The Game Labor Conundrum

Last week, professor Kemp mentioned how he would be in extreme crunch mode, working ridiculous amounts of overtime working on an idea that sometimes never gets used. When I read the Dyer-Witherford article, the discussion of EA spouse seemed very familiar to me. Then I got to “The everyday lives of video game developers: Experimentally understanding underlying systems/structures”, written by Casey O’Donnell (which also mentions EA Spouse) and I made the connection. I read The Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators also written by O’Donnell for professor Kemp’s Media Industries class. Similar to the article (they are roughly the same points), DD included an ethnological approach to studying the complex work of video game creators. The term New Economy is used to describe the work ethic pushing employees beyond their demands/conditions. The article and the book are organized differently, the article is organized into three parts to understand the real (hidden) lives of game developers (1.instrumental work/play, 2.tools of video game development/experimental systems, and their collaborative creative processes’ implications/capabilities). DD is organized in a cool way for the reader to easily understand, like a video game- with 8 “worlds” or chapters separated into three parts: pre-production, production, and publishing/distribution each ending with a “Boss Fight”. I did my presentation on Ch. 5 Leeroy Jenkins- World 5-1: Managing Chaos, World 5-2: The Importance of Passion, World 5-3: The Game Develop(er/ment) Mythology, World 5-4: Designing the Perpetual Startup System, World 5 Boss Fight: The Rise and Fall of “Quality of Life“ . The essay is simplified by the author,  “Looking at work/play and understanding its tendency toward excess offers important insights into understanding creative collaborative practice; similarly, it’s necessary to understand the importance and danger of interactivity. The ways that experimental systems plug into our ability to understand underlying systems and structures also structure us; these ways are simultaneously enabling and constraining”, (O’Donnell, p. 19).