into play: the importance to allow workers to come together to have their voices heard. If their workplace cannot be partly owned by themselves, i.e. in another way than the capitalistic (which is, by definition, fascist in the hierarchical sense), workers must unionise:

Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) is one example of this process. TWC is a “coalition of workers in and around the tech industry, labor organizers, community organizers, and friends” that is based in the US, and particularly active in the Bay Area and Seattle. In the past few years, the network has gone from strength to strength. As R. K. Upadhya, a member of TWC, explained: “Since the 2016 elections in the US, there has been an unprecedented level of visible unrest among workers at all levels in the tech industry, from food service workers to programmers and engineers.”

He goes into detail by using a French videogame studio as example:

On February 14, twenty-one workers went on strike at Eugen Systems, a French videogames studio. Their statement, released through Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV, the Videogame Workers Union), read, “In the face of the refusal to pay us as required by law, and the manifest lack of consideration for the value of our work, we have come to the conclusion that, in order to make ourselves heard, we have no option but to go on strike.”

After thirty days on strike, one of the activists, Félix Habert, reflected on their experience by that point: “It’s rather hard when you’re just a bunch of people with no political experience.”

However, they had also discovered mistakes in how the company organized payments, crowdfunded $10,000 in strike funds, and made international news with their campaign. As one journalist reflected at the time, “It’s a small but symbolic labor dispute in one of the country’s most often praised economic sectors that could have ramifications for workers at other studios.”

The strike, which Habert described as “a very spontaneous movement,” ended in the second week of April, even though the strikers’ demands were not met. Some then chose to take legal action against the studio.

The STJV has continued to build from this strike, representing not only workers in the industry, but also students and unemployed workers. The union is now focusing on campaigns against unpaid internships, low wages for starting workers, and precarious contracts.

Woodcock provides both arguments for and details of what Marx would make of the videogames industry, in persuasive terms. However, he keeps a cool head, and envelops his theories in modern-day examples that anybody can understand, interested in videogames or not (I'm not).

This is something that should be read by all persons who have anything to do with the videogames industry, industries overall, but perhaps mainly by persons who think nothing is wrong in the videogames world.

I'd love to have read a bit more on diversity in the videogames society, but other than that, this is a very current, workplace-applicable, and likeable book. It's also easy to read, unlike a lot of politically argumentative books.