“You Can Sleep Here All Night”: Video Games and Labor
Exploitation in the video game industry provides a glimpse at how many of us may be working in years to come.
For being such a big deal, the video game industry isn’t treated very seriously.
Let’s not make any mistake here: the industry is a big deal. Globally, yearly sales rival or surpass those of the Hollywood. Entire cities are planning on making video games the cornerstones of their new economies. They’re played at least as much by adults as by children.
Yet there’s a dearth of rigorous coverage of the industry. The video game press, such as it is, remains mired in a culture of payola and ad revenue addiction, outside of a few outlets like Gamasutra. The one television station devoted to industry news, G4 (which has moved away from covering only video games), seemed committed to proving every gamer stereotype true, with an endless parade of uncritical corporate press releases punctuated only by sophomoric oral sex jokes.
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