Ebook: A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry

A Precarious Game is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers Bulut researched for almost three years in a medium sized studio in the US loved making video games that millions play. However, only some can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers in the Global South.

In A Precarious Game, Bulut explores the politics of doing what one loves. Passion and love at work imply freedom, participation, and choice, but they in fact accelerate self-exploitation and can impose emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless hours. Bulut argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable transnational industry thrives.

Work within capitalism is not just an economic matter and the political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even when based on mutual consent. As Bulut demonstrates, rather than considering work simply as an economic matter based on trade-offs in the workplace, we should consider work and love as a question of democracy rooted in politics.