Abstract
Marxists tend to be interested in the broader dynamics of capitalism: in production, circulation, and consumption as macrophenomena. Why, then, as Jamie Woodcock asks in Marx at the Arcade, should Marxists be interested in videogames? Behind this question is a commitment to a particular type of inquiry—an epistemology that asserts that through understanding an industry, its labor process, and the social actors caught up in it, we can gain a greater understanding of the wider capitalist system. Marxists should pay attention to videogames, he argues, because the videogames industry provides a good case study for understanding Marxist economics. But videogames are also an arena of political contestation, of push and pull between different actors: corporations and hackers, workers, and managers. This struggle takes place at both the level of production, in the form of workers’ struggle, and at the level of consumption as ideology. As such, Marx at the Arcade attempts to fuse two levels of analysis: a political economy, rooted in workers’ experience, and a cultural critique of the videogame commodity. As a route into Marxist political economy, Marx at the Arcade is a welcome addition to the literature, albeit one that falls slightly short in its analysis of videogame culture.
The book is split into two parts: part 1 homes in on the political economy of the videogames industry, while part 2 focuses on videogames as cultural commodities, or how they are consumed by the population. The author shows us how games are made, before showing us how they are played.
After a brief historical background on videogames (chapter 1), Woodcock gives us an overview of the videogames industry. Videogames are a product of the capitalist system they emerge from. That system, currently, is a globalized one, which sees commodities produced, transported, and sold along long intra-national value chains: “The console, the cables, the screen, the controller, and so on all had to be made somewhere. It is likely they were manufactured in China, far away from where many consumers are likely to be sitting when they play” (36). Typically, commodities are conceived of in the Global North, manufactured in the Global South, where labor is cheaper, and transported along logistical networks to be sold back at the Global North markets. Videogames are no different. Games companies in the United Kingdom and the United States are global businesses and, following the broader shifts of these economies, have outsourced manufacturing of hardware to Asia, while development, publishing, and marketing departments remain in the Global North.
It is within this capitalist network of value chains that the author urges us to understand the videogames industry. The industry itself is a microcosm of capitalist relations. Indeed, the section “The Videogame as a Commodity” in chapter 2, reads like Marx’s exegesis of the commodity in Capital volume 1 and reveals the underlying dynamics that give a videogame its exchange value. What the author lays out here is not abnormal for a capitalist industry—but this is exactly the point. A great strength of Marx at the Arcade is its pedagogical function: how it applies Marxist economic categories to a popular field of entertainment, providing an accessible demonstration for those unfamiliar with Capital.
In the following chapter, “The Work of Videogames,” Woodcock argues that the labor process must be understood as a three-part material relation: constituted by technical, social, and political “class composition.” He asserts that there is a close relationship between the way workers are organized into a labor process at work (technical composition), the way workers are organized into a class society outside of work (social composition), and the forms of political organization they engage in (political composition), such that social and technical composition together give rise to political composition.
In exposing the technical composition, Woodcock finds that videogames firms have “rationalized” the production process, using techniques straight out of the Scientific Management playbook: “breakdown, simplify, routinize, standardize” (78). The development of a single game can incorporate tens of studios in different countries, working in succession around the clock in “24-hour non-stop development” (Beaudoin 2016), with each worker specializing in a certain area of development, much like a car factory assembly line. This Taylorist streamlining of the production process facilitates automation and workforce deskilling: “No longer does a worker need to understand the entire game project; they need to know just one aspect” (78). Rationalizing the production process reflects the need for firms to tightly control workers and increase efficiency in order to meet economic pressures of a highly competitive market.
Authoritarian control of workers is widely experienced in workplaces, although Woodcock is keen to characterize it in this instance as a reaction to the unique “hacker” subjectivity of developers: “The kind of work being undertaken today draws. . . on the hard to control hacker knowledge. . . . Putting this hacker culture to work is a complicated thing for employers because it contains this anti-work feeling” (75–76). The job of a developer is, by nature, creative and requires a degree of autonomy. As a result, orienting developers toward productive ends is difficult and creates tension within the technical composition.
Woodcock sees “crunch time”—a ubiquitous and highly exploitative practice, whereby workers are forced to work until breaking point with no compensation—as a direct result of this “hard to control” hacker culture. Crunch time is often factored into a project’s schedule as a way of saving money during development. But, as the author points out, crunch time is another method of worker control, a response to the challenge presented by the anti-work hacker culture, which is widespread among developers.
What is good about this analysis is that it does not merely describe the labor process, but it reveals power relations at the heart of the workplace. In making the production process more streamlined and work more intense, bosses dissolve the power of the workers—wearing them out through crunches, quashing their leverage through deskilling. These management techniques are designed to cull the power of the workforce. However, a point of complication with characterizing management techniques as a reaction to workforce power is that developers had little power to begin with. Managerial practices, such as crunch time, are possible only because there is a low union density in this industry; developers, for most of the history of the industry, have been apolitical (the first strikes happened in 2016). Are managers really that terrified that hacker culture will give way to a conscious working-class militancy? Hacker culture may be common among workers, but it is unclear whether it is the unruly nature of the labor force or the market imperatives, which necessitate cost-cutting and efficiency, that are motivating the introduction of authoritarian management. Woodcock’s analysis is ambiguous about this point, but given the—until recently—deferent disposition of developers, we might suspect that it is the later force that is driving workplace practices.
Given the author’s advocacy for class compositional analysis, it is a surprise when, in the chapter on “Organizing in the Videogames Industry,” we learn that the first instances of political organizing in the industry involved voice actors—workers who were omitted from the account of the technical composition. Since the technical composition is supposed to determine the forms of political organizing, the reader wonders why it was the voice actors, and not the supposedly anti-work developers, who got their act together first. Hence the otherwise useful analysis of the workforce’s technical composition is not realized enough to present a holistic account of organizing in the games industry. Nevertheless, we do see clear examples of how the exploitative labor process gives rise to grievances, which in turn form the basis of political organizing in the games industry. Take Game Workers Unite, for instance: an international, pro-union organization that formed around demands against crunch time and burnout.
Part II of the book explores the consumption of videogames and aims to understand how they are played. The two halves of the book are stitched together through Marx’s “base-superstructure” distinction. That is, the material base of society, or the specific relations of production, produce the superstructure, which is definite forms of social consciousness. As such, the specific economic circumstances give rise to the ideas that come be represented in videogames, insofar as economic conditions determine the hardware, software, and content that is eventually produced. Videogames thus reflect the economic order: first-person shooters are deferent to US imperialism; role-playing games reinforce gendered and racialized tropes; simulations, like The Sims, are often limited by consumer-cultural norms.
Although, through making this distinction, the author explains how production and consumption of videogames are broadly related, he does little to map out a specific conceptual approach to analyzing the culture of videogames. Woodcock’s somewhat vague approach to videogames as cultural commodities fails to demarcate videogames from other cultural mediums, such as cinema or the novel. For instance, the author could have explored how interactivity distinguishes the videogame as a specific type of cultural commodity that is consumed in a specific way. Consequently, the path that is taken feels a little imprecise, mapping out a generic Marxist theory of culture and referring to several different analytical categories—mass culture, textual apparatus, art object—without ever settling on one specified analysis.
Instead of a unified theory, what we get is an approach to videogames as individual genres, which is split over four chapters: “First Person Shooters,” “Role Playing, Simulations, and Strategy,” “Political Games,” and “Online Gaming.” Each chapter outlines its genre’s typical characteristics and explores examples of prominent videogames from within that genre. There is sense to this genre-based approach: videogames are diverse, but games that fall into a single genre largely share the same general logic. The intense real-time experience of playing a first-person shooter (FPS) is very different from the stop-start, “god’s eye” perspective of strategy games, for instance. At the same time, the individualized analyses are not always fully realized. For example, the attempt to understand the experience of playing FPS as a further permutation of the “mediated” interaction between audience and artwork, first highlighted by Walter Benjamin in his analysis of cinema, does not serve any critical purpose and appears detached from Benjamin’s original usage. It is correct that FPS involves a form of mediated relationship, but its significance is left underexplored.
Nevertheless, over these four chapters, a picture of the cultural impact of videogames takes shape. To the extent that games have been co-opted by reactionary forces (the US military, for example) games can serve as an ideological apparatus for the interests of the ruling elite; but as a medium, they can also subvert the dominant ideology. This push and pull has characterized the history of videogames, and the book presents several interesting examples of both subversive and submissive videogames (see specifically the chapter “Political Games”). The impact of games that subvert seems to be outweighed by the those that reinforce the dominant ideology, however. Marx at the Arcade seeks to remedy that. Woodcock argues that, despite the left’s relative dearth of resources, Marxists should engage in the struggle to politicize videogames.
The reader should approach Marx at the Arcade as an introduction to Marxist economics, an interesting application to an industry that has been largely understudied. Woodcock offers readers a comprehensive account of the production and circulation of videogames, while demonstrating with clarity how the videogames industry mirrors the wider dynamics of contemporary global capitalism. As such, the book is a good demonstration of the explanatory power of Marxist analytical frameworks. When it comes to cultural critique however, Marxist concepts are sometimes unrigorously applied, often obscuring what it is that is unique about videogames. That said, Woodcock’s overall conclusion is correct—Marxists should be concerned with this medium. Marx at the Arcade is a good place to start.
