Creating Spaces of Opportunity

Labor organizing and unionization efforts among videogame industry workers have gained significant momentum in recent years. Beginning with the SAG-AFTRA videogame voice actor strike of 2016-17 through the formation of the first industry-wide, direct join union for US and Canada-based videogame workers in 2025, this project documents, historicizes, and analyzes ongoing efforts to change the labor situation of the videogame industry. How did an industry previously characterized as “unorganizable” become a site of labor activism? In an industry where NDAs and worker precarity contribute to a culture where people feel unable to talk openly about workplace issues, public labor organizing campaigns create an avenue into learning about industry working conditions, namely where it is breaking down and no longer tenable for people to endure. This dissertation focuses on American game workers, but argues for understanding local, site-specific successes (and setbacks) in videogame labor organizing as a necessary precursor for industry-wide change. Smaller developers and independent studios, as well as low wage and contract workers may appear to be on the periphery of the videogame industry, but these groups wield a significant influence when effectively organized.

My research engages a multi-method approach as used by production studies and critical media industries scholarship. As such, this project interrelates different data sets such as original interviews, participant-observation, industry and union publications, videogame enthusiast press, online discourses, and political-economic data about the videogame industry, cross-checking the information gathered for critical analysis. However, rather than use this data to define the videogame industry as a set formation and its labor situation as inevitably deriving from that structure, this project engages with theoretical frameworks from cultural geography and anthropology to describe the contingencies of the videogame industry and its labor practices by considering workers’ lived experiences, such as navigating unpredictable or demanding schedules (i.e., "crunch time"), collaborating across siloed or distant groups of co-workers, and finding work and managing morale amid periods of mass layoffs. Critical theories of space and place allows for analyses of these workers' unique workspaces (i.e., remote work, open space offices, and proximity to entertainment and tech industries) and their sense of the videogame industry overall while still acknowledging the economic, political, and social infrastructures that shape their material conditions. Although videogame company operations are typically driven by financial and profit-related concerns, as well as executive and shareholder priorities, my project will emphasize how the material practices and embodied knowledge of videogame workers also constitute the industry and its practices in a consequential manner.