Currently viewing the tag: "Labor"
Playtesters play videogames that are unstable, unbalanced and riddled with broken code. Their labor is also unstable in that playtesters are frequently short-term contract workers, unpaid volunteers, or “family and friends.” And yet, from these unstable labor and play environments, testing is “the backbone of software development” (Petro Piaseckyj, Managing Producer, Sony). Playtesting is recommended as [...]
Illustration by Bryant Paul Johnson Born of a handful of events and revelations in the games industry over the past few month as well as new directions in my research, this brief post about ethical gaming is a provocation for gamers and game studies scholars. It begins in the virtual frontier of Red Dead Redemption [...]
On January 21 Sony announced the cast for its exclusive PlayStation Network reality TV series, The Tester. This latest addition to the reality-competition subgenre follows a familiar structure: Contestants compete through various challenges in order to land a sought-after and usually glamorous job (model, designer, chef, etc.). However, contestants on The Tester compete for a job in Sony’s [...]
While popular discourse about the role of women in games is usually limited to the hyper-sexualized portrayal of female avatars or how to lure women and girls to play, the latest controversy over working conditions at a major game development company is a rare public opportunity to consider the gender and class politics of the [...]
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