The labor of video game testers has barely registered within political-economic analyses of work practices in the game industry. This article addresses this gap through a critical deployment of the concept of precarity and its multiform nature experienced by game testers. Drawing on Harry Braverman’s concept of “degradation of labor,” I aim to contribute to media labor literature by introducing the concept of “degradation of fun,” where testers are alienated from play and forced to develop instrumental and selective ways of play. I make the argument that as opposed to popular representations, game testing is a decidedly precarious labor, due to its assumed low-skill status, and because of the existence of a large reserve army of labor, which depresses the wages and renders testers expendable. Ultimately, the “immateriality” and joy of testing as labor comes with material physical and bodily pains, and sentiments of second-class citizenship.
Game workers have a problem. They code values and ideologies into games, but they are either not aware of it or deny it. Through a constructive and critical engagement with Games of Empire, I propose the concept of “ludic religiosity” to reveal how white masculinity informs game workers’ professional discourses, technological practices, ludic desires, and imaginations. Drawing on three-year-long ethnographic research and in conversation with cultural studies, philosophy of technology, and postcolonial game studies, I revisit desiring machine and ideology, two major concepts from Games of Empire. My goal is to demonstrate the racialized and gendered discourses and practices behind game developers’ desire to produce cognitive capitalism’s “escapist” commodities and rethink ideology within white masculine production cultures. Foregrounding how racialized and gendered practices and imaginations inform the desire behind the global game industry is crucial, especially in the aftermath of Gamergate and the rise of authoritarianism.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.