My good friend Jamie Woodcock once told me that if we all decided the world worked differently today, it would. What stops us all from making that choice? I believe one of the difficulties in bringing about a new world is that we’ve been ensnared by capitalism and it’s hard to envision what alternatives could be. Most people don’t know how to ethically make collective decisions without falling back on hierarchy and authority, so they can’t imagine what that would look like at scale. What I’d like to explore is how to make it easier for everyone to experiment with building new, liberatory worlds that benefit us all.

Video games are one of the most popular forms of entertainment where people play in different worlds in the safety of their own home. As someone who has been making games for over 18 years, I believe video game workers are particularly well suited to create games where people can try out different political systems and ways of working and being together.

In order for game workers to be able to build those games, however, I believe we need to learn, on an individual and collective level, how to work together in ways that benefit us all before we can then build that into our games. One such way we can learn is by collectively organising together in unions to gain knowledge through trial and error, while improving our working conditions and lives. I’ve been doing just that alongside other game workers in the Game Workers branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) for the past seven years and have experienced first hand what it’s like to create and run an organisation built by the workers and for the collective benefit of our members and communities.

There are so many things we need to learn and do and there will be many steps along the way to the many revolutionary worlds that are possible. When game workers get first-hand experience in unions and other liberatory organisations, we can then explore what the many worlds without prisons, police, capitalists, hunger, rent, war, borders, climate crisis, and wage labour might look like. As Audre Lorde tells us, “Revolution is not a one-time event” and there are many things we need to learn in order to move from where we are now to where we want to go. It won’t be easy, and there are a lot of difficulties we’ll face along the way, but I believe it’s worthwhile and possible, and it will get easier as more of us actively organise in unions.

Capitalism and The Games Industry

When I talk with people about the unionisation effort in the video games industry (colloquially known as the games industry), they often don’t know what our working conditions are like and why we’d want to unionise in the first place. Us workers create games which can bring a lot of joy to the people who play them, but our working conditions don’t usually mirror that joy. People often think we sit around playing games all day, when instead we’re sitting in front of a computer for 8-14 hours a day working on small task after small task for 2-8 years until a game is finished and released into the world. Video games are an artistic endeavour, and there can be a lot of joy in creating something people play, but it is also a job like any other job and can be exhausting and wear us down.

Writers create the incredible stories you experience in our games, programmers write the complex code that brings games to life on the screen, artists draw and animate the beautiful characters and environments, designers invent and tweak the fun gameplay, audio designers create entrancing sound and music, producers coordinate building the game on budget and on time through spreadsheet magic, quality assurance (QA) test the games to find the bugs so players don’t, marketing shows the public why they want to play the game, customer support helps players with issues they encounter, and localisation experts translate the game into many different languages. All of these disciplines are supported by many, many other people, including office managers, accountants, chefs, cleaners, and more. Teams of 10-20 people are common for small games, and they can grow to thousands of people for the largest of games.

I entered the games industry as a programmer and am now a cross between an engineering manager and producer. On our teams, we generally work towards milestones every 1-3 months which consist of building large areas of the game. We finish milestone after milestone until several years later we eventually have a completed game. My day to day work as a programmer went in cycles based on those milestones.

In the beginning of a milestone, I would take what features we want to make and write technical design documents, estimate the amount of work, and break it down into small tasks and put those into our task tracking system. Once the work is broken down, I would start programming on the feature which would entail typing in a text editor in a specific language that computers understand so the game behaves in the particular way we want. The work varied massively from building tools to help the artists create animations for characters in the game, to making tapping on a tablet do the thing we want, to having a sound play at just the right time.

There’s not usually much pressure at the beginning of milestones, but as deadlines near, the pressure and chaos ramps up considerably. Senior management on the team will often want changes made that won’t fit in the amount of time we have left and they’ll want the people doing the work to work overtime in order to get it done. On particularly poorly run projects, that chaos overruns each milestone and turns into a continuous pressure cooker for months or years on end. When senior management is worried about timelines, they often micromanage peoples’ time and work which makes the whole process infinitely worse.

Similar to other artistic industries, our industry is in turmoil because the people we work for want us to work as cheaply and quickly as possible. In the best of times we’re able to enjoy the work we do at a reasonable pace. In the worst of times we’re working way past the point where it was fun for us. If you look at my union’s manifesto there are a lot of issues we’d like to address that are similar to other industries. Despite the games industry making billions of dollars, many game workers are paid minimum wage, especially those new to the industry or in certain disciplines like game testers in QA.

The white men, and occasionally white women, in power in most game companies have created an industry culture where gender, ethnicity, age, and disability discrimination are common enough that many people have stories about mistreatment. Not everyone has experienced discrimination, but it’s not hard to find people who have if you talk with game workers long enough.

Executives have increasingly been shifting to using contract workers instead of fully employed workers as a way to pay less and keep the workforce more precarious. Even those of us who are fully employed are not safe - over 35,000 of us have been made redundant in the past three years. The capitalists running the companies intentionally take risks with their money to make “hit” games and have no second thoughts about letting the people who made the games go when they don’t meet their ridiculously high expectations. Even people who make wildly successful games are made redundant because the several year cycle of game development means not everyone has work immediately after shipping a game. It is not uncommon for people to be made redundant at one company, find another job, and be made redundant again within six months. For this reason, I have begun calling what executives are doing attempted mass destitution, as that’s the effect it’s having on the workers in the games industry.

The average tenure for a worker at a company is 2.5 years, and the average time in the industry is a little over 5 years, which is especially important in Britain and the North of Ireland because our full employment rights don’t come into effect until 2 years into the job. When most companies require you to move to the city where their office is to work for them, you can see how changing companies every couple of years can be incredibly disruptive for workers’ lives. Company executives want increased profit at any expense, including people being unable to house or feed themselves.

The instability in the industry, the pressure exerted on us by executives, and the common mistreatment causes so much stress on workers that people often have severe trauma, burn out, and leave the industry altogether. This partially explains why we have such a low average time in the industry despite having been around for decades.

I’ve been working in the games industry for over 18 years and in that time I’ve been made redundant twice, fired once, burned out twice, the company I worked at was sold to another company two different times, and one company went bankrupt due to the owner of the company intentionally selling it to a friend for pennies as a tax writeoff. The games industry is a meat grinder.

All of these issues and more stem from an incredible imbalance of power between the executives of game companies and the workers who make the games. The executives are able to create these horrible working conditions and discard us when we’re no longer useful to them because we, as workers, haven’t collectively built up enough power to stop them. A precarious workforce benefits executives because they can pay us less and pressure us to work more for them.

Seven years ago, many of us were tired of being mistreated and started organising in unions together in a worldwide movement called Game Workers Unite. I was one of those workers, and the experience of organising together has changed my life in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.

Game Worker Unions

In August of 2018, thirty other game workers and I met in the Waterloo Action Centre in London to discuss what unionising the British games industry might look like. It was the second meeting of Game Workers Unite UK, a precursor group which would go on to form the Game Workers branch of the IWGB Union. At that meeting, we discussed many ideas for how to improve the games industry, and as part of what to do next, we discussed how to make a decision for what we collectively wanted to do.

When we created the IWGB Game Workers six months later, we knew we didn’t want to run our branch the same way executives run the companies we work for. However, knowing we didn’t want to perpetuate the hierarchical and exploitative ways we’ve experienced is very different from choosing more liberatory ways of working together. We experimented over and over and over again to find out what worked, iterate on what didn’t, and slowly trended in the direction we wanted.

In most of the game companies we work for, there is a small group that makes all the decisions, sometimes with consultation with the rest of the workers, but most often not. A common desire for people in the games industry is to aspire to be promoted into those groups so they can finally make the ‘right’ decisions instead of the ones they disagree with. In the union, we intentionally moved away from that kind of decision making, which was not easy to do.

As our membership has grown over the six years we’ve been a union, the way we make decisions has changed a lot. When we first started out and were small, it was relatively easy to poll people and get a sense of what they wanted to do collectively, as we were under a hundred members. We’ve now grown to well over 1,500 members in six years and we’ve had to adapt and change in that time.
At our Annual General Meetings, we elect branch officers to our Elected Committee, and that small group of members commits to helping run the union. They do not make decisions for the branch except in time-critical situations, but they instead commit to helping organise and facilitate the process so that we can collectively decide what to do.

Each geographical region and workplace is able to elect their own representatives to help run the union in their area. Regions often have social or working meetups in-person, go to solidarity actions like strikes or protests together, and create a community of care. The workplace groups tend to focus on building power in the workplace and pushing for changes that benefit the members, be they increased wages, better benefits, or a four-day work week. There is often an overlap between the workplace groups and the regional groups since workers are located in similar areas due to working in offices.

One of the overriding philosophies that I and others in the union espouse is that members are empowered to make decisions that affect them. The members at workplaces decide whether they run a campaign, go on strike, or take action because they are the ones affected by those decisions! The regional groups similarly choose how they want to function. The Elected Committee and other officials in the union do not generally tell other members what to do because that is antithetical to how we want to organise together.

Where this becomes more complicated is with shared resources like money, staff time, and union policy. Any large-scale decisions are brought by members to monthly open meetings or the Annual General Meeting. Any member is allowed to bring motions, and all members are encouraged to attend, discuss, and vote on them. In this manner, we have chosen to use our finances to hire staff organisers, created and approved our manifesto, and hosted conferences like the game developers unConference.

Another difficult area is what happens when there is conflict in the union? What happens if people break our policies? What happens if people harass or mistreat others? These are things you hope people won’t do, but should expect to happen regardless. We’ve tried many different things with varying amounts of success, and responding to these types of things is not easy. We have a disciplinary committee made up of elected members which rotates once a year to handle the very few cases that happen.

One alternative, and a current project of mine, is to help mediate conflict between members and help them reach a joint way forward through whatever difficulties they’re experiencing. I would never have learned to do this had I not been a part of a group that tries to avoid discipline via authority and chooses instead to work through conflict where possible to come out even stronger on the other side. This is exactly the kind of experiment I think we need to build better worlds.

Anyone heavily involved in unions can tell you they can get messy. I’ve been through my fair share of conflict within the union, and each time was different shades of difficult, but also incredibly educational. What I’ve learned is to go in expecting certain meetings to be messy and that we will work through the mess to come out the other side stronger together. That’s not always possible, but in the vast majority of times our goals will eventually align everyone on what needs to be done. I often remind myself of Margaret Killjoy’s reminder to “Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy”, and our own members are not the main enemy we’re up against.

It is an understatement that being active in this union and organising together has been life-changing. What we’re doing is building an organisation that we want to see exist in the world, and we’re trying to deal with all the difficulties that come along with it in new and sometimes revolutionary ways. We are simultaneously individually and collectively learning and growing.

Creating New Worlds in Games

Once game workers understand more personally how to work in unions and other liberatory organisations, they can then bring that knowledge to the games they create. They can experiment with narratives and gameplay that help people better understand what different worlds can exist. This, however, won’t be easy for a number of reasons.

Most of the popular games focus more on competition than collaboration. They are either about individual prowess or teams winning against other teams. There are many game development tutorials that teach you how to create guns and shoot each other, but hardly any that teach collaborative game mechanics. The number of games that have experimented with anarchist, socialist, or communist style gameplay is relatively small because it is much easier to copy and tweak something that already exists than come up with something new. We’re going to have to try new things and fail and learn many times along the way before we’re able to create games that allow people to experience new ways of being together.

The games that do have socialism, anarchism, or communism in them often use them as a way to critique capitalism, more than allow players to experience them first-hand. One amusing exception to this was when players considered communism to be the easy route to win in Victoria 3.

Disco Elysium is one of the go-to examples of games that heavily feature communism and labour unions and is a community favourite. Citizen Sleeper and its sequel are set in the far future and critique capitalism well while having small areas of the games show what successful anarchist or socialist groups might look like. However, these games don’t really allow the player to experience those new worlds, only learn about what they might be like in bits and pieces.

What I would love to see are games that can both critique and show what’s possible. An example of what I mean by this can be found in Ursula K. Le Guin’s book, The Dispossessed. She created a fictional anarchist world and went into great detail about how they live to give readers a fully shaped idea of what an anarchist planet could be like. Imagine games that teach players how to create unions at work, organise in revolutionary ways with others, allow people to play together in non-hierarchical organisations, build communities of care that extend into the real world, mediate conflict, and push for prison and border abolition. There are worlds of possibilities out there that players haven’t experienced yet.

Games that do feature new ways of working together often do so in a skewed manner or as small side quests rather than the main focus. Many games talk about revolution for the common good, but then feature the player and their motley crew seizing power for themselves rather than building out systems that involve everyone. Those games are individualistic power fantasies more than collective liberatory experiences. For players to truly experience new worlds, we’ll have to learn to create engaging games that decentre the player as the “main character.” Some game workers are already designing and writing about what that might look like.

Even when we figure out how to make the games, we’ll still need funding to make them. Games are expensive to create and can take years and hundreds of people for the larger games. The vast majority of companies are owned by people with vested interests in maintaining their position under capitalism, so why would the likes of Electronic Arts or Ubisoft want to create a game to help us play with the idea of socialism? I don’t think they would, but I believe a combination of workers active in militant unions and creative campaigns could figure out a way to make them.

Liberatory struggles have time and time again run into the issue of how to fund revolutions and there are some famous examples of robbing banks or treasuries in order to do so. I’m not suggesting game workers rob banks in order to fund making games about socialism (even if robbing banks is a somewhat common theme in our games), but I do think looking at history can help give us ideas for what we might be able and willing to try.

In the past, Game workers have occupied factories, participated in a nationwide general strike, and even went on a hunger strike to improve their material conditions. I believe in our collective creativity to figure out ways to fund the games we want to build, even if it feels impossible right now. Everything is impossible until it isn’t.

If you asked 1000 people off the street to build a state of the art videogame, most people wouldn’t know where to start. But if you asked game workers to do it, we could. And that’s because we have years and years of collective knowledge and experience. Overcoming the large funding and game design obstacles will be difficult, but we can learn through trial and error what we need to do in order to build the games that can then teach players about the possible worlds that can exist. We learn and do so that we can share and teach.

By transforming ourselves, we transform the world

If we want a joyous, equal, free, and democratic world, we have to take steps towards making that happen, it won’t magically materialise on its own. We can all do that by experimenting within organisations like unions to find liberatory ways of working together. As part of organising together, we will individually and collectively learn how hierarchy and authority shape our world and learn how to mitigate those issues.

For game workers, organising in labour unions and building up our collective muscle and skill will then enable us to build new types of games to teach and show others what new worlds could be like. This will likely take years or decades of work and I’m under no illusion that we’d be able to do even a fraction of this today. It will very likely take longer than I live. However, I believe in our abilities to tackle incredibly large, complex problems and figure out solutions because we build games that are exactly that, after all. The games we build will take their place alongside other revolutionary media in film, books, and music and help us achieve a better future for us all.

Revolution and building new worlds is a generational project and not something that can be done by a few people. That means if you’re a game worker and you’d like to work towards building something that will help transition us from capitalism, you can work towards that right now. Get active in unions and other liberatory organisations and start building the world you want to exist. You will learn a lot, you will experiment with things that work and don’t work, and you will help change the world. That idea can feel daunting, but remember: you don’t have to do everything, you just have to do your part.