Tips For Beating All The Bosses!
March 21, 2019 9:32 AM   Subscribe

“The game industry is making record profits, yet very little of that is flowing into the hands of the people who actually create the games. Together, we have the power to change this.” At the 2019 Game Developer’s Conference in San Franscico, Game Workers Unite released a special zine all about unionizing and co-op efforts. Union FAQs : Is Profit-Sharing What We Want? Craft Unions, Industrial Unions… What’s the Difference? Strategy Guide: How to Start Organizing your Workplace. Not in the Industry? Ways To Help.
posted by The Whelk (15 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing. Not in the gaming space, but adjacent.
posted by bonehead at 9:51 AM on March 21, 2019 [7 favorites]


Hey kids let's write a game: Union Organizer

(you jump in a car and furiously drive around a town filled with good guys and monsters disguised as corporate executives with a clipboard and a crowbar)
posted by sammyo at 9:56 AM on March 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


Wait does that exist

Why not
posted by schadenfrau at 10:32 AM on March 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


A strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
posted by Fizz at 10:59 AM on March 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


monsters disguised as corporate executives

Disguised as?

A strange game, the only winning move is not to play.

An alternative take: The only winning move is to take back the board the capitalists stole from us, and not let them play anymore until they've learned to share.
posted by howfar at 11:08 AM on March 21, 2019 [15 favorites]


Hard to take the board when they built all their shit on top of it, roped us into participation, and can use violence against us if we don't want to play.
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:31 AM on March 21, 2019


Yeah we'll be taking all their shit too. I thought that was implied.
posted by howfar at 11:43 AM on March 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


Also, of course changing the world is hard.
posted by howfar at 12:10 PM on March 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


In the IT sector, nobody needs unions as badly as the game developers do.

Which means nobody's going to have as difficult a time unionizing as the game developers will.

A particularly hard complication is the optics. A picket line means nothing when strike breakers can VPN right through it. So tactics have to evolve. So far, the only leverage I've seen coming from software developers has been in the form of devs and managers resigning, nto striking.
posted by ocschwar at 12:29 PM on March 21, 2019


Oh shit can there be a picket firewall?
posted by Jon_Evil at 1:58 PM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Oh shit can there be a picket firewall?

aside from the part where it will be needed, I am all for this cyberpunk dystopia.
posted by isauteikisa at 4:03 PM on March 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


If it was that easy to just have scabs vpn in and do useful work, then that work would have already been outsourced/offshored.
posted by ryanrs at 4:13 PM on March 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing. Not in the gaming space, but adjacent

And the senior staff have a "new" reason for not organizing - unionization is cultural misappropriation.

Yes. It's as stupid as it sounds.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:50 PM on March 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


And the senior staff have a "new" reason for not organizing - unionization is cultural misappropriation.

This is about the most brazen and cynical use of social justice terminology for capitalist purposes I've ever seen. Woke union-busting is a thing now.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 5:53 AM on March 22, 2019 [3 favorites]




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