Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm - Paperback
by Tongyu Wu (Author)
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.Tongyu Wu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University in China.
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