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169 How Did the Video Game Industry Get So Brutal for Workers? (w/ Dr. Johanna Weststar)
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Another day, another news story about studios laying off hundreds of video game developers. Why did this industry become so volatile? And what makes game devs so vulnerable to job insecurity, especially when the industry's profits have never been higher?
This week we're joined by Dr. Johanna Weststar, a professor of labor studies (and Stardew enthusiast!) at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She's the co-author of a new book, "Not all Fun and Games: Videogame Labour, Project-based Workplaces and the New Citizenship at Work," which dissects 15 years of employment data and trends to figure out why game development is so fraught, and how we can improve it.
There's so much more to the story besides "crunch." The explosion of temporary gig work, erosion of social safety nets, do-or-die publishing schedules, and struggles to unionize remote and disparate workers has lead to a reckoning in the games industry. But despite these challenges, we may be on the verge of a more secure work life for the people who make our favorite adventures — akin to the protections put in place for Hollywood when that industry was still young in the 1930s and 40s. What we do next, legally and culturally, will make all the difference.
Plus: How a blog from 2004 changed the Internet's perception of game dev, and your questions!
Find more of Johanna's work, publications, and how you can connect with her here: https://dan.uwo.ca/people/faculty/johanna_weststar.html
And her work with the International Game Developers Association (IGDA): https://igda.org/dss/
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