Review of: Jamie Woodcock (2019) Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle

Abstract

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, "...