Video Games Are As Bad As Everything Else
As I write this, the horrible dystopian thing that is being discussed today in video game circles is an article by Drew Harwell in the Washington Post. The story details Activision Blizzard’s use of the pregnancy tracking app Ovia on its employees, the human beings responsible for turning the business into a money-making juggernaut with titles like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. The company — one that inhaled record revenues of $7.5 billion in 2018, paid its new CFO Dennis Durkin a $15 million signing bonus, and then laid off around 800 of its staff — gives small incentives to its workers to use Ovia and then gathers a disturbing level of personal data about them, which is uses to squeeze every possible cent out of their labor.
The most disturbing bit of the story is a toss-up, as there are plenty of standout candidates, but I’m partial to this quote from corporate vice president of global benefits, Milt Ezzard, describing the gradual acceptance of the company’s creeping surveillance:
“Each time we introduced something, there was a bit of an outcry: ‘You’re prying into our lives,’ ” Ezzard said. “But we slowly increased the sensitivity of stuff, and eventually people understood it’s all voluntary, there’s no gun to your head, and we’re going to reward you if you choose to do it.”
“People’s sensitivity,” he added, “has gone from, ‘Hey, Activision Blizzard is Big Brother,’ to, ‘Hey, Activision Blizzard really is bringing me tools that can help me out.’ ”
This kind of employee tracking, and far worse, is not uncommon for huge corporations, and given the grand scale of abominations in the industry, this probably won’t remain of topic of conversation for long. Tomorrow’s discourse is likely to bring some fresh new horror.
I am not certain that this is unique among many other industries, or that it is remarkably different than it has been for a long time in games, but these issues now seem to surface relentlessly. What’s clear is that the problems of the video games ecosystem reflect the larger ills of society to a degree that seems almost comically exaggerated. It is hard to explain to people that are not immersed in the regular cycles of games news that the industry that generated such fun diversions like Mario Kart and Words with Friends might be at least as deranged as everywhere else, if not more.
Today it’s bad-faith grievance and ahistorical both-sidesism weaponized against the vulnerable in a reactionary grab to halt progressive change. Today it’s rehashing, for the nth time, gatekeeper arguments about how accessibility and difficulty options intended to give more people a chance to enjoy an experience will somehow ruin things for the bright-red and bothered “this thing is for me and not you” crowd. Today it’s calling a player who quits a stressful job with a professional Overwatch team, part-owned by a massive global conglomerate worth billions, “selfish” and “unprofessional.” Today it’s people rallying against competition for a distribution platform that holds a de facto near monopoly on digital computer game sales and collects a vast fortune via a bizarre form of cyberpunk arbitrage, with tactics including review bombing years-old games, presumably because some fans enjoyed Half-Life 2 in 2004 or don’t want to have to open two separate launchers on their desktop.
Seemingly every day it’s another shrewd cost-cutting measure that’s “just smart business,” from a company that appears to have plenty of resources for its C-level executives. Maybe this time it’s Electronic Arts laying off 350 people. Unrelated, a website called Salary.com posts information about executive compensation based on statements to the SEC, and this is a graph that they have up for 2018 at Electronic Arts Inc.
Those numbers are so large as to be ungainly for most people to compute, but some quick work with a calculator says that’s $123,646,700 going to five of EA’s top brass in one year. For no reason in particular, dividing that total by 350 gets you over 353,000 dollars.
Maybe the most telling story in this particular rotation of the hellscape centers on BioWare, a subsidiary of EA and the developers of the recently released Anthem. At the beginning of the month, Jason Schreier published a deeply researched investigation at Kotaku, diving into the game’s ill-fated development cycle. Beyond explaining how some of the game’s features came up short of their original aims, it highlighted years of corporate dysfunction, traumatic working conditions, and mistreatment of labor at BioWare, on the Anthem team and before. Neither EA nor BioWare responded to Kotaku’s requests for comment. However, upon the publications of the piece, and apparently before they could have even had time to read and reasonably react to it, BioWare posted a response.
The message labels Kotaku’s reporting as a personal attack on the people who made the game, and calls it, “attempting to bring them down as individuals.” It hand-waves away the concerns about labor conditions and treatment of its employees. The statement subtly demonizes journalists, and categorizes factual investigative journalism about a company’s unhealthy work environment as unnecessary negativity. “We don’t see the value in tearing down one another, or one another’s work,” it reads. “We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.” This is, after all, about what’s good for video games, and certainly not at all related to a business’s bottom line. And finally, the release consciously exalts capital-G Gamers and their exclusive entertainment.
“But the reward of putting something we created into the hands of our players is amazing. People in this industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun.” The people involved in creating titles exist solely to cater to player’s desires, and what’s a crushing overtime schedule when you have passion?
“As a studio and a team, we accept all criticisms that will come our way for the games we make, especially from our players.” What are a mere reporter’s complaints next to the needs of the gamers, and why do journalists exist if not to gas them up?
“Our full focus is on our players and continuing to make Anthem everything it can be for our community. Thank you to our fans for your support — we do what we do for you.” Let us assure you that we will not allow things like working our people to the point of breakdown or biased, negative reporting get in the way of your entertainment.
The statement was so obnoxiously brazen that it was quickly met with criticism, but even some of the people denouncing it seemed to interpret the incident with a level of naivety. This is not just tone deaf damage control and customer flattery, it’s calculated pandering with potentially serious consequences. This isn’t a case of a company that makes games clumsily misunderstanding how the press is supposed to work, it’s an intentional effort to undermine it.
The political roots for this sort of thing run deep, and are currently being exploited in terrifying ways, but there’s long track record in the video game industry of companies driving a wedge between zealous players and everyone else — the actual people making the games, journalists, critics, non-gamers, and even more casual players. Less than a year ago, for Rhizome, Lana Polansky laid out a long history of companies scapegoating their workers for the sake of placating players, and further, weaponizing the enraged mobs against them in “Worse than Scabs: Gamer Rage as Anti-Union Violence.” So many of these outrages, even the ones that are widely recognized as outrages, are viewed as individual occurrences or toxic quirks of the hobby and too rarely get connected to a bigger picture.
Video games were never a niche playground for a homogeneous group of nerds, and we’re decades past the ability to pretend that’s the case or feigning that that framing isn’t actively harmful. The industry is a behemoth, and many of the problems that it’s riddled with are variations of the same ones found in other commercial sectors, tech companies, and profitable forms of entertainment. The malevolent actors are just as malevolent, and the damage from the maladies is just as tangible. Whether it’s marginalized voices being shouted out of public spaces, sci-fi levels of corporate greed constructing a real panopticon nightmare around us, or class-warfare unashamedly playing out in broad daylight, it’s long past time to start viewing them as manifestations of our society at-large, and not just some eccentric genre issues. The cycle of bad news sparking worse discourse isn’t likely to improve anytime soon, but a good place to start might be treating it with the gravity of the rest of our systemic problems. All this is real life and not just some pixels on a screen.
