This article investigates the experiences of digital game testers working in external quality assurance departments in Poland. As compared with video game developers, testers have received relatively little attention in game labor studies, and there is a particular gap in the scholarship with respect to testers within firms that perform work that is outsourced from game developers and publishers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Polish game testers, my research reveals that outsourced game testing is characterized by sharp tensions between self-realization and self-exploitation. The article explores three aspects of testers’ response to these tensions, including enduring precarious working conditions, seeking better career prospects, and engaging in resistance in the workplace. I examine testers’ work through the conceptual lens of hope labor, which designates undercompensated work carried out in the hope of gaining more stable and rewarding employment opportunities in future.
This article discusses fraudulent contracting of work in the Polish videogame industry by addressing its relation to workers’ understanding of their insecure employment and the economic risk associated with it. Fraudulent contracting of work is understood as misuse of civil law contracts/self-employment to disguise different types of employment relations. The article draws upon in-depth interviews with Polish videogame workers and key sector organisations to examine their understanding of the prevalence of employment relations not covered by the labour code in the videogame industry. The interviewees presented polarised opinions about engagement with civil law contracts ranging from celebratory approaches to their flexibility to discussing their use by companies in order to circumvent the labour code provisions. This article argues that the understanding of work precarisation needs to be further investigated in relation to national regulatory systems and workers’ understanding of their own employment arrangements.
Critics of both the game industry specifically and the cultural industries
broadly have long drawn attention to how romantic ideals around creative
and passionate work are exploited by cultural firms. Long hours, periods of
contingent employment, and expectations of unpaid labour are all justified
as the sacrifices that cultural workers make in order to ‘do what they
love’. Drawing from interviews with 200 amateur game makers, a range of
complex, and sometimes contradictory justifications of self-exploitation
are identified. While some game makers speak of ambitions to one day
get paid to make games, many others justify keeping their creative work
separate from what they do for money as a form of self-emancipation.
Video games have entered the cultural mainstream and in terms of economic profits they now rival established entertainment industries such as film or television. As careers in video game development become more common, so do the stories about precarious working conditions and structural inequalities within the industry. Yet, scholars have largely overlooked video game production cultures in favor of studying games themselves and player audiences. In Game Production Studies, an international group of established and emerging researchers takes a closer look at the everyday realities of video game production, ranging from commercial industries to independent creators and cultural intermediaries. Across sixteen chapters, the authors deal with issues related to labour, game development, monetization and publishing, as well as local specificities. As the first edited collection dedicated solely to video game production, this volume provides a timely resource for anyone interested in how games are made and at what costs.
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