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The Professional Identity of Gameworkers

by Chase Bowen Martin and Mark Deuze

Writing in Escapist magazine (issue 61 of September 5th, 2006), John Szczepaniak laments: “Few know the real truth about who creates videogames [...] It must also be noted with bitter irony that for a medium which is forever debated as being "art," the people behind it seldom get the acknowledgement deserved.” Beyond numerous blogs maintained by game developers and the occasional interview or studio profile in a trade magazine, little indeed is known about the people behind the keyboards. The situation is even worse at the level of academic research: even though studying games is incredibly popular among scholars and students alike, few professors seem to be interested in the professionals (and amateurs) who make the games they play.(1)

As researchers at Indiana University's Department of Telecommunications – where part of the graduate program is designed to train people for jobs in the digital game industry – we took up the challenge. We wanted to know not only who game developers are, but also what they do, how they go about doing it, and what their work means to them. Thus we set out to review the available scholarly literature on the making of computer and video games, reports in trade magazines and journal articles (including IGDA white papers), posts on group and individual weblogs of game developers. Then we went to the GDC of 2006 and 2007 and talked with lots of developers, attended IGDA sessions on Quality of Life issues, e-mailed our contacts in the game industry as well as (the few) colleagues studying gamework at universities all over the world. Put together, this material tells a comprehensive story about the key issues informing and influencing the working lives and professional identity of gameworkers.(2)

The Videogame Business

Within a short history, the games industry has dealt with tremendous expansion, an (early 1980s) implosion, and a subsequent rebirth. Today both the Interactive Software Association in Europe and Entertainment Software Association of America confidently report that games of all types are played by an increasing number of people of all ages, across socio-economic backgrounds and gender. Few would argue the relevance of digital games as a cultural phenomenon, as well as a formidable peer in the global media industry. As a result of this rapid development – from individual bedroom tinkering to multimillion dollar development teams in a few decades - the professional identities of gameworkers are expected to mature almost instantly, without the benefit of a lifetime of experiences, traditions, routines, and rules.

Within the game industry, designer personalities are emerging with reputations similar to the auteur film directors of the 1970s. Names like Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, CliffyB or John Carmack connote a kind of singular creative excellence among fervent gamers, in a manner that resembles the popularity of Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, or Roman Polanski a generation before them. These names and their work serve as a beacon for many newcomers and wannabes to become part of this industry – regardless of the fact that their work was made possible by teams of tens or hundreds of developers, programmers, artists and many others often working under conditions of almost permanent crunchtime.

To get a better sense of who these people are and what shapes their professional identity, we divided our analysis up into five elements determining what it is like to work as a game developer: the structure of the industry and the organization of work; the role of technology; issues of law and policy governing labor; careers in the game industry; and the influence of the market.

Industrial and Organizational Structure

The game industry continues to be a maverick field of production within the larger world of media industries – even though it is quickly folding into a global media system dominated by a few conglomerates. Gamework is now part of a global production network, where all the parts of the production pipeline can be distributed or outsourced across regions and countries all over the world (but particularly in Northern Europe, South-East Asia, and North America). The structure of work has changed tremendously to meet the demands of this global market, and are now often arranged in tight hierarchical formats where workers fulfill narrowly defined roles. A distinct hourglass structure has emerged, where a few hardware manufacturers and multinational publishers dominate. The expansion of production budgets, team-sizes and global outsourcing and subcontracting practices creates a higher barrier of entry for independent developers and publishers. These large publishers are aided through their relationships with retailers in the competition for shelf space due to their ability to invest heavily in product marketing and development. As symptoms of the tension between guaranteed returns on investment and risk, games that can be franchised and cross-promoted with other media are increasingly prioritized in the production chain in order to capitalize on their guaranteed – or perhaps: less unpredictable - marketability.

Yet at the same time the industry has a history of creative autonomy, a legend fueled by the memories of many developers of their time as modders, level editors, or homegrown developers programming out of their garages. As team sizes continue to swell, such auteurship is undermined – though marketing departments still introduce specific lead developers forward to put a (famous) face on their games - when the vision must be communicated down intricate levels of hierarchy, among teams of individuals with a wide range of skills, competences, tastes and preferences who come together temporarily to work on a particular asset, deliverable, or end-product. Adjusting to the demand for the increase in the number of professionals to create next generation games, many developers have turned to contractual and part-time work to meet production needs at times of high demand. Generally speaking, this further compromises communication, and widens the gap between the work of a game developer and the overall project or final product when the game goes gold.

Technology

Technology is intrinsically tied to the nature of video games and the work of game developers. Technological innovation that drives industry demand simultaneously drives ‘old' skills into obsolescence. Research shows that each technological advancement is seen by many developers as enhancing the possibilities of realism in their games, creating what has been called an “immersive fallacy” in game design: the belief that games draw their users into a world whose value is that it is ever more realistic, detailed and naturalistic. Such Techno-fetishism not only undermines the value of previous work in favor of an ideal-typical (thus unrealizable) end-goal, but also allies developer interests with peripheral technologies independent of games (DVD players, Web browsers, TV tuners), positioning themselves as complete media centers or “Trojan Horse devices” enabling media conglomerates to conquer the entire living room.

Network technologies that facilitate an open, interactive relationship between gamers and developers force a negotiation of what authorship exactly means. The game industry has always been at the front when it comes to cultivating close, if not co-creative relationships between producers and consumers by releasing work through shareware or freeware agreements, including level editors and SDKs with games, and encouraging prolific modding communities.

Continuous access to the final product also means maintaining consumer interest is often directly tied to profit margins. In many online games ongoing product development gets outsourced to player communities. The creation and maintenance of in-game artifacts, storylines, and social relationships among groups of players add to the richness of the game experience but can also be considered as threatening to circumvent the original developer's vision. This ambiguity of the role of the audience as co-creator of content gets amplified by the fact that for many MMO users active participation in the game is felt as a duty – indeed, as work. In a way, an increasing amount of gamework is thus outsourced to the free labor provided by gamer communities – who then are often advised to start modding in order to be considered for employment in the industry.

Ultimately the distinction between consumers and producers gets determined when development companies or publishers indiscriminately use their authority over the original game's IP to secure the rights to user-generated content. This is established through End User Licensing Agreements that require players to comply with their standards in order to access the product.

Law and Policy

If we can consider EULAs as “informal” labor contracts for the work that consumers do in the game industry, the formal contracts used with professionals inside development studios are indeed quite similar. In most cases, all IP created by game developers remains property of the studio or publisher; a practice that gets validated by companies who provide the facilities that allow game developers to do their work. This gets complicated as gamework is contingent: largely project-based, of a temporary nature, and contracted out individually. Development companies are indistinct when legally defining their role vis-à-vis the employee when they fail to discriminate a developer's work from a developer's autonomy and opting to control all of it.

The ability for external organizations such as unions or industry associations such as the IGDA to influence, establish or enforce industry standards has thus far been marginal. The settlements by EA following the ea_spouse case of extreme workers' rights violations were followed by a movement of hundreds of workers from their Los Angeles based studio to studios in Florida and Canada. As many states (such as Texas and Washington) and countries (like Canada and the U.K.) provide tax incentives and other regulatory waivers to software companies, precedent has been set for game companies to cluster based on local or regional legal benefits and deregulatory frameworks regarding, for example, workers' rights. The South Korean government has even dropped the requirement of military service for those willing to work in the game industry, considering digital games key to the international export of Korean culture. Developer organizations, such as the IGDA, could be an adequate or helpful representation of developer interests but are largely powerless, and thus act more as advocacy groups. As organization structures shift towards outsourcing – an estimated 60% of game studios outsource today, primarily in the areas of localization, cinematics, sound design, game testing, middleware and artwork – and an almost exclusive reliance on contingent labor, the strong social networks needed to take collective action and participate in unions or advocacy groups effectively evaporate.

Careers

Industry produces culture – as in for example a studio making games like Doom or Mario Bros that become a recognized part of international popular culture – and culture produces industry. The culture of a company or a field of work is produced through sustained collective activity that in turn relies on and contributes to the development of a specific career system. Gamework is a random, sporadic and messy type of work, that favors the young, the unattached, and: the male. In countries such as the UK, The Netherlands and the United States, women make up about half or more of the workforce in TV and film, but the level of representation is consistently lowest in digital games: about 10 percent (percentages reported internationally range from 8 to 12 percent). The division of labor in the game industry is also quite gendered. Women work primarily in business and legal services, and to some extent marketing. A breakdown of “Game industry's 100 most influential women” by Next Generation magazine in 2006 for example shows the list included only 7 designers, 1 tech lead, and 1 art lead.(3)

Beyond gender discrepancies, a significant characteristic of gameworkers is their relative youth and inexperience, with the vast majority of professionals in their twenties working less than five years in the industry.(4) Yet, there is an overwhelming loss of experienced developers, with the IGDA reporting that only 51% of developers plan on staying in the industry for their entire careers and 34% saying they plan on leaving in the next five. This indicates reliance on quick adaptation and early promotion to meet the needs of a fast growing industry with increasingly complex and sophisticated management structures. Often this involves a delicate interplay between designers and producers, requiring a balance of technical expertise and soft communication skills that are difficult to develop without the benefits of experience, mentorship, and team familiarity.

The hierarchical structure of the industry, the uncertainty and unpredictability of employment, the generally young male-oriented orientation of game marketing and design can be linked to what some describe as a form of “militarized masculinity” as an organizing characteristic in gamework. All of this contributes to a professional climate that can be anything but open, friendly or sensitive towards workforce diversity. In regards to the adversity facing development companies in cultivating an accessible work culture, it is interesting to note the emergence of the so-called “Quality of Life Manager” at several game studios, who serves as a liaison between workers' rights and studio interests. The presence of such an occupational role within game development signals the process of fast-forwarding through a history of professionalization without the benefit of a lifetime of experiences, traditions, routines, or rules governing the interchange between work and play.

The Market

As reported at the start of our article, everyone plays games today. Some attribute the increasingly individualized, competitive and “winning is everything” economy to the fact that games are now pervasive among those in the European, Asian and American workforce. Although it is highly unlikely that such attitudes and beliefs can be attributed solely to growing up playing computer and video games, it is safe to say games have become an accepted and widely popular part of contemporary society. Where popular conception depicts gamers as young, white, heterosexual men, the actuality of the gamer demographic is much more varied, even though among console and PC title developers the primary market – considering the predominance of first-person shooter, fighting and sports games on offer – is still this stereotypical one. Indeed, the vogue parsing of the market is between hardcore and casual gamers, designating players by degree in which they play. A September 2006 report by industry analyst NPD Group identified at least six distinct gamer segments - Heavy Gamers, Avid Console Gamers, Mass Market Gamers, Prefer Portable Gamers, Secondary Gamers, and Infrequent Gamers. The report showed that the Heavy Gamer segment comprises only 3 percent of the total game playing population.(5)

Recognition of aforementioned culture of participatory authorship has become a crucial element of the production process in the game industry, as hiring practices for many job postings list desired gamer-related qualities such as “a passion for games” and “familiarity with genre” as requirements for employment. Furthermore it is not uncommon for developers to recount their first experiences creating games as modding and hacking games that they already enjoyed or played. This trend not only contributes to the blurring of the boundaries between gamers and gameworkers, they in fact reproduce each other as players become developers, who are then proficient in targeting players of similar interest.

Discussion and Conclusion

In the day-to-day reality a professional identity of gamework can perhaps best be described as series of ongoing negotiations taking place by the individual game professional. The options for negotiations of employment styles are limited as any discontent can be countered by the thought of a legion of younger workers (and co-creating gamers) waiting to break into the industry, willing to tolerate the same strenuous working conditions and probably (at least initially) for less pay. This leaves little alternative than to commit to an individualized and pragmatic work-style in game development where a willingness to regularly submit to crunch periods often embodies the lived experience of working in games.

Yet work in games is increasingly characterized by the time spent away from working as much the time spent working. Social activities such as playing video games together, playing sports at lunch, and going on outings in the evening contribute to building a (short-term) team mentality that is as much a construct of company branding as it is part of an individual professional identity. Even though most development studios have become part of big multinational companies or production processes, life on the work floor cultivates a distinct anti-corporate culture and “work as play” ethos. Such a perception serves multiple functions: reassuring workers of their own autonomy, constructing a narrative of coolness that contributes to a more effective recruiting and retention system, while facilitating subtle yet pervasive disciplinary mechanisms for keeping people at work all the time.(6)

Considering earlier comments on the blurring of work and play among those who play games, as well as the “work as play” ethos in most game development houses, a picture emerges of an environment where the organization of work cannot be seen separately from personal preferences and individual negotiations. Yet such a conclusion runs counter to the signaled managerial practice of a militarized systematic division of labor (at least on paper), that models industry productivity based on milestones. This among a professional context that can be characterized by increasing corporate pressures to bring in significant returns on investment. In this system, the identity of professional game developers must be seen as inseparable from the products of their work – making clear crediting standards vital and all too often vague.

The answer to what drives developers to deal with a list of problematic circumstances that threatens and destabilizes working conditions may be similar to what drives their audience to push through the increasingly difficult levels of the games developers create. The players' need to conquer new challenges and the assurance that victory is possible may be the same attributes for winning the boss-fight at the end of a level as for making it as a game developer. The camaraderie of the community that comes with success is the motivation to continue to the next dungeon, and contributions to a list of shipped titles are the badges of honor and achievement that adorn a resume. Beyond these heroics stands perhaps a new model of individualized work and professional identity in today's increasingly post-industrial new media economy, where the worker has to find a way of making the industry aware of one crucial, all-important fact: that without her, there is no game.

Endnotes

  1. Of course there are some exceptions, such as the work of Aphra Kerr in Ireland, Helen Kennedy and Jon Dovey in the UK, Yuko Aoyama and Hiro Izushi in Japan, or Nick Dyer-Witheford and Zena Sharman in Canada. Please contact us for specific references or the full paper version of our study.
  2. In our analysis we deliberately focus on those involved in the making of so-called ‘Triple-A' titles for consoles and PCs. Although some similarities exist for different areas of the industry, we cannot generalize all too easily across all types of games.
  3. Source URL: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3783&Itemid=2
  4. Source: IGDA report (2005), URL: http://www.igda.org/diversity/report.php
  5. Source URL: http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_060919a.html
  6. See also URL: http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/depeuter_dyerwitheford.html

 

IGDA Resources/Links

 

Author Bios

Mark Deauze Mark Deuze is a professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University. He blogs at Deuzeblog and can be reached via mdeuze at indiana dot edu.
  Chase Bowen Martin is a graduate student in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University. He can be reached via cbmartin at indiana dot edu.

 

 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the IGDA.