Just as a heads up, I like swinging by here to chat with folks in the aftermath of an article, for at least a day or two after. I'm dealing with a ruptured eardrum which has me mostly on the couch due to vertigo (as well as a touch fuzzy headed, so I don't want to write inelegantly), so I'll be a little scarcer this time.
@darth_navster: Thank you. St. John's article seemed particularly (shall we say) open about the philosophies here, but I don't think he's at all the only one. He's just willing to say it and even flaunt it. As is his right. Heck, I'd rather have it out in the open like that so people know where the lines are drawn.
But really, I don't want that to be the only takeaway. St. John's been pretty ably taken down more than one place. The main takeaway, if I have my druthers, is that the IGDA's members look at the fact that St. John was speaking at events as recently as 2010 (maybe more recently, but that's what I found) and they say, no, we don't need that here. I don't mean that in a censorious sort of way; St. John has a world to speak about how great crunch is. But the IGDA is not a neutral organization; it's an advocacy organization and, taking them at face value, there is no way that people who insist on crunch should be given platforms. I certainly wouldn't expect the Heritage Foundation to let me onto a panel on entrepreneurship and I don't really expect the IGDA should be doing the ideological flip of this.
So hopefully we get something constructive or at least a little clarity out of the IGDA on this issue.
@r3dt1d3: Almost all of them, oddly enough! There's SAG-AFTRA, as you mentioned. Writers Guild of America. Actors' Equity, which does stage acting. You can look at professional sports, if you want to stretch the definition of creative, or even teaching.
I'd also offer that perhaps games (and software, generally) aren't exactly creative only occupations. Games occupy a weird nebulous zone between artistic endeavor and industrial style work, where "industrial" should be read fairly broadly as something not strictly punching sheet metal in a factory. Some of the rote work done eg by QA resembles repetition in traditional blue collar work (I can speak from personal experience in both situations).
Not a bad read but it's certainly not without its bias. I'm curious if you plan to cover why people might not want to unionize. I'm not well versed enough beyond hearsay to make that argument, buy would appreciate hearing the other side.
That's out of my hands, obviously. I'd only offer that (imo) the standard, workaday world we're operating in now essentially already provides the counter-argument.
@kebrel: Some people have bad union stories. They exist and nobody serious about talking labor should ignore them. My counter to that is that they are, despite the warts, democratic organizations. You can vote new leadership. You can dissolve and reorganize, if it gets truly awful. You sometimes have to put up with a minor bad for a greater good.
So that's why I say that whatever a bad union may be today isn't necessarily the same tomorrow. I'm an optimist at heart, under a fair bit of irony; I truly do think that bad situations with democratic input can be made good.
@arbitrarywater: It wasn't the benchmark! Rather, it was a decent talking point for an intro. The catalyst is twofold:
1) This is a series and I'm (hopefully) going to do justice to the full panoply of cultural issues surrounding games and labor. One of the things I think we've missed out on (and I fully include myself in this pre-GB) is that it's such a big issue and the industry is starting from scratch on it that we just don't get the word count in the press to do it justice. So I'm covering a lot of bases and this very basic "this is what a union is, this is how we talk about them, this is maybe how we should talk about them" article is part of that comprehensive view.
2) I think pro-union people make a mistake that we just assume people know what a union is. It's really not complicated. But I think that ignores that the process of deunionization has left a fair number of people without a clear view of what they do or outright misconceptions about them. So I didn't want to assume that before we start talking about what a union might look like in the industry or how we've built a reserve army of labor in games through media which makes it tough to form one.
@conmulligan: I almost did but wasn't sure on which forum to do and I'm also wary of turning the email loose too much, if that makes sense. He doesn't seem to mind but I was worried on his behalf. I still may make a forum post.
@noblenerf: I'm not a fan of gamification most things. Keeping it brief, I think it places more and more onus on the individual worker, which then creates a pretty easily exploitable feedback cycle as you mention. I'll get into this just a bit in the next article, but a fundamental misunderstanding I think we have when we talk about getting "more" as workers is that there are power dynamics at play which we've slowly decided aren't important. Gamification of wages tend to reinforce the notion that the individual you can address those power imbalances between worker and boss by maintaining the status quo.
On unions being decades off: I don't see why that has to be the case. I think they feel further off than they practically are because we've simply decided as a culture that they can't be done. That's not to say that unionization is easy, but it is to say that I think we make relatively straightforward things seem impossible or decades off when they're not. Within living memory, we've seen nationalized health care in Europe, Social Security and unions in the Wild West capitalism of the US, etc. So given the enormity of those things happening in my grandparents' day, I don't see any reason why unionization in games would be decades off.
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