...

Well, kind of...

I’ve been fairly vocal about how the games industry as a whole, just doesn’t like poor people. Which made me sort of happy, when I saw this video by Samantha Greer.

However, something that has been bothering me for quite a bit and maybe it’s my own fault for looking at it too much, is how the video itself has been discussed.

There are two things that frustrate me, one is something that I can address fairly quickly, the other one takes a bit a longer, but let's talk about the video first:

The video itself is basically a very surface level look at how and in which ways having a lower income makes being part of the games industry rough, since a lot of access is gated via money. It uses the term “working class” for this and is very upfront about how it applies that term. Is that application ideal from a materialist/marxist perspective? No, and you can read this piece, if you want to know why. I have some issues with some parts of it, but I do agree with its argument why the application of the term in the video might not have been ideal.

The reactions towards this video have a lot to do with how it used the term working class, but also how, towards the end it kind of just gestures towards some solutions that sound very “more *insert minority* in games!”, which isn’t really anything.

So the main ways in which I saw the video being discussed on twitter was either the businessy people doing their “this is really important!!!!!” tweets, without really doing anything, while other folks brought out the theory and while making some valid arguments, also managed to make some (in my eyes) fairly reductionist takes about class association (no idea how to better phrase this, sorry!).

I wrote about this quite some time ago, but when you’re making games on your own, either as a small team, or a single developer, you’re technically not part of the labour force, and in regards to the relationship you have towards people you contract and all that, you have much more in common with the CEO of a larger game studio, than a mid-level programmer. However, since you are also in a very precarious situation, you’re much closer to the vast majority of lower income people, most of them being workers.

This puts you, as a small business owner into a weird conflict, where capitalism wants you to serve the interests of the capitalist class (extracting labour power from the available workforce to generate profit that you get to keep). However, most small businesses won’t ever benefit from pushing for these interests, since you’re getting outcompeted by larger companies. So you serve the interest of the ruling class, while constantly being pressured to become a worker yourself.

This is the situation every indie developer is in. I’m also in that situation, as much as I would like to deny it. But the moment I commission someone to work on my game, I become their boss. A weird, poor, disorganised boss, who would like for capitalism to not exist, but a boss nonetheless.

There’s also the fact that in order to legally sell stuff, you kind of have to turn yourself into a business, at least where I live. Public funding options for game developers also often require people to have a registered company. Publishers push for people to increase their scope, which in turn requires them to hire people, which then turns the developers into actual bosses.

If you try and refuse to engage with this, chances are high that whatever you make won’t ever earn you enough to get you out of your poverty hole, since your small single person game that has been developed on a miniscule budget, has to compete in a market that also has products in it, that have been made by companies that employ whole villages worth of developers.

So when you make games in a very tiny setting with a very tiny budget, are you a worker? No, you’re not.

Are you poor? Most likely yes.

Does being poor make it harder for you to keep existing in this space, because events and other parts of it just assume that everyone is a company who does company things? Also yes.

The tricky part here is that on a material level, me and my neighbour who works as a street cleaner have more in common, since we’re both poor. Same goes for a tech worker, who is employed at a company, but who earns roughly the same amount of money as someone who has a well going small to medium sized business.

However on a class level this stuff flips. The Street Cleaner and the Tech Worker have more in common and me and that CEO have more in common. Do I see myself as being similar to the jerky business person? No! Because my lived experience as someone who comes from a sort of middle-class (in the income sense) background, but has lived at or near the poverty line for almost the entirety of their adult life, is completely different.

And I think here is where that very strict marxist reading of the way the PMG video used the term “working class”, caused issues with people, myself included.

Boiling it down to “well if you make games as a small scale Indie, even on your own, you’re basically the same as a CEO”, feels a bit invalidating, when you just recently learned that your electricity bill will jump up by over 30% and that the welfare office once again wants to have a chat with you, since you still don’t have a job. A welfare office that, by the way, can take away up to 30% of whatever they pay you, if they deem your efforts to get said job to be “not enough”.

Now with all that being said, how do we go on from here?

Again, I really don’t like how a lot of the reactions towards this video was just the standard fare “oh this is an important issue, let’s all say how important it is, maybe invite one or two poor people to our events, or offer more mentoring and be done with it!” stuff.

However, I also don’t think breaking this down to “organised labour is the solution” helps either, since organised labour does not cover everyone who is being fucked over by capitalism. It’s an incredibly important part of it and I’ll throw shoes at anyone who argues against that. However, it also has a history of failing those that are marginalised through other means. On a more personal level, I also have an issue with this argument, since it can very easily further break down into a very simplistic “well, why don’t you just go and get a job!” type of thinking, which is just awful?

If you think about it, the problem with small businesses basically working against their own material interests, is because the promise they’re being sold is that if only they perform as well at Capitalism as those other Companies, they too can become somebody important.

Be a commercially successful game developer and you too can go to GDC and do talks that “inspire” people or that raise “important” issues.

This desire to be “somebody” isn’t even limited to the business side of things. One large issue you get in labour organising is that a lot of people think of themselves as future bosses and not as exploited workers. So they too work against their own interests, on the off chance that they might be one of the few lucky people to get ahead.

There’s a part about this Max Haiven’s book “Revenge Capitalism” (which I’m still reading) and in it he quotes extensively from this piece.

I particularly found this quote very interesting:

We have been sold many forms of “freeing” ourselves from oppressive conditions that necessarily pass through the process of becoming somebody—of achieving recognition or a place in the limelight. These are enticing forms precisely because so many women and others have been silenced in or erased from our collective consciousness and memory. But those places and lights are not only increasingly fleeting but largely circumscribed and proscribed by and for the system itself. Neoliberal capitalism offers no shortage of opportunities for individual recognition and self-promotion disguised as freedom, and in our current context the result is an abundance of “movement leaders” with social media presence but no community base and performative acts of “opposition” without practical consequence, both of which can be attention-grabbing in the immediate but lack the serious, sometimes tedious, ongoing and unrecognized processes of collective organization and personal sacrifice that by necessity constitute struggle. We think the Zapatistas are showing us a process of becoming, all together, nobody, of creating a largely invisible and mostly anonymous social power from below with a far more profound response to exploitation, dispossession, repression, and humiliation than the symbolic and select somebodies permitted by capitalist structures. In the EZLN’s words, “when the powerful refer to others, they disdainfully call them ‘nobody.’ But ‘nobody’ makes up the majority of the planet.”

In my eyes, Labour organising plays a very important role here, because it collects so many different people under one central term. However, as I said it cannot speak for everyone who’s being hurt and exploited by capitalism, since not everyone is a worker.

Which is why I think it’s still good that this video exists, despite its real shortcomings?

It’s funny how, while trying to work through what’s bothering me about all of this, I’m realising the incredibly contradictory position I’m myself in, but I think that applies to everyone? After all we’re all complicit in the perpetuation of Capitalism, as long we live in it.

Anyway, I just hope that folks who are in a similar situation as I am, don’t come off this whole discussion thinking “well I might run a business, but I’m also poor and therefore I can’t exploit people, since I’m technically not a boss”, or whatever. What I would like to happen instead, is that folks realise that there are countless ways how Capitalism hurts people and that you cannot ever escape it on your own, but with the help of everyone else who has been hurt by it, you might be able to destroy it instead.