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I had never been interested in video games -until I read Marx at the Arcade. Jamie Woodcock provides pleasurable reading and makes a convincing case that studying the video game industry reveals much about current modes of capitalist production, as well as the ways for workers' selfemancipation. This research interest influences the author's variety of publications and involvements such as the most up-to-date introduction to the gig economy (Woodcock and Graham, 2019), the Fairwork Foundation (https://fair.work) -a project aiming to increase working standards for platform workers -or the activist-research collective Notes from Below (https://notesfrombelow.org).So why is it important to gain insights into the video game industry? According to Woodcock, there are three reasons. First, it is an important cultural commodity: millions of workers escape from the stress of the outside world or from boredom in their offices through video games. Second, being one of the most profitable sectors of the entertainment industry, it involves vast supply chains reaching from the production of hardware to the construction of software to the retailing of the commodity. Third, according to the author, the industry reflects current modes of production involving digitalisation, isolation, precarious employment and weak unionisation.Recently, critical labour researchers pushed so-called workers' inquiries as a research tool for contributing to worker's self-organisation and eventually self-emancipation. For researchers, this means it is useful not only to ground their perspective within the working realities of people but also to conduct research as a collective project in an attempt to increase working-class power. Utilised also in an earlier work of the author (Woodcock, 2017), Woodcock applies this framework to the video game industry, along with the concept of class composition, to understand the working realities in the game industry.Class composition involves three dimensions: technical, social and political composition. Understanding the technical composition of game workers covers the labour process and working conditions. The labour process in the video game industry is quite complex and interconnected; it needs a variety of professions such as designers, programmers, level designers, sound engineers and testers. Large video game corporations exploit the passion of video game designers, who often lack a clear distinction between play and work, and whose surplus labour is appropriated in already scheduled "crunch times", that require long working days to meet stressful project deadlines. The work is not only stressful, but workers are also isolated. This is partly because non-disclosure agreements are widespread and silence workers, as they cannot talk about any aspect of their work. Researching this industry naturally is complicated, and organising workers even harder.Social composition is the less-elaborated part of the book's analysis. Generally, it asks how workers are embedded outside of work or, as the author puts it, "...

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Microwork or microtasking is defined as digital work carried out via Internet platforms containing repetitive small tasks. The concept has gained currency in the debates on the Internet economy and the emergence of a global workforce for information processing. It emerged from the combined interest in the developments of the capitalist labor process and the social consequences of technological change. Research on microwork covers a number of different dimensions: the task structure and work demands; the time structures of microwork; the income security; the precarious employment situation; the relationship between clients, platform, and workers; the architecture of microwork platforms; the collective organization of microworkers; and microwork as a means to bring jobs to remote regions and less developed countries. Currently, research focuses on precarity, time structures, and the architecture of platforms with their consequences for power relations between clients, platforms, and workers. Future research may more intensively look at the regulation of microwork in different institutional settings.

Phoebe Moore has written a timely and interesting book on data-tracking, precarity and the labour process. We read about agility management systems, unseen labour, surveillance and managerial control. The book does not leave the reader with a grim perspective on the world of work but ends by sketching possible futures and highlights points of resistance.After an introductory chapter ("Getting to Know the Automatic Self"), Moore begins a revision of the Labour Process Debate ("Labour Processes from Industrial Betterment to Agility"). In this chapter, the author identifies how particular technologies appropriate labour and how this results in particular subjectivities. Technology has played a pivotal role in the value extraction of human labour since the beginning of capitalism. Particular managerial ideas on job design -that is, the way that a set of tasks is organised -have also played an important role. One of them is Taylor's Scientific Management. This managerial ideology focuses on the body's movements, the isolation of them into discrete units and the quantification of output in an attempt to increase productivity and decrease costs per unit of outcome. The author offers an additional wave to the "waves" of managerial ideology, namely Agility Management Systems (p. 58). Herein, information about workers at work and in life play a more important role than before. A greater emphasis is placed on technology compared to Scientific Management. Where Scientific Management was concerned with efficiency, agility seeks adaptability. In these systems particular subjectivities are required, because "agile workplaces require agile workers" (p. 62). This is where the author introduces another important concept for the argument of the text: unseen labour. Agile workplaces are characterised by constant change, and its impacts have to be self-managed by the workers. This involves a high degree of affective control and emotional management. None of this work is apparent. Constant transformation requires emotional and affective resilience by the affected workers, to withstand this constant change (p. 109).Precarity is central to understanding the quantified self in agile workplaces, because through these tracking technologies even attitudes, sentiments and thoughts become a site of value creation (pp. 82-3). Precarity is understood as "the purest form of alienation where the worker loses all personal association with the labour she performs. She is dispossessed and location-less in her working life and all value is extracted from her in every aspect of her life" (p. 79). Hence, precarity presents a re-composition of the relationship between capital and labour in which workers become increasingly disposable. "The quantified self at work phenomenon is linked to the rise in precarity…" (p. 12). Precarity and agility necessitate and facilitate one another.Agility management seeks to obtain much more information about workers than before. A greater emphasis is placed on technology, especially to track and monitor in order to contr...