Resist Normalization

Despite my better judgment, I like video games a lot. When I play a good video game, I derive little a enjoyment from it, as a treat for me. When I play a great video game, I cement the memory of that experience in my brain forever. I don’t think this is an unusual occurrence or anything; I’m describing something very awkwardly that is a common experience for most people. It’s certainly not controversial to say “good thing… good?”

And the reason I’m starting this piece off like so is because I’m about to just dunk myself into the discourse trash can and roll around in there for a hot minute.

An indeterminate amount of time ago (I am having a hard time keeping track of time in general rn, please excuse me), reviews started rolling out for The Last of Us Part II, Naughty Dog’s long-awaited sequel to their 2013 hit. Earlier this year, someone leaked part of the game’s story. A couple months before that, now-ex-Kotaku writer Jason Schreier posted a piece there about the worsening culture of crunch at the company. The piece starts with a construction accident that almost hurt people working in the Naughty Dog offices after hours.

“Worsening culture of crunch.” I really hate this. I’m going to come back to this.

But anyway, Naughty Dog has been in the news before about poor workplace conditions and treatment of employees. In 2017 a report – again, by Schreier – came out alleging that employees were fired after coming forward with sexual harassment claims. The company denied this was happening. These stories are relatively recent and I distinctly recall seeing folks in the critical space talking about them – and more – in the lead-up to TLOU2‘s launch.

When reviews started rolling out, I wasn’t surprised that folks liked the game. I think Natalie Flores and Julie Muncy‘s reviews for Paste and Wired, respectively, are great examples of critical writing that navigates the various points of tough subject matter well. But I was surprised at the amount of superlative language I was seeing. Folks were positively gushing over the game. In one noticeably stark Gamer Moment™, someone compared the game to fucking Schindler’s List. But the article that actually upset me was the review by Washington Post contributor Christopher Byrd.

Headlines are a funny thing. Unless you’re me, and don’t have anyone to tell you that your headline isn’t “SEO friendly” (whatever that means), someone else might be writing headlines for you. I don’t want to lay the blame for this purely at Byrd’s feet, but when your review of the game starts off with the title, “One of the best video games ever made,” you know folks are going to look at it like “Oh WORD?”

Now if the piece had just stuck with this framing I wouldn’t be talking about it, but Byrd does mention the “crunch culture” stuff. He talks about how walking through the game’s “extraordinarily rendered” set pieces made him think about the human cost.

“In an industry notorious for asking employees to keep long hours, the perfectionist culture (emphasis mine -ed) at Naughty Dog still stands out,” he writes.

Byrd ends his review as follows: “‘The Last of Us Part II’ is one of the best video games I’ve ever played; I hope the cost to the developers was worth it.”

And this, my friends, is where my brain kind of broke.

May 1 is known around the world as International Working Person’s Day, or May Day. It’s the original Labor Day, and it’s usually a moment where labor activists and radicals take to the streets to show that the fight for labor rights is ongoing. Decades ago, the US government and some of the larger labor unions in the US moved Labor Day from May 1 to the first Monday in September to obfuscate this, and also to disconnect Labor Day from its history.

The reason the original Labor Day was held on May 1 is in recognition of the Haymarket Martyrs, eight anarchists, socialists and other protest-goers who were arrested, subjected to a show-trial and largely unjustly executed in 1887 for their alleged (and later disproven) role in the 1886 Haymarket Affair. If you’re not sure what the Haymarket Affair is, Thought Slime’s video on it is great. The short version: Workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company went on strike as part of a national campaign to agitate for an eight-hour workday. Police killed several people in the process of trying to squash the labor action. Peaceful demonstrators showed up the next day in Haymarket Square, May 4, 1886, to show their support of the McCormick workers and protest police brutality. When cops finally tried to break up the protest, a bomb detonated. The ensuing pandemonium resulted in “seven police officers… killed and 60 others wounded before the violence ended; civilian casualties have been estimated at four to eight dead and 30 to 40 injured.”

I find this important to bring up for a couple of reasons. First, the year of this protest was 1886. Second, what the protestors were agitating for was a 40-hour week.

An eight-hour day.

In 1886. That was *does math* 134 years ago.

Eight anarchists, socialists and random fucking passersby were arrested and executed by the state – in a show trial – because they were fighting for the eight-hour workday 134 years ago.

Let’s throw to Schreier’s March article about the “culture of crunch” at Naughty Dog:

Working at Naughty Dog means designing beloved, critically acclaimed games alongside artists and engineers who are considered some of the greatest in their fields. But for many of those same people, it also means working 12-hour days (or longer) and even weekends when the studio is in crunch mode, sacrificing their health, relationships, and personal lives at the altar of the game.

Twelve-hour days or longer.

“The perfectionist culture at Naughty Dog.”

“A worsening culture of crunch.”

Frankly, I’m tired of this framing. Working 80 to 120 hours a week is not “putting a few extra hours into your work to make a game better.” It’s not dedicating a little bit extra time to perfecting a craft. It’s a fucking slap in the face of the folks who fought and died to get rid of workdays where all you did was work and sleep and work and sleep and work and sleep – and sometimes not even sleep. It is the epitome of an exploitative labor practice and it cannot be framed like a fucking marketing buzzword. It just can’t.

I love video games. I really do. But video games are probably the least-essential consumer good that modern capitalism produces. The amount of labor being extracted to make a fucking video game should not be almost triple the average workweek in any other field. And considering who the fruit of that labor largely ends up going to? Studio and publisher CEOs? Nah, man, fuck no. We can’t do this. This is untenable.

There is a bit of an open question on what games journalists and critics can even do here, if anything. Calls for boycotts are often not looked upon kindly, as they are often disconnected from any collective labor action inside an offending studio and don’t tend to work anyway. And unless you’re me and can just sit here playing sudoku all month, you don’t get a choice in what you cover, by and large. The market chooses for you, and The Last of Us Part II has been billed for months as a fucking Whole Event. That being said, I do have a suggestion. As egregious labor exploitation continues to set itself in stone in the video game industry alongside long-term sexual harassment patterns (that also stretch into the media side of things) and a “good ol’ boys club” that aggressively excludes marginalized people, one thing we can decidedly do much less of is write shit like:

“‘The Last of Us Part II’ is one of the best video games I’ve ever played; I hope the cost to the developers was worth it.”

Because it fucking isn’t. It is not worth it. Do not normalize this shit. Do not let another generation go by where you let game companies destroy assembly lines full of designers and programmers and QA testers and writers and artists with 100-fucking-hour-weeks because you like a fucking game. This is irresponsible as all hell.

And don’t just stay silent, either.

Vincent Kinian did a quick run-down last week of most reviews of The Last of Us Part II. Very few outlets mentioned crunch in their review at all.

https://twitter.com/Video_Game_King/status/1271479619527618561?s=20

We can’t just sweep this stuff under the rug because a game is good, or gave us an experience we like, as hard as it is to talk about in the first place. We need to push back against editors who tell us to minimize our mentions of labor exploitation or workplace misconduct or sexual harassment or any other part of the slew of horrid shit that happens to video game workers in this industry. It’s important to not just simply disconnect the product of labor from its exploitation because that’s precisely how we will end up getting fucked over. We can’t just let this slide anymore.


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