Book Notes- Marx at the Arcade--Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle

By Jamie Woodcock

Finished 12/22/2019

A Marxist analysis of video games, along the axis of production (historical-material and labor relations) and consumption (games as play/anti-work, hacking, and online communities).

Woodcock takes Stuart Hall’s call for understanding popular culture as a site of social struggle. He uses video games as a locus for such analysis, examining their history, the class composition of their production, their links to imperialism and state violence, and their consumption.

His history of video games is rich, though still partial, highlighting their connections to military technological development as well as the anti-work philosophy and lifestyle of the counter-cultural people who ended up working on the earliest computers at Universities and corportions.  These two trends (hierarchical control and experimental “hacking”) for the nexus of video-game labor relations to this day, with big multi-national companies attempting to regiment, deskill, and control a labor force (programmers and designers) that is still rooted in creativity, loves their own product (he uses the term “playbour”), and rejects the ideas of work handed down from fordism, particularly a clock-punching eight hour day. As a consequence, the major labor issues inherent in the video game industry are the problems crunch time (long, hard hours as a project nears its end) and a tolerance for White, masculinist ideologies among workers, leading to the exclusion of women and people of color from success and advancement. He concludes with some discussions of efforts at unionization in the gaming industry, and the problems and possibilities of organizing a highly precarious but well paid labor force.

The second half of the book focuses on the consumption of games, and the ways in which the messages of many games repeat dominant ideologies that reify class relations and state power. At the same time, he also focuses on some alternative games that play against such ideologies, as well as the idea that experimental play inherent in video games may allow players to reconfigure or improvise alternatives to powerful ideas and social relations. There is also a simple but thorough discussion of the Gamergate phenomenon, largely framed as an anti-diversity patriarchal backlash movement. Overall, it was nice to see an analysis of games that recognized some of the ways that their ideas are problematic, while still locating them as an important site of cultural production, community-building, and counter-hegemonic activity.

As a gamer, it was fun and enlightening to read a critical history of an activity that I’ve loved for a long time. As a progressive with an interesting in labor politics, it was enlightening and inspiring to read about the complexities of organizing in the new flexible-information economy, in a way that provides pathways for future action.