This chapter follows the workers as they adapt to these changes and explores what their labor means to them at this transformative and crucial moment in their careers.Įxpanding on these changes in more detail, chapter 3 looks at the geographical impact of Desire’s acquisition and subsequent move into a larger space in its Midwestern city location. Desire’s acquisition by a large publishing company changed the structure and flow of labor done by the company’s workers, ultimately influencing the company’s culture, space, and morale. In chapter 2, Bulut begins to describe Desire’s specific circumstances that illustrate how the ludopolitical regime operates within an American game development company. These sections explain the ethnographic methodology used throughout the book provide a brief history of Desire (a pseudonym), the video game development company and define the ludopolitical regime and how it functions as a controlling structure for the video game industry on both a local and global scale. Bulut furthers this conversation by extending it into the actual creation of the games and the video game industry.īulut lays out a foundation-the structures, cultural practices, and history of the video game industry-in the book’s introduction and first chapter. Gray, Shira Chess, and Christopher Paul have noted as endemic to gamers and gaming culture. Ludopolitics sets “the political terms of who can play and enjoy work as opposed to those who have to work” 2 and maintains the inequalities of meritocracy that many other cultural game theorists such as Adrienne Shaw, Kishonna L. This regime is structured via uneven power relationships at multiple levels of the industry. Using a combination of feminist theory, Marxist theory, and critical political theory, Bulut’s analysis of the different factors that impact the video game industry’s cultural infrastructure illuminates how inequality and neoliberal understandings of labor are endemic to the process of video game creation.Įrgin Bulut’s ethnographic methodology and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks provide a unique insider perspective on how the video game industry functions and maintains itself through the ludopolitical regime that Bulut identifies. Using the overarching theme of labor as an act of love, Bulut examines the “ludopolitical regime” that structures the hierarchies and much of the decision-making within video game development companies.
Bulut explores how failure, meritocratic ideals, and inequalities between members of the gaming workforce contribute to the precariousness of the video game industry through perspectives such as finances, labor rationalization, and the use of space. Ergin Bulut takes aim at these potentially dangerous and complicated attitudes and behaviors that are deeply rooted in one of the most precarious media industries of our time.Ī Precarious Game lays out a three-year ethnographic study of a struggling yet successful video game development company as it navigates being purchased by a large game publisher, the resulting ramifications of the purchase, questionable financial decisions by the parent company, and the resulting bankruptcy and second purchase of the developer. The hip and glamorous life of designing, writing, or producing video games embraces the neoliberal rhetoric of “doing what you love” and promulgates the perspective that love and labor can work hand in hand.
As one of the world’s leading entertainment industries, video game production has attained the status as a cutting-edge, technology-driven, “cool” profession that thousands of people dream about joining.