Jamie Woodcock
Autor von Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
Über den Autor
Dr. Jamie Woodcock is a researcher at the Oxford-Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of Working the Phones, a study of a call center in the UK inspired by the workers' inquiry. His research focuses on labor, work the gig economy, platforms, resistance, organizing, and mehr anzeigen videogames. Jamie is on the editorial boards of Notes from Below and Historical Materialism. weniger anzeigen
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"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:
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:
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:
Woodcock writes a little on how the military-industrial complex makes haste to help videogame studios:
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:
That fades away in comparison with the following:
So, marketing weapons to children is commonplace in big parts of the videogames industry. If we think that's ludicrous, think about this instead:
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.
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:
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.
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 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:
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:
He goes into detail by using a French videogame studio as example:
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.… (mehr)