n recent years, it’s become clear that
the working conditions for game
developers are often pretty bad.
In October 2018, Rockstar co-founder
Dan Houser came under fire after he
appeared to brag about his team working
back-breaking 100-hour weeks to complete Red
Dead Redemption 2 on time. This was only the
latest controversy surrounding a practice so
common in the industry that it has its own
name: crunch. In February 2019, Activision
Blizzard laid off 800 employees right after
announcing a bumper $7.2 billion quarter.
The following month, 350 EA employees were let
go – yet another cohort of unfortunate workers
bearing the brunt of the industry’s whims.
In that context, the picture that developers
Ted Anderson and Wren Farren paint of their
experience working in video games is hardly
surprising. Anderson references “diminishingI
benefits, stagnant wages, and worsening working
hours” and recalls such phrases as, “Do you have
the passion to come in and work this weekend?”.
Similarly, Farren recalls “A lot of issues with
hierarchy, layoffs, and just bad management,” in
her previous industry job. “I was feeling super-
disenfranchised with the games industry and the
structure that seemed to be inherent with it,”
she says.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could jettison all
those toxic practices? The expectation of
working insane hours at the expense of family
life and mental health; the zero-hour contracts
doled out to poorly treated Quality Assurance
workers; the profit-over-people motive that
allows a company raking in piles of cash to
discard the workers that helped make them that
money on a whim. Hell, why not just get rid of
the bosses that enforce all this stuff in the first
place? That might sound like a fantasy, but thisHow an embryonic movement of worker-owned video game
co-ops are striking back at an often exploitative industryTHE RISE OF THE WORKER CO-OP
WRITTEN BY: PAUL WALKER-EMIG
A WORLD
WITHOUT
BOSSES?
A world without bosses?Interface
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