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How have the jobs changed within the gaming industry over time?
Similar to other parts of the tech sector, the game development industry is moving away from hiring people full-time and towards a gig model. It’s becoming commonplace to hire contractors and freelancers, instead of hiring full-time visual artists, sound designers, or writers for games. Or having fans submit speculative work to be used in games, paying them only a pittance.
We're also seeing executives increasingly try to pay people in exposure, particularly in the promotion of games. While most companies have dedicated marketing and community teams, there is also a trend towards trying to promote through “influencers”—often younger gamers with a sizable social media presence that will spend hours streaming their game sessions. If someone has a lot of views on their channels, the company will pitch a partnership, offering free games or flights out to flashy events—a moment in the sun. In reality, these people should be hired and paid a living wage to do this sort of promotion.
There is this very paternalistic way that all the game development companies treat their employees. We’re often told, “We’re one big family.”
And the workers are the children.
damn that's good
The only labor action I’m aware of in the game development industry has been the voice actors strike of 2016. During that strike, basically all unionized voice actors stopped voice acting for games. The strike lasted for almost a year. They won—but honestly, it wasn’t as big of a victory as their union, SAG-AFTRA, played it up to be.
The voice actors were fighting for royalties on their games. They will work on these huge products like Grand Theft Auto that make over a billion dollars, but only get paid a few hundred dollars per session. In response, CEOs tried to pit workers in the industry against each other. They would say, “Well, it wouldn't be fair to everyone else if we gave you royalties—the programmers and the designers and the artists aren’t getting royalties.” And it’s like, “No, you’re absolutely right, they all should get royalties!” They try to play us all against each other, but really we should all be in this together.
everyone should be paid as well as the CEO tbh
GWU is not just against shitty labor practices. We’re also against shady business practices, and those impact players. A good example is the recent controversy around “loot boxes.” People will design systems that require a ton of grinding and say, you could toil through this game for 100 hours in order to get all the content, or you pay us five dollars and we'll unlock the Darth Vader mask or whatever it happens to be that you want to get.
That's an exploitative business practice, and it's shitty because game workers didn’t come into this industry to make little tchotchkes to sell to people. They came into this industry because they loved the great experiences they had playing games growing up, and they wanted to contribute to that and tell their own stories. And instead they're forced into making this cheap, exploitative content.
In building an anti-capitalist framework to fight back against shitty labor practices, there is a natural alliance with players who are exploited by shitty business practices—not that they always appreciate that.
When we consider the social effects of computers in political and social life, we usually think in terms of expanded power and new possibilities. This perspective on computation permeates even our critical visions of technology. But we should also be attentive to the power that computers and the accompanying language of “systems” and “complexity” have to narrow our conception of the politically possible.
But isn’t there a strong financial incentive to try to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, whether it’s an algorithm or a human executing the trades? Otherwise it seems very easy to lose a lot of money.
Sure. But the market structure of investing dilutes that incentive.
The people who are developing the most sophisticated quantitative techniques work for hedge funds and investment banks. For them, there are two ways to make money. You make money by charging fees on the assets you manage, and you make money on the performance of the fund. That split will give you a sense of why there’s a dilution of the incentive. Because even if your assets don’t perform well, you can still make money on the fees that you’re charging to manage those assets.
The rewards from those fees are so large that if you can sustain a story for why your technique is superior, you can manage assets for a long time and make a ton of money without having to perform well. And, to be fair, sometimes it takes a number of years before you know whether the quantitative technique you tried actually works or not. So even if you aren’t making money in the short term, you could have a reasonable story for why you aren’t.
At the end of the day, for the manager, it’s as important to gather a lot of assets as it is to run a successful strategy. And gathering assets can be largely a marketing game.
Another fallacy in the lead-up to the financial crisis was the assumption that financial markets were so efficient that participants didn’t need to do the underlying work to figure out what the securities were actually worth. Because you could rely on the market to efficiently incorporate all available information about the bond. All you need to think about is the price that someone else is willing to buy it from you at or sell it to you at.
Of course, if all participants believe that, then the price starts to become arbitrary. It starts to become detached from any analysis of what that bond represents. If new forms of quantitative trading rely on assumptions of market efficiency—if they assume that the price of an instrument already reflects all of the information and analysis that you could possibly do—then they are vulnerable to that assumption being false.
Is Uber worth $60 billion? Well, Uber is worth $60 billion because we believe someone is willing to pay $60 billion for it. But maybe Uber is worth zero. Maybe that’s the actual value of the revenues that Uber will make in the future. In the current environment, we rely on liquidity to sustain prices for financial assets. When liquidity dries out and you’re forced to rely on the things that those financial assets actually represent, however, you could see painful shocks if there’s a big disconnect between price and reality—the kind of shocks you saw during the financial crisis.
If people didn’t want to do the analysis before, they’re probably even less inclined to do it now. They figure the machine learning models are taking care of it.
Right. The machines are taking care of it. Or other market participants are taking care of it.
I might think that the share of a particular company is worth 20 dollars. But its price can go up to 100 dollars well before it drops down to 20, in which case I can’t sustain my measure of its actual value. So if all of the computers are pushing the price to 100 dollars, I might as well not do the work of figuring out what the company is actually worth because it’s somewhat irrelevant to the price that it trades at. Paraphrasing Keynes, “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
At the heart of finding a way to manifest social property is the tension between planning and markets. In this section we insist that that this is not a matter of planning versus markets but of discovering creative institutional mechanisms that structure the proper place of planning and markets. Marx rightly argued that praising the voluntary and efficient nature of markets apart from the underlying social relations in which they’re embedded fetishizes markets. But markets are also fetishized when they are rejected as an absolute and treated as having a life of their own independent of those underlying relations. The place of markets under socialism is a matter of both principle and practicality — and dealing creatively with the contradictions between the two. Some markets will be banished under socialism, some welcomed, and some reluctantly accepted but with constraints on their centrifugal antisocial tendencies.
markets to plan for things that are not essential i guess? for goods that are rival and excludable?
tbh im having a hard time seeing why that would be better than a more planned or publicly-funded system. a voucher system would be better than a market in most places, even though the mechanism is similar, purely because markets reify inequality
Markets will be necessary under socialism. But certain kinds of markets must be unequivocally rejected. This is especially so for commodified labor markets. The argument runs as follows. Planning — the ability to conceive what is about to be constructed — is a universal characteristic of human labor: “What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” A core critique of capitalism is that the commodification of labor power robs workers of that human capacity. Individual capitalists plan, capitalist states plan, and workers as consumers also plan. Yet in selling their labor power to get the means to live, workers as producers surrender their planning capacities and human potential to create. This original sin of capitalism is the foundation for the broader social and political degradations of the working class under capitalism.
Yet the question of reallocating labor remains and, if workers are to have the right to accept or reject where to work, this implies a labor market of sorts. But this would be a labor market of a very particular, limited, and decommodified kind. Based on the need to attract workers to new sectors or regions, the central planning board would set higher wages (or more favorable housing and social amenities), adjusting them as needed if the workforce falls short. Within the wage framework set by the central plan, the sector councils could likewise raise wages to allocate workers across workplaces or into new ones. Workers could not, however, be fired nor lose work through competitive closures of workplaces and should there be a general shortage of demand relative to supply, demand could be stimulated or worktime reduced as the alternative to the creation of a reserve army to discipline workers.
i like the model in the dispossessed better, but ofc that assumes a workforce that has been trained to be socially responsible even at individual cost
On the other hand, who can imagine a socialism without a marketplace of coffee shops and bakeries, small restaurants and varieties of pubs, clothing stores, craft shops, and music stores? If the underlying conditions of equality are established so these markets are about personal preferences not expressions of power, there is no reason to be defensive about welcoming them. It is when we turn to the commercial activities of workplace collectives that the role of markets takes on their greatest, and most controversial, significance.