Damn. 🔥🔥🔥 polygon.com/2018/10/17/179…
LOUDER. 
As I've been saying, the insistence that creatives also perform the function of customer service people is killing creativity.
Okay, so one thing this article doesn't really touch on, although it implies it (and that's not a criticism--I think it would have distracted from the point of the article and really is a whole discussion in itself) is gender. But let's start with some definitions/background.
Cross goes on after this to discuss the commodification of personality in gaming, but I want to talk about how gender plays directly into this.
So, the Pan-Am idea of "service with a smile" was, specifically, FEMALE service with a smile. Sexy stewardesses who would wait on you (the presumed male customer) hand and foot. This is sex work. Or at least, *imagined* sex work.
It may be more subtle than stripping, although there's still a sexy uniform, and it may not involve actual physical intimacy, but it is selling the fantasy of a compliant, eager-to-please, seductively servile woman.
In some ways, this is even more pointed among female waitstaff. bbc.com/news/uk-422520…
To be clear: I support people who *want* to do sex work. I support its legalization. But like anything else touching on sex, and sexualization, it needs to be consensual. That sort of performance--and labor--shouldn't be a requirement for your job merely because you're femme.
And for women in the game industry whose work is public-facing (which is, again, if not an explicit requirement for many game jobs, an implicit one), the sexual ownership players attempt to exert is fairly blatant.
It's common to get dick pics, players demand details about your relationship status, and sometimes your sex life, and they make frequent sexually-oriented comments toward you.
In other words, players demand that female game developers sell the fantasy of Online Girlfriend.
And most game studios are there, standing behind you with a bludgeon, to make sure you play into player fantasies of a compliant, happy to be flirted with, flattering, endlessly available woman.
And sometimes the implications aren't even subtle. At Paizo, every year at our pre-convention meeting, whenever someone asked about what to do if an attendee was harassing us, the answer was a vague, "oh, come talk to an executive." Ok, vague, but fine. EXCEPT...
...this was immediately followed up with, "try not to put yourself in a situation where you might get harassed. And remember, you're there to make sure the attendees have a good time."
Consider the implications of following up an employee's question about what to do if she's sexually harassed with "you're there to make sure the attendees have a good time."
Now, I don't want to minimize the impact, and the fundamental wrongness, of what's being demanded of game devs in general, regardless of gender. Or to imply that non-female/femme devs don't get sexually harassed. They do.
And it's wrong, full stop, to demand that male/masc devs, in addition to the creative and technical work that's what they're being paid for, perform the fantasy of Online Buddy for players.
But the world being what it is, when those demands are directed at femme devs, they generally have a sexually-oriented component as well. The demands for what feminine compliance and "service with a smile" looks like are different.
And we return to the article: what's demanded of game devs ultimately goes beyond Hochschild's paradigm of the service industry. You must perform delight and servility for your fellow employees, and when you go home at the end of the day, you must keep performing.
And if you perform successfully, your performance will be the evidence used to justify abuse. "Smile, if you want to keep your job." "See? She's smiling. She likes it."
"Oh, of course we don't MAKE anyone work 100-hour weeks. They do it because they are passionate." "These laid-off devs are DELIGHTED to come back as contract workers, without benefits, because they're passionate about seeing the game finished."
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
