State Of The Union
Developers discuss the case for unionising the game industry, the practicalities, and how unionisation might affect the art of game design
Developers discuss the case for unionising the industry, and how it might affect the art of design
After a decade in game development, Jon McKellan has seen many sides of an increasingly divided industry. Prior to founding Glasgow-based No Code with his brother and a childhood friend, he served as lead UI designer on The Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation and crafted UI and animation concepts for Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. Now a weaver of shortform techno-horror yarns like Stories Untold, McKellan looks back on his larger projects fondly, but also with a certain rancour. “I think there’s a thing where, because people enjoy the work, somehow it’s okay to abuse that. You like making games, it’s your passion, so fine – do it for 20 hours a day, what’s the problem? I feel like I have been in this situation where because
I’m passionate, I’ve been taken advantage of – the people paying the bills have said, ‘Sure, stay late, stay late’. And I feel like the lack of unionisation has been a problem.”
A game industry union – that’s to say, an organisation of workers formed to protect the rights and interests of its members – might have highlighted and mobilised against such practices, ensuring that the occasional burst of overtime doesn’t mushroom into a culture of overwork. “I do feel there are occasions where doing overtime is necessary, but not institutionalised overtime – ‘We’ve contracted you to 35 hours a week, but we expect you to do 50, for the next five years,’” McKellan continues. “It’s just exploitation.” Unfortunately, large swathes of the industry remain distrustful of unionisation, as he has discovered firsthand. “I’ve seen employment contracts where [you’re required] to not join a union. If there was one, you’re not allowed to join it, and that’s really shady to me.”
Chris Avellone, the seasoned writer-designer whose works include Fallout: New Vegas and Respawn’s forthcoming Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order,
has also come to see the point of unionisation. Besides challenging crunch, he argues that unions might force publishers to include departed employees in game credits, and provide legal resources and insight in the event of an unfair dismissal. “California has an ‘at-will’ hiring system where they can terminate you for any reason, and they never need to give an explanation,” he says. “When that’s happened to friends of mine, I know it would have helped had they been able to talk to someone with legal know-how to explain what rights they have in that situation – what you’re entitled to, what you can ask for, what companies can ask for. Companies can throw all sorts of things into a separation contract that are illegal. I’ve seen ones where it says ‘You have ten days to sign this or else’, and that’s illegal. Having some legal counsel instantly available, I think, would be a lot of help to people in the industry.” Avellone argues that there’s more at stake, however, than individual cases of poor treatment. He thinks that full unionisation would alter the very culture and production framework of the industry, sparking a shift in approaches across the board and perhaps, spelling doom for certain ways of making games. “I’m not naive enough to think that unions would solve everything,” he says, “But I think it would help with mitigating crunch, in the sense that it would destroy a lot of big companies. But I don’t think that would be a bad thing, because I think their methodology is flawed.”
“I have been in this situation where because I’ m passionate, I’ ve been taken advantage of–the people paying the bills have said, ‘Sure, stay late ’”
There has never been more discussion of game-industry unionisation than today, as censure mounts over cycles of mass layoffs and reports of abusive working practices at some of the biggest and most successful companies in the industry, among them Epic Games, Telltale and Netherrealm. In February 2018, approximately
half of Steel Division developer Eugen Systems went on strike over a series of payment disputes. In October, Rockstar’s Dan Houser’s enthusiastic claims of working “100-hour weeks” during development of Red Dead Redemption 2 were met with a storm of criticism. Earlier this year, 150 employees at League Of Legends developer Riot Games downed tools in protest against the company’s handling of grievances related to apparently endemic workplace sexism.
The past two years have seen the rise of Game Workers Unite, an international grassroots campaign for unionisation, building on the efforts of existing game-industry unions such as Le Syndicat Des Travailleurs Et Travailleuses Du Jeu Vidéo in France. GWU also takes inspiration from labour organisations outside the industry, including the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The latter initiated strikes against Activision, EA, Take-Two and others in 2016, demanding better compensation for actors and voice and motion-capture artists. After a record
340 days of protest involving hundreds of people, it negotiated a new bonus structure with the companies and a commitment to greater transparency in contracts.
For all this activism, however, there continues to be confusion among developers about what unions are for. As
Declan Peach, vice-chair of Game Workers Unite UK, explains, the problem is partly that much union work involves individual grievances that may require confidentiality (as in the case of sexual harassment claims). But the broader difficulty is that as a platform for negotiations with employers, a union’s role can be very complex – especially when it comes to a historically nonunionised industry where the largest projects typically involve teams in several countries, each with its own laws and workplace customs. “The reason we’re segmented into chapters is that union law is very different [between countries], and we can’t, both from a campaign perspective and a legal perspective, do the same things,” Peach says.
In the US, for instance, it’s much harder to achieve the legal recognition you need to form a union, and harder to get access to employment tribunals – government-appointed bodies that make decisions about claims that employers have acted unlawfully. American states write their own employment laws, semi-independently of the federal government, some of which are more hostile to union action than others. “It varies state to state whether or not you can be fired without a valid reason,” Peach adds. “But in the UK if somebody is fired without notice we can take it to an ACAS [the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, a public body offering free advice, support and services to both workers and employers] tribunal and argue discrimination.”
On top of the legal considerations, popular sentiment in the US skews anti-union, making it tough to kindle discussions about labour organisation in a workplace without rousing the ire of colleagues or bosses. “In the US, unions are kind of taboo, more so than in the UK. I was speaking to the organisers during one of our training days, and they are far less willing to speak to different sections of different game companies, because they think that with the way companies in the US are organised, departments like HR and IT tend to be quite in bed with management. That’s not necessarily true for every company, but it’s more true in the US than in the UK.”
All of which is not to say that union action in the UK is straightforward, Peach adds. “The UK has a really weird way of doing tribunals. You have to be a fulltime employee, meaning you have to work 40 hours a week, fulltime for a company, and not be on a zero-hours contract – and you have to do that for two years before you have the full range of employment rights. Before then, if you’re unfairly dismissed and we as a union have to take it to tribunal, we’re not allowed to do it for any reason other than underpayment or discrimination. It’s just a weird aspect of union law in the UK, which means we come across as trying to shout about discrimination a lot, but in reality we need to make that argument because we can’t make another one.”
The past two years have seen the rise of Game Workers Unite, an international grass roots campaign building on the efforts of existing industry unions
The struggle to define and pitch unionisation to developers aside, union activists also need to enlist the support of players – not just for unions in themselves, but for the idea that some games are simply not worth the human cost of their creation. This is tricky, of course, when you don’t have the reach and publicity resources of a company like EA. “As long as they’re getting fed their games, they’re going to find it hard to rebel and say, ‘Yeah, I’m with the developers, they shouldn’t be doing these
kinds of things,” McKellan tells us. “People were saying the other day that there’s a huge crunch culture at Epic on Fortnite. The people buying those battle passes don’t really care. And to be honest they shouldn’t, it’s not their problem. They’re just consuming the entertainment, they’re buying the product. But while that appetite is there people are going to want to satisfy it, and people are going to get caught under the wheels doing that. I don’t think a union on its own will solve it.”
It’s possibly a question of how the debate is framed. Sympathetic players may understand that unionisation can help address the industry’s widely documented problems with crunch, for example, but may be less conscious of how improving the lot of developers can benefit the games they enjoy. On the contrary, the industry and community remain somewhat in thrall to the myth that great art is necessarily tethered to absurd self-sacrifice, which benefits those who would rather workers lacked a collective voice with which to argue for more respectful treatment. According to luminaries such as Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin and Deus Ex creator Warren Spector, overwork is a sad but inevitable component of a creative process dogged by uncertainty. It’s true that game development can be messy, with a huge amount of prototyping and iteration often required to establish whether an idea is worth the trouble, and then four more years of hard work on something that only really begins to resemble a shippable product in the final stretch. But it’s also true that treating developers like cogs in a machine doesn’t lead to a better game.
Speaking to Edge during a presentation at this year’s Reboot Develop conference, former International Game Developers Association executive director Kate Edwards argues that romanticising crunch is often just a way of excusing mismanagement. Too many projects, she says, are reduced to cauldrons of overwork because leads ask for changes or new features out of the blue, or dither over issues that require a quick decision. “A lot of these problems, frankly [are because of] managers who are not managers. These are people who are not trained to do business development, they don’t have a background in it – they may have started at the company as a programmer some years ago and risen through the ranks, and suddenly they find themselves in senior leadership roles just because they’ve been around for a long time.” The benefits of crunch in itself are highly overrated. According to a 2008 study of an anonymous company by the game developer Clinton Keith, after five weeks of working six days a week for ten hours a day, employees were less productive than during a standard 40-hour week. According to another piece of research by Mothership Entertainment boss Paul Tozour in 2015, there is, in fact, a correlation between overwork and lower Metacritic averages and return on investment. In the long term, crunch has also led to an industry-wide brain drain, as eager, talented graduates grow up to become weary, bitter veterans, many affected by anxiety and depression. “A huge number of game-industry professionals tend to move industry after three to five years,” Declan Peach says. “The reason veterans are so sought after is that there aren’t that many.”
The strain has only intensified as the industry has become ever more dependent on service revenue models, which oblige teams to carry on tweaking and creating game content for months, if not years, after they ship. Media coverage of the situation hasn’t always helped. There has been a series of rigorous reports on the state of working conditions at larger studios, such as BioWare and Telltale, but these often frame bad treatment of employees as exclusive to critical and commercial failures, rather than commonplace throughout the industry. More insidiously, relentless news coverage of game-as-service updates and denunciations of those (such as Apex Legends) that aren’t updated as often adds to the pressure on overworked teams.
In giving developers more power to resist open or tacit expectations around overtime, unionisation might then lead to a higher grade of game, though it’s important to restate that unions exist for the sake of developers, not products. “I think the games overall would be of better quality, because many studies have been done of how people work under stress, and you do better work when you’re not under stress,” Peach says. “I can tell you having known many big game developers, we all produce better work when we have more time to do it.” Beyond that, it’s fascinating to consider how the art of game design might alter in qualitative terms if workers were shielded against the toil represented as mandatory for the creation of a game of such scope as Red Dead Redemption 2.
“Industry professionals tend to move industry after three to five years. The reason veterans are so sought after is that there aren’ t that many”
“I don’t think we’d see games on the scale that we’re seeing them – the huge triple-A open world things, the Red Deads, the Far Cry series, that kind of thing,” Jon McKellan muses. “Those games are hard to build in the time you have already, and it takes them seven years. If we were unionised to the point where everyone worked normal hours on productions like that, they’re going to take twice as long and they’re not going to be financially viable any more. They’re not going to make the money back, and it would take too long to get them out. So I think games would just get smaller – and I’m all for that, because I don’t have time to play massive games any more! I’d like to make them smaller, you play a few hours and you feel like you’ve had your fill.” He adds that “we’re trying a bit too hard to put ‘endless’ content into things, to the point where it’s almost like, if everything’s in the game then nothing’s special any more. It’s just this mess of mechanics.”
These are conclusions echoed by Sébastien Bénard, a game designer at Dead Cells developer MotionTwin. The studio is intriguingly placed to comment on the effects of unionisation because it is a workers’ cooperative: its employees are all paid the same, work equal hours, and have a say on every major development decision. It thus offers a snapshot, however extreme, of how a unionised industry might function, with power siphoned away from managers to the workforce – and as Bénard concedes, it’s a model that has limits.
For one thing, this approach is hardly practical for a company on the scale of, say, Ubisoft Montreal, which at the last public count employed 3,500 people. “We actually decided at one point to embrace this limit and say, okay, we cannot grow, for example, to a team of 20 people. We are just limited to around ten.” Bénard prefers to see this as a constructive hindrance, however. “It’s like with a game jam: you have 24 hours to make a game, so it’s a huge constraint, but having such a constraint [inspires] you to find very interesting solutions.” Dead Cells, he adds, owes much of its vibrant visual design to the small number of people working on it. “It’s completely based on the size of our team, and the fact that we had to find ways to optimise for that.”
MotionTwin could never make an open-world game in the current sense, Bénard admits, but like McKellan, he argues that the developers of such games are too beholden to scale for its own sake. “I talked a lot to somebody who worked on the last Assassin’s Creed, and we were discussing the idea of the horizon. The horizon is there for the single purpose of making you think there’s something there. Making an open world, I think, is about making the player feel that potential. And maybe you don’t have to actually make every single asset, every single house – you just have to make people feel like they could go there.” Grandeur need not be a question of literal exhaustiveness, in other words, nor does it have to require exhausting drudgery on the creator’s part. “I think when you have a huge team like Ubisoft – it’s the same for any larger company – when you have the ability to create everything in the world, maybe it’s all just crap at some point.”
Unionisation, in short, is about more than unions themselves and individual disagreements with management. It reflects a mounting need and desire for a holistic overhaul of the art and business of game development; a sea change not only in terms of how games are made but how they are played and understood. In this regard, all parties in the equation have a
certain responsibility to one another. Publishers must cease treating their workers like cannon fodder, to be exchanged for fresh recruits after a few years of toil in the name of an unreasonable release schedule. Developers must resist the mythologisation of crunch by those further up the ladder, and be both aware of and prepared to stand up for their basic rights as human beings. And players and journalists must learn to think differently about games, letting go of the view that scale and roundthe-clock updates are fundamental metrics of relevance or quality.
Unionisation would catalyse these shifts, by resetting the balance of power between managers and workers to create a basis for negotiation. If the complexities of union work are hard to sum up, Kate Edwards perhaps puts it best when she says that labour organisation isn’t about obstruction, but the opportunity for dialogue. “Nobody wants to strike, nobody wants labour action, nobody wants to stop working because we love what we do. But we want to make sure that if we have these problems, there’s some way of communicating with management. We need to sit down and talk about this, and you need to listen to us. Because we’re the people doing the work.”
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