Day 9/10 of the anti-racist #gamestudies thread series
Today, I want to discuss a text which helped me start to think about global nuances of racism & sexism in hardware production.
It's from the brilliant book Gaming Globally by Nina Huntemann.
link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9…
Today, I want to discuss a text which helped me start to think about global nuances of racism & sexism in hardware production.
It's from the brilliant book Gaming Globally by Nina Huntemann.
link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9…
This is chapter 2 entitled 'Women in Video Games: The Case of Hardware Production and Promotion'. Before I read this I thought 'women in games' are underrepresented. Turns out there are plenty of WIG but they are where we don't wanna see them: In hardware factories, on showfloors
And there is a reason we don't see them. Because we think of the games industry as a ‘weightless’ economy. Dynamic, knowledge-based, a laptop in the home office.
But there is much more weighty, material stuff going on for a significant portion of the games industry.
But there is much more weighty, material stuff going on for a significant portion of the games industry.
As a result, the ongoing manual labour in the games industry, esp. female workers become the “invisible servants of the new ‘weightless’ world” who have assembled all of our devices but are somehow erased from our collective awareness.
There's a geographical aspect in this erasure: “Today the digital economy relies as much, if not more, on bodies in the form of manual labor and service work. What has changed significantly is where the laboring body is located, both geographically and in the production network.”
Today, most of the hardware production work is located in developing economies and so-called ‘free trade zones’ in Asian-Pacific countries. 70% of EMS (electronic manufacturing services) happens in APAC countries like China. This has to do with trade liberalisation after WW2.
During the 80s, China created ‘special economic zones’ which liberalised markets and caused a mass migration of poor people looking for manufacturing jobs in the city
This had a massive impact on the lives of billions, mostly women, the main workers in e.g. Foxconn factories
This had a massive impact on the lives of billions, mostly women, the main workers in e.g. Foxconn factories
Because of the lax trading rules designed for efficient trade & uninterested in humans, most of these jobs are contract based and fluctuate according to the demands of original electronic manufacturers like Apple, Dell, or Sony. We’re talking stuff like 180 hours overtime a month
So “it is possible to awaken 8,000 workers living in factory dormitories to work 12-hour shifts in order to quickly meet a production goal of 10,000 units a day, as Apple did when the company decided to make a minor change in the shape of an iPhone screen”
for videogames... ...
for videogames... ...
What about the work itself? long periods of standing, repetitive motions, interaction with dangerous chemicals. There are low number of reported accidents but sometimes, you know, a factory just explodes because of the concentration of aluminium dust and lack of regulations.
Global dynamics of privileged consumer demands intensify these inhumane conditions.
Remember when PS3 wasn’t doing as well as predicted so publishers like EA pressured Sony to lower the retail costs of PS3?
That move directly harmed a number of hard-working ‘women in games’.
Remember when PS3 wasn’t doing as well as predicted so publishers like EA pressured Sony to lower the retail costs of PS3?
That move directly harmed a number of hard-working ‘women in games’.
The global gendering of crappy labor isn't reserved to manufacturing jobs. Huntemann discusses a western analogy in the form of highly sexualised promotional labour. (luckily, booth babe-dom is on the decline, but it's still interesting to see how recent of a phenomenon it is).
Promotional modelling is devalued as 'real' job through sexual assault on the show floor, including organised campaigns like EA’s 2009 ‘Sin to Win’ contest where visitors were encouraged to commit ‘acts of lust’ with promo models.
Huntemann draws a parallel between the two types of highly physical, precarious, and exhausting labour expected from ‘women in games’ globally. An interesting parallel is that both factory and promotional work involves lots of standing. But her comparison also reveals differences
While the author doesn't explicitly mention it, the comparison reveals a dimension of privilege between Global North/South. It's emotional labour of promoting hardware to lusty gamers versus working in hazardous conditions in potentially exploding factories.
But overall, what the discussion of these 2 jobs demonstrates is the relative precariousness of women in games compared to their male colleagues. Their jobs are more temporary, less paid, more physical, monotonous.
And in the end, they work for an assumed white male consumer.
And in the end, they work for an assumed white male consumer.
Forgot to shout out to the author @ninabeth 🙏🏻
continue to day 10:
