Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781439922972)

Games are often a fun perk of a tech company job, and employees can "play to win" in the competition to succeed. But in studying "Behemoth" (a pseudonym for a top American tech company), Tongyu Wu discovered that gaming work culture was far more insidious.

Play to Submission shows how Behemoth's games undermined and manipulated workers. They lost their work-life balance and the constant competition made labor organizing difficult. Nonetheless, many workers embraced management's games as a chance to show off their "gamer" identities and create a workplace culture with privileged insiders and exiled outsiders, with female and migrant workers usually in the latter group. Moreover, Wu indicates this may be the future of work for high- and low-skilled and, creative workers in an environment where capitalists have heightened demands for technology and creativity.

Drawing from 13 months of ethnographic work, Wu presents a persistent reality in which the company reaps the reward of surplus productivity, leaving employees themselves in a highly competitive and sometimes precarious work position.

Author: Tongyu Wu
ISBN-10: 1439922977
ISBN-13: 9781439922972
Publisher: Temple University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/28/2024
Pages: 238
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d