A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry by Ergin Bulut

A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry by Ergin Bulut

Author:Ergin Bulut [Bulut, Ergin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781501746536
Goodreads: 50208047
Publisher: ILR Press
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00


5

REPRODUCING TECHNOMASCULINITY

Spouses’ Classed Femininities and Domestic Labor

Right before the Christmas break in 2012, I was at Desire to interview Dan. It was a calm day. One could feel the holiday joy at the studio. Workers looked relaxed as they were enjoying snacks and beverages scattered around the studio. A white man in his early forties, Dan had started his career as a 3-D modeler in 1995. Around 2000, he joined a start-up where they had the budget for only three artists, which forced him to learn the roles of multiple positions. This ultimately turned Dan into a technical artist, his current role at Desire.

Dan was the only male in a family of four. He played a lot of games, whereas his wife was “not at all into video games.” He was trying to get his daughters into video games, and his wife was “kind of grudgingly” letting him do that. During our conversation, Dan told me that when he worked at the start-up company prior to Desire, his wife resented how Dan would go and “hang out at the fraternity house for eight to ten hours” while Jill, his wife, would “go do her accounting job every day” and make less money. Dan did acknowledge his wife’s point, saying, “From the outside looking in, I can see that, and we certainly did have fun.” But at the same time, he would respond to Jill’s criticism by proudly embracing the industry’s technomasculine ethos around “working in the trenches”: “Especially at the start-up company, we never missed the milestone; we never cut a feature. We worked our butts off at that little company.”

On the one hand, Dan was hearing Jill’s criticism regarding the technomasculine work environment in game development, which Jill likened to a “fraternity house.” On the other hand, neither Jill’s criticism about the gendered workplace culture nor Dan’s former mentor’s warning that he should do “absolutely no work” on Sundays and devote “his entire Sundays to the family” could help Dan put a clear boundary between work and life. Unfortunately, Dan confessed, he was “not there yet.”

Dan’s lack of presence at home brings us to the unequal politics of social reproduction outside the studio, because at the end of the day, somebody has to reproduce the laboring bodies of these “men in the trenches.” In the case of Desire, women perform unpaid labor in a variety of ways: cooking for both the partner and his colleagues, taking care of the kids when daddy is gone, or bringing cupcakes to the studio during crunch to cheer people up. These activities reduce the costs that would have otherwise been undertaken by the studio. Such activities also ideologically reproduce the heterosexual family. Perhaps most importantly, these reproductive activities normalize the technomasculine work ethic and discourses of passion in the video game industry.

Interrogating the politics of Dan’s “not being there yet” necessitates an understanding of how Dan’s and his colleagues’ passionate working lives are reproduced in the domestic space. To that end, I interviewed



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