This is part of the Scratchware Manifesto.
Phase Two: Know Your Enemy
Power And Money In The Game Industry
What is wrong with the game industry? Why do games come out buggy, why do good game companies go under, why are the games we play today just like the games we played 5 years ago, with better graphics? To understand why this is so, and to understand what we can do to change it will require an understanding of how power and money flow in the game industry.
The game industry is first and foremost an industry like many others in the world. They call it the new economy, as if it is in some way fundamentally different than what has gone before. Is it? Hell, no. When you get right down to it, the industry as a whole is populated by economic players (corporations) headed by people who are doing all they can to make money for themselves and another group of people (the stockholders), while getting as much money as they can from the customers, and paying as little money as possible to the people making the games.
The Vampires Of Wall Street
If the economic and political world were a first-person shooter, it would be infested by the undead. That’s right, the world is controlled by a bunch of vampires. Ever wonder why Exxon, Microsoft, Monsanto and all their buddies run so many commercials on how great they are? That’s because they have to hide the truth to us. Vampires control the world, in the form of corporations.
What are the characteristics of vampires? Well, they’re immortal. Strangely enough, a corporation can live forever, too. Morgan Bank, Ford Motors, and General Electric - they can go on and on and on. Another characteristic of vampires? They live by sucking blood. You know the feeling you get when you boot up a new game and it crashes five times in the first 15 minutes? That’s your blood being sucked. The corporation exists for one reason only (and don’t let them tell you otherwise) - to make as much money as it possibly can. It’s like we’re cattle, kept alive for the greedy bloodsuckers to get as much profit as they can out of us. (They treat the Earth the same way, too - ever seen a clear-cut forest? Corporate vampires in action!) Vampires are notoriously hard to kill, and so are corporations. Exxon spilled oil all over Alaska - but it’s still going. Union Carbide killed thousands in Bhopal, India, but it’s still trucking. You can try and sue a corporation, but they have millions of dollars and thousands of lawyers to make sure their evil undead masters remain in control. Bridgestone/Firestone made a bunch of shitty tires, which killed a whole bunch of people in their SUVs. They might get in some trouble, but you can be sure that the corporation will go on. (An interesting fact: many of the faulty tires were made in the Decatur Illinois plant, where the regular workers were on strike. The tires were made by ‘replacement workers’, also known as scabs. Vampires and scabs? Some coincidence.) Vampires also have nests; usually the basement of some dusty castle. The vampires who run America have a nest, too, but theirs is called Wall Street. Vampires have a dark charisma; corporations spend billions on advertising.
Benjamin Franklin The Vampire Slayer
The founding fathers of the US were an interesting bunch; some of them were into some strange things. Many were members of secret societies, with hidden knowledge and rituals. You think the eye in the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill doesn’t have some hidden meaning? Right. These people knew of the evil arcane power of the vampire-corporation; the British controlled the colonies with a few huge and powerful corporations. After the Revolution, they let corporations exist, but they reserved the right to plunge a stake into their hearts at any time. For the first 100 years of the US, corporations were highly limited. But they were plotting and planning their release. They got their big break during the Civil War. At the same time that black folks were getting freed from slavery, the vampires of Wall Street were slipping their bonds, setting up a slave system for all of us. In 1872, they convinced the Supreme Court that corporations had all the rights of a person. And that’s what we have today; America Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of GlobalCapitalists’R’Us.
We Are All Renfield
They’re crafty, these undead princes. Most people rely on them for a paycheck. They have created this hierarchy of slaves; from the zombies at the bottom to the cherished and pampered few at the top. They love dangling carrots, almost impossibly high. There are a lot of carrots in the computer industry right now - you too could be a dot-com millionaire! At the same time, the shortage of skilled computer workers has them trying to ship in people from abroad with the H1-B visa proposals. Now, there’s nothing wrong with an Indian, Thai, Finn, or German wanting good work; remember, they’re vampire-food too, but these visas tie these workers to the companies that hire them, which results in more company control. And the wage rates for all computer workers go down.
While they’re crafty, they’re also stupid. You’d think immortals would have a longer outlook, but the rules of their nest - sorry, Wall Street - have caused them to focus more and more on quarterly returns. Ever wonder why some buggy game got rushed out for a Christmas release? Fourth-quarter profits, friend!
Silicon Sweatshops
So the computer game industry is getting caught up more and more in a blood-sucking scam. Venture (vampire?) capitalists make sure everyone knows what side the bread is buttered on. The large amount of blood - sorry, capital - that is required to make a game nowadays mean more and more of the small development shops are being forced out or forced into ‘partnerships’ with big corporations. At the same time, working conditions in the industry are getting worse. Crunch time (crunch, like the sound Renfield makes biting into the carapace of a tasty bug?) seems to be more and more common, and to go on longer and longer. Descriptions of crunch seem to have a lot in common with the kinds of work practices you find south of the border. Here’s one from Ion Storm Dallas, as reported in Salon (link: " How do game developers hack it?). It's rife with 'I love my vampire masters' baloney.
All-nighters, 18-hour days, sleeping at the office -- John Romero's posse keeps up a
"death schedule" to get Daikatana out of beta.Since Daikatana's inception, elite and
obsessive gamers have road-tripped from around the world to work with their hero, Romero.
They've quit school, left relationships and literally built beds under their desks to live
and breathe nearly every breath in the house Romero built. Their commitment to a
self-described "death schedule" -- the final, endless rush to perfect their game -- isn't
just some start-up novelty, it's a way of life.
The commitment of a Mexican maquiladora worker to their imposed 'death schedule' isn't a choice -- it's a hard economic decision in a poor country.The first 14 hours
are always the easiest.
"Aaaaarrggggggggh!" Shawn Green screams as he thrashes his computer keyboard against the
ground. It's midnight in the coders cove of Ion Storm and the cubes are as dark as the
city below outside. Green, a stocky, long-haired programmer in a paunchy black T-shirt,
hunches like an ape at the beginning of "2001" and whacks keys across the floor like loose
teeth. A skinny programmer stretches his neck out of a nearby cube to observe the tantrum,
then nonchalantly returns to his work. Green brushes the hair from his face as a smile
creeps across it. "Nothing like a little stress relief," he says, tossing the battered
keyboard down the hall.
Nothing like a little violent behavior induced by an insane schedule. This is Texas -- will the next step be to grab a handgun and whack loose teeth across the floor after trying to eat a bullet?
Green, the 28-year-old lead coder on Daikatana and a veteran of id Software, is 14 hours
into one more 18-hour day. In a few minutes, he'll take his first and only break, heading
off to an abandoned abortion clinic to practice with his doom-metal band, Last Chapter...
The great thing is, if people in the industry were paid hourly, crunch time would be a clear violation of even the miserable US labor laws. Mmmmm… I love working 18 hours with one break. Sign me up, oh dark lords of capitalism!
Everyone teeters on the brink of self-destruction during crunch mode, the ruthless death
schedule that comes during these final months of production.
That's got to be healthy!
The sheer relentlessness of crunch mode, Romero insists, is the only way to make sure
everything gets covered.
The sheer relentlessness of global competition, sweatshop managers insist, is the only way to survive. Back to work, lazy sheep!
To hack it, survivors like Green have transformed crunch into their high-tech frat's
equivalent of hazing -- the upperclassmen being the machines, and the pledges, the humans
who serve them… Brian Eiserloh, a bushy, 29-year-old coder who goes by the nickname
Squirrel, set the office record for spending 85 out of 90 days without going home. "You
can get an amazing amount of work done," he enthuses via e-mail. "I thrive under
[short bursts] of pressure."
The thing is, Daikatana turned out to be a long burst.
They get longer and longer. And soon enough, they become the expectation. This is called 'reduced expectations', baas and moos, and it's one of the favorite tools of the vampire.And this one has to be the crowning glory. We're so much better in the US than in other parts of the world. There, you have other people forcing you to work in unlit, unventilated workplaces for 18 hours day in and day out. Here, we get people to convince themselves to do it voluntarily. Aren't we so superior?
Now Ion Storm's 31 game developers don't just work in the shade, they work in the black.
To get into their cubes, they part felt… It was a fairly awesome and ironic sight as I
wandered through the glass-domed gamers' haven last October. All I saw were rows of caves.
And of these caves, Weasl's was the darkest. "I call myself a mushroom," Weasl told me as
I crouched inside, "because I'm always working in the dark." With a couple extra layers of
felt draping his cube, there's not even the slightest trace of light, let alone fresh air.
But Weas… doesn't seem to mind. "Darkness is really helpful when you're trying to shut out
outside influences," he explains, tweaking an animated pool of lava on his screen. "After
you spend enough time in here, your personality adapts."
After you beat a child repeatedly, it's personality adapts, too.
Luke "Weasl" Whiteside is the newest level designer to join the Daikatana team and, in a
way, the most enigmatic. Since he came to the company just a few months before my visit,
Weasl managed to miss out on Ion Storm's tempestuous back story. He's still so awed to be
working here that sometimes he doesn't leave. Underneath his desk there's a pillow. On
some nights, he hunkers down below his computer, munches some M&M's and goes to sleep.
For Romero, who dreamed of populating a company with gamers as intense as himself, Weasl
is as hardcore as it gets.
Sounds like poor Weasl is suffering from a case of vampiric possession. Concentration camp victims identified with their oppressors, too. Not to say that the much (and probably accurately) maligned Ion Storm is the only company where this happens -- no, not at all. It's all over. Doesn't that make you feel better about the games you buy?
It’s a good thing that CDs don't carry bloodstains well.
Slash And Burn Development
So the companies are getting more work out of people under worse conditions, and making them like it. At the same time, they are increasing their control over the fruits of worker’s labor. When you say it like this, it sounds great: ‘Intellectual Property Rights’. Who could complain about people having control over their own work? Well, brothers and sisters, it’s not the worker who has the control, it’s the undead. Work for hire contracts leave computer creative workers with no rights whatsoever. Further, there are many games that get lost in the mad scramble for guaranteed profits. The industry is littered with the corpses of games that had funding pulled at some point. And who owns that work? The corporations. So thousands on thousands of hours of work have disappeared into the secret vaults of the demon princes.
An Unholy Alliance
How does something this wasteful and evil manage to keep going? One way is through good-old-fashioned anti-competitive marketing strategies. Why is it that every game in the world has to retail for $55.00 when it comes out? Well, the vampire lords of the gaming industry have made a pact with the vampire lords of the distribution giants to make it so. And the lackeys of the computer gaming press, both online and in print, keep up the scam. The computer hardware masters don’t mind either, as these games are pushing bigger and better hardware sales. And the Demon King of the computer world, Microsoft, does it’s part too.
Moo! Baa!
And let’s not forget the ‘keep the cattle in line’ strategies. The dark masters of our industry are well aware that they are outnumbered, both in the workplace and in the gamer community. They have used the time-honored methods of divide and conquer, baffle them with bull, and keep them in the dark and feed them shit. The most common way people have fought for their rights as workers is to organize themselves, often into unions. Well, unions have been on the butt end of a bad-PR campaign that has gone on since the 1930s. Certainly these warriors of the new economy wouldn’t want to take part in something as stinky as a union. We’re Game Professionals, not autoworkers!
The Sun Is Rising
Our vampire overlords don’t do too well when the sunlight of truth is shined upon them by well-educated workers and gamers. You can see signs of the rising sun all over. Microsoft’s operating system monopoly was one of the forces that has helped the LINUX movement to grow. LINUX is deadly to vampires, because it works directly against one of their main sources of control - copyright of software. Without that, the cattle can slip out of the pasture, grow horns, and do all sorts of dangerous things. The whole open-source movement draws many people who are tired of the way the corporations do things. Another great anti-vampire example is Napster, and the other MP3 swapping schemes. People are really tired of vampire radio, vampire music companies, and vampire CD stores. The Indymedia movement is another example of resistance to the reign of the undead, particularly in their control of the media (baffle them with bull, keep them in the dark). Alternative forms of organization abound on the Internet, from everything to internet collectives (www.tao.ca) to Quake clans. Some of these are aware of their dark bondage, some are not.
Putting A Stake Into The Heart Of The Game Industry
Our vampire masters know their rule is precarious. Resistance is growing, from the Seattle uprising against the WTO to this manifesto. The corporate hold over our ‘democratic’ politics is slipping. There is a simple, three point plan that can take these guys out.
First, we need to pull the blinders off our eyes. Wake up. Games don’t have to be shitty and buggy, working on games doesn’t have to be some equivalent of slavery. We need to get mad and get active.
Second, we need to educate ourselves on the real story in our industry. Look for alternative sources of media. If you get the feeling that someone is trying to bullshit you when you read some news story, you’re probably right. Find out the truth.Third, we need to organize. This is what makes them tremble - that the cattle and the sheep are getting together. We need to take direct actions to change things. We need to organize ourselves into a new industry, find new channels, and use our economic power as buyers and our labor strength as workers. We need to get out from under the thumb of the corporations, either by tearing them down or by making them obsolete.
New Model Utopia
Picture if you will, a time when we don’t have to rely on our vampire overlords for our gaming or our game-making. Game development teams are small groups that share all the proceeds from their work and have control over it and ownership of it. Games are not bought in the mega-stores, but off the Internet or from your local independent game-download outlet. Games do not all cost 50 bucks - some cost 30, others 10, some are free for the first chapter and then 50 cents per chapter download. We have games about everything, from worker’s revolution and women’s rights to raves and pagan rituals to shooters and citybuilders. Faced with real competition, the current big players can no longer get away with releasing buggy product that’s just a rehash of last year’s hit title. We can do it, if we get mad enough, educated enough, and organized enough.
What do you want to overthrow today?
- Designer J1
Next: Phase Three
Previous: Phase One