Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm
Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm by Tongyu Wu
English | June 28, 2024 | ISBN: 1439922977, 1439922985 | True EPUB/PDF | pages | 2.3/2.9 MB
English | June 28, 2024 | ISBN: 1439922977, 1439922985 | True EPUB/PDF | pages | 2.3/2.9 MB
Games are often a fun perk of a tech company job, and employees can “play to win” in the competition to succeed. But in studying “Behemoth” (a pseudonym for a top American tech company), Tongyu Wu discovered that gaming work culture was far more insidious.
Play to Submission shows how Behemoth’s games undermined and manipulated workers. They lost their work-life balance and the constant competition made labor organizing difficult. Nonetheless, many workers embraced management’s games as a chance to show off their “gamer” identities and create a workplace culture with privileged insiders and exiled outsiders, with female and migrant workers usually in the latter group. Moreover, Wu indicates this may be the future of work for high- and low-skilled and, creative workers in an environment where capitalists have heightened demands for technology and creativity.
Drawing from 13 months of ethnographic work, Wu presents a persistent reality in which the company reaps the reward of surplus productivity, leaving employees themselves in a highly competitive and sometimes precarious work position.