Fragmented industrial structure and fragmented resistance in Korea’s digital game industry

Abstract

This article is part of the special issue Creative Labor in East Asia. By exploring specific political, economic, and institutional conditions promoting actually existing precarity in Korean digital game labor, this study aims to examine how the industrial and institutional conditions of precarity affect digital game workers’ subjectivity. Under this theoretical and empirical consideration, the study first delineates how the rapid industrial transition to the mobile game market happens in relation to the Korean government’s deregulation policy on that particular market. It then scrutinizes the ways in which this industrial shift deepens labor precarity, promotes degradation of skills, and ultimately fragments workers in the digital game industry. Based on this structural analysis, it argues that the fragmented industrial structure of the digital game industry in Korea not only actually fosters contrasting labor subjectivities but also promotes fragmented resistances among Korean digital game workers. By critically evaluating both possibilities and limitations of the recent firm-centered union movements created by digital game workers, the study ultimately concludes that finding a way to connect organized unions to unorganized freelance workers is absolutely necessary to actually transform “precarity” into “solidarity.”

Politicising digital labour through the politics of body

“…Within this research scheme, the data for the study are extracted from two different sets of in-depth interviews. To begin, we re-used earlier (Kim and Lee, 2020) interview data with 22 digital game workers including six game designers, five artists, seven programmers, two project directors, one QA and one CS staff in different-sized digital game companies. Since these data focus on more general labour conditions and processes, we restructured the written-interview questions to focus on concrete work experiences – including work cycles and patterns, body/health conditions, frequency and experience of crunch mode in terms of emotional, physical and mental impacts, opinions about the nature of their work (its emotional, physical and mental characteristics) and thoughts and experiences relating to karoshi.…”

“…Since the 2010s, the game industry has rapidly shifted to a mobile platform – a transition negatively impacting the working and living conditions of digital game workers. The impetus for this change was expansion of mobile game consumption due to the spread of smartphones, the development of game production technology as well as the spread of free game engines (making producing mobile games much easier) and the strengthening of regulations on PC (personal computer) online games (Kim and Lee, 2020). With fierce competition in the mobile game industry around the world, the game production cycle has been shortened.…”

“…With fierce competition in the mobile game industry around the world, the game production cycle has been shortened. To survive the intensified competition with foreign countries such as China, Korean game companies have chosen a strategy of developing similar games with proven profitability over making original games – speeding up game production and updating them more frequently, with increasing costs for promotion/marketing, IP fees and platform fees conversely decrease workers’ wages and welfare costs (Kim and Lee, 2020).…”

“…Nonetheless, a number of researchers indicate that the main motivation for digital labour is related to emotional and affective pleasure, such as ‘fun’ (Bulut, 2020) and a ‘sense of creativity’ (Kim and Lee, 2020) in the work. Yet they also expose how emotional and affective pleasure can be degraded and transformed into pain under harsh labour conditions (Bulut, 2020; Kim and Lee, 2020). Here, the contradictory co-existence of emotional pleasure as well as pain is neither a purely mental experience nor totally separate from the digital worker’s body.…”

“…If we do not seriously consider the importance of the politics of body in this labour, it is difficult to understand how the key motivations for these workers – including emotional pleasure, self-realisation and creativity – are quickly disrupted and finally become bodily and mental pain. In fact, a number of studies report (Bulut, 2020; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009; Kim and Lee, 2020) that even digital labour in the ICT industry in the Global North is also known for notoriously long working hours (such as the 24/7 work culture in Silicon Valley and the crunch culture in Korea’s digital game industry and elsewhere), presenting not only psychological pressures but also physical suffering brought on by the constant energy required to handle increasing labour precarity. These practices are directly related to the control of digital workers’ bodies.…”