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All Work and No Play (2021)
Video games, like any creative product, reflect and refract the conditions of their production. Today, what they most resemble is twenty-first-century work.
Variations on the same trajectory occupy multiple chapters: employees crunch to finish a game; it ships; they celebrate; soon after, there’s an ominous meeting; everyone is fired; the gut-punched coworkers enjoy a funereal beer at a nearby bar, before heading home to update their resumes. In its most acute form, journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio writes, workers use “video games to perform the ghosts of [their] daily labors.” A long-haul trucker spends his week off grinding in American Truck Simulator; chefs leave their kitchens at midnight to play Cook, Serve, Delicious! Given that just seven years ago, the world of gaming convulsed in rebellion at the slightest effort to apply the lessons of feminism and anti-racism to the industry and its products, it’s encouraging that people like Schreier—who, with his former colleagues at Kotaku, was on the receiving end of some of Gamergate’s reactionary bile—continue to write and publish critical work like this.
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