Tech Won't Save Us - The Video Game Industry Needs Unions w/ Gita Jackson

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Gita Jackson to discuss the revelations of sexual harassment and discrimination at Activision Blizzard, how workers have organized in response to them, and what it all could mean for the future of the video games industry.Gita Jackson is a senior writer at Motherboard, Vice’s tech vertical. Follow Gita on Twitter at @xoxogossipgita.🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:In July, California’s fair employment department sued Activision Blizzard, revealing shocking interal details, including a “Cosby Suite” and harassing prospective workers at a job fair.In November, it was revealed that CEO Bobby Kotick knew about it and had settled harassment lawsuits. Afterward, workers walked out but the board stood behind Kotick.The heads of Playstation and Xbox released statements criticizing Activision Blizzard’s leadership.Workers are now passing around union cards under the name A Better ABK as the company sends anti-union statements. They have also set up a strike fund.The EA Spouse Letter was written in 2004.Gita wrote about Comic Book Workers United, the union seeking recognition at Image Comics.The Mandalorian used Unreal Engine to create virtual sets, and Unity just bought part of Weta Digital to expand its virtual production.Since recording, Vodeo Games has formed the first video game union in North America.Support the show

It just seems like finally there is some understanding of like the things that we love that we use in our times of leisure are also products of labor. So the people that make them need protections as well. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Gita Jackson. Gita is a staff writer at Motherboard, which is Vice's tech vertical, where they write about culture, film, and of course, the games industry. And that will be the focus of our conversation today. You might have noticed that Activision Blizzard, the maker of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and a number of major franchises has been in the news lately, not just because the new Call of Duty game was released last month. But since July, stories have been coming out about the treatment of workers at Activision Blizzard, and in particular, discrimination, and a general frat boy culture,

as the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing called it when they sued the company in July. Now, I'm not going to go into all the details in the introduction because we discussed that in the interview. And I will just say, you know, be ready for some pretty serious things that are being discussed because what has been going on at this company is absolutely outrageous and should not be happening at any workplace. Notably, in response to these revelations and to the information that the CEO of the company not only has known about this but has personally settled sexual harassment lawsuits, even after saying that he knew nothing about it when the original details came out in July, workers at the company have understandably not only walked out and begun

to organize, but recently launched a strike fund, began a strike, and are passing around union cards with one could imagine the goal of unionization with the Communication Workers of America. And just a side note that if you want to know more about what the Communication Workers of America are doing, I spoke with one of their organizers, Emma Kinema, back in December of last year on episode 39. So in our conversation, Gita and I discuss what these developments mean for the wider games industry and for the attempts at unionization in the industry. But even far beyond that, when we look at unionization in the comics industry, in visual effects, and even the ongoing fights in the film industry to get better conditions, despite the fact that film workers are unionized and have

been for quite a long time now. I think this is a really fantastic conversation. I was really happy to have Gita on the show, and I think it will give you a really good insight into what is going on at the games industry in this moment and where things might be going from here. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And if you want to find more about the other shows in the network, you can go to harbingermedianetwork.com. If you liked this episode, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share the episode on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. This episode of Tech Won't Save Us, like every episode, is free for everybody because listeners like you support the work that goes into making

it every single week. I can only have these critical and necessary conversations with people like Ida because of the support that you provide. So thank you for that. And if you're not a supporter right now and have always been meaning to, you can pause the show right now and go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can join patrons like Ed Sheer from Toronto and Carrie Ann Soufield-Eide from Oslo by becoming a monthly supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Gita, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hi, it's I'm so excited. So happy to be here. Yeah, I'm so excited to chat with you. You know, it's been a super long time coming. You know, obviously, I've been paying attention and reading your work for like a long time. So I'm super happy to finally chat with you.

And in particular about video games, and like all the shit that is going down in the video games industry in the past number of years, but especially right now with Activision Blizzard. So we're going to get into all of that stuff. But to get us started and to give the listeners, I guess, an introduction to the topic, you know, give them some background. What has been going on in recent years in the video games industry that makes it such an important thing to be paying attention to right now, you know, especially as it seems like we're having like reckonings with a lot of these social issues in society. But at the same time, we're seeing this wave of union organizing across the United States. So video games have been like a very fertile ground for organizing for a really long time, but they're notoriously difficult to organize. And workers in games have said that

that's a result of a couple of different things. But I feel like with the recent news about the company Activision Blizzard, who are behind games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, so some of the biggest games in the world, they have the second highest market cap of the publicly traded video game company. So they're also an extremely profitable company. It seems like it was finally at a tipping point. I first became aware of issues of labor in video games in like 2004 because of what's now known as the EA spouse letter, which is a letter from a wife of a worker at EA, Electronic Arts, who make games like The Sims, FIFA. They make all the sports games, basically.

They used to be great. And then their reputation as a company has fallen over the years. I love the Sims Maxis team. Those guys rock. But the EA spouse letter was just essentially, it's a really, really sad thing to read because it's just this document of this woman who's like, my husband took a job at EA. He thought it was a dream job. They would string him along, moving him from different studio to studio. He would be overworked. This has shattered my family. Our children can't stay in school long enough to make friends. And now they're very depressed. Holy shit. Yeah. It was like a very upsetting letter. Nixon and Reagan really did a number on like labor organizing and labor rights in this country. So at the time, the response was

more like, wow, it seems like EA is a very bad company. But over time, thanks to work from people like Jason Schreier, who I worked with at Kotaku, and like a multitude of other journalists like Patrick Klepek, who I currently work with at Waypoint, we've learned a lot more about how these conditions are not unusual. You know, this is a very typical arrangement to be on a contract for years and not ever given a full-time job, to be placed in incredibly precarious positions, you know, financially at the whim of these studios, to be forced to move fromarious positions, you know, financially at the whim of these studios to be forced to move from studio to studio, sometimes from country to country,

to work long hours. I think something that has gotten a lot of attention from lay people is the idea of crunch because crunch exists in other industries too. Crunch is when you're close to the end of a creative project. So for weeks, sometimes months, you will work overtime. It won't be phrased as mandatory, but it's essentially mandatory overtime.

So you'd have people working 60 to 80 hour weeks. And this is not at all unusual. While Activision Blizzard has been in the news recently, Rebecca Valentine at IGN just did a report about the working conditions at Destiny's Studio Bungie that also included some of these things. And on top of that, after the Me Too movement started, my colleagues at Kotaku did reporting into harassment and abuse in gaming companies. And we found that it's also incredibly rampant, especially like sexual harassment. So the reason why we're talking about Activision Blizzard now is because a year ago, they were sued by the state of California Department of Fair Housing and Labor for being a cesspit of harassment and abuse,

like up to the point that a Blizzard employee took her own life on a company trip because she was being harassed so badly. Like this is so, so, so far beyond the pale. And in part, because video games, like a lot of other creative industries, they rely on like, quote unquote, like worker passion. So people are very aware if they quit, there's hundreds of teenagers that are so willing to take their job, no matter how abusive it is. But also, you know, you get told that we're just like your family. It's like so many like so many other tech companies right it's the same strategy like oh we're your family oh you know you are so passionate about video games and that's our strength that you love video games so much

video games aren't gonna love you back unfortunately what the workers at blizzard right now are discovering is like video games don't love them back uh their c-suite doesn't love them back at all. And the only option they have left is to organize, which is incredible, but it's remarkable how long this journey really has been. Absolutely. And, you know, before we get into the specific like details of what's been going on at Activision Blizzard,

I want to go back to what you were saying there about the kind of worker passion and even back to, you know, that EA letter that you were talking about, where, you know, this wife effectively said, like, her husband thought that this was going to be his dream job. And then he found out, you know, exactly what it was like to work in this industry. Because, you know, I remember when I was, you know, a teenage boy playing video games, loving it. My dream was also to be a video game developer. Yeah, because it just seemed like amazing that your whole job could be to like make video games to seem so awesome.

Like, why wouldn't you want to do that? And I feel like, you know, I don't know if that has changed now in like the perceptions of younger people who are thinking about like, what the futures of their careers are going to be. But at the time, like the idea that there was crunch and, you know, harassment and stuff like that at video game companies was just something that would not have been something that I was aware of at all. And so it just seemed like naturally, like, this is just some amazing thing. Like, I can't believe this is even a job. And so clearly, this is something that the video game companies rely on to, as you say, keep that like stream of teenagers who will be ready to kind of come into the companies and then just like grind them down until they get thrown out and,

you know, have to find something else to do with their lives, you know, just constantly cycle in this labor, right? Yeah. I mean, you see this in some other labor industries that have been organizing also, right? So you see this in comic books, right? Like comic book workers, I've spoken to a few who say they got into the industry in sort of non-creative ways, like as accountants, as editors, as project managers. Like I got into the industry just because I wanted to support creative work, but I didn't realize that the amount of labor that would be put on my shoulders would be incredibly backbreaking. I spoke to a comic book worker who developed a

repetitive stress injury just from doing like the office work because she was forced to do two jobs, you know, like it's just literally breaking their bodies in order to get a comic book to the printer on time. It's pretty egregious, you know, these kinds of industries are so niche is one thing also, like people don't really report on them in earnest. In the 1970s, there were incredibly egregious labor abuses happening at Marvel Comics, especially in terms of how Stan Lee would treat some of his collaborators and take credit for their work. But it's not something that would make it into the newspaper in the same way that labor abuses at other companies work. You still see this anti-union talking point to other companies work, you still see this like

anti-union talking point of like, oh, you have a fun job. You know what? I do have a fun job. I like talking to people all day as a journalist, right? I like talking to people all day. I like looking up weird things. I like being able to allow people to share stories with me and then to write them and share them with the world. But that doesn't mean it's not a job. It is a job. I wake up when I don't want to wake up and I report to someone that is like, not my parent at all, you know, do things that they tell me to. And when I sit here and I type all day, like my body does take a physical toll, even though it's fun. You know, I think, especially in America, the idea that if you have a job that's

fun like that counts as the same thing as having protections but it totally does not like as we can see right now one thing that stands out to me as well though like you talk about comics which is I think largely ununionized I think I'm right in saying that video games which is largely ununionized at least in North America you, there are other countries where there are unions in video games. You know, we talk about visual effects workers, which I think are getting more and more focused recently, where there are, you know, very few unions among those workers. But then we also talk about film workers, where there are strong unions that have been in place for many decades, I think a century or more. But even there, we've seen recently that there are significant issues there still, even though the unions are

present, and these workers are still having to fight for, you know, the proper protections at work, you know, good working conditions, fair pay, things like that. But at least they have that union that can collectively represent them in those negotiations with employers or, you know, with in this case, you know, the group of studios so that it's easier for them to, you know, try to win those concessions instead of having to like one by one go to their manager and try to get better pay or something or like, you know, have to do walkouts because they have no other means to push back and try to exert their power, right? Yeah, you know, right now, there's this one union in comics,

they're about to vote, but they have a super majority. So I feel pretty confident that they're going to be recognized. But Comic Book Workers Unite is the union of the office workers at Image Comics, who hilariously is a company that was founded by people like Rob Liefeld and other very famous comic book writers and artists from DC and Marvel who were upset that they could not retain ownership of the characters that they created for these companies. So they went and they founded their own company that was incredibly successful. So, you know, Spawn is an Image Comics character and he's not as iconic as the rest of these things, but people know who Spawn is, you know?

Like he's still a perennial Halloween costume, essentially. And The Walking Dead as well, right? Yeah, The Walking Dead, yes. The Robert Kirkman, he even started his sub-studio, Boom Comics, at Image because it was so successful. And now that's like a television show as well. There's their own foibles in sort of being equitable to their colleagues in there. But if you look at this history, there's always been this push towards better conditions for workers. And now it's finally turning into people actually organizing.

So I know that Image Comics, they were inspired also by Paizu, which is a tabletop game company. They make tabletop RPGs. And they recently organized as well. And I know it's the Communication Workers of America that has been organizing both of these groups. And it just seems like finally there is some understanding of the things that we love that we use in our times of leisure are also products of labor. So the people that make them need protections as well. And it's not just the people who are sitting down and writing the funny comics. It's like the people who are taking care of all the schedules to make sure that everything goes to the printer on time. People who are doing marketing for your books and making sure that you are getting like ads in the right books and appearances

at different comic cons and all that stuff. Those people also need protections. There's so much work that goes into making whatever particular leisure product. I think when we're talking about like these jobs as fun jobs, we were specifically thinking how fun would it be to be like Ken Levine, who made Bioshock Infinite, the guy who just sits around thinking about cool ideas all day long. Or like how fun would it be to be John Romero, the creator of Doom? It would be incredibly fun to be John Romero.

He seems like he's always having a fun time. He really does. I interviewed Brenda once for her game Empire State, and I just saw John in the back of their house, walking past the office. I thought that she was doing an interview, and then closed the door. It was really cute. But I sat around thinking as a child, you know, playing Final Fantasy, like, I can't believe this game is like a work of magic. I can't believe like, it must be so incredible to be a person who makes video games. And I, I think what's remarkable is in talking to people who make video games, it still seems like amazing and incredible to make video games, the kinds of decisions they

have to make, you know, the kinds of weirdo narrative choices they end up doing. Like, it's so sad to learn that the writers at Bungie have such a hard time, because they're thinking like, it must be incredible to sit here writing out all these ridiculous lore stories about Savathun and all these weird proper noun people. But even fun things are jobs is what we have all discovered. And when you look at Activision Blizzard, you really see like, despite how fun that job can be, how abusive it can also be and how upsetting it must be to go to work every day in those conditions. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think it's time that we actually get into Activision Blizzard. But before we do that, you know, just to note that, you know, you've mentioned Bungie, but

there have also been issues at Riot Games that have been reported in recent years, Ubisoft, I believe BioWare as well. Like this is an industry-wide problem, but obviously, you know, we'll be focusing on one particular example here. And so I believe the information about the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, their lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, I think that came out in July. And so what did that reveal about what was going on at Activision Blizzard? So it revealed some pretty intense sexual harassment, like really, really beyond the

pale sexual harassment. Just off the top of my head, the kinds of things I remembered reading and just really being shocked was drunken cube crawls where male employees would go from cubicle to cubicle and drunkenly hit on all the women that worked in an apartment. You know, there's frequent reports of male superiors encouraging their female reports to sleep with them. Lots of people being pressured to drink alcohol. In specific, the California Department of Fair Housing and Labor also mentioned that these were much worse towards Black women. Black women in IT were also denied pay equity and were frequently judged more harshly in like employee reviews. And it took them a lot longer to go from contract workers to full time employees.

So there's also like a racial element here. But the sexual harassment was just really so extreme, like the woman who took her own life on the trip at Blizzard, like she had been sleeping with one of her superiors and he had been showing people pictures of her new body. And like, that was the thing that drove her to take her own life. Like the fact that it happened on a company trip, I just, sometimes I just wake up in the middle of the night and just think about how alone she must have felt

with absolutely no support. You know, you hear from all these workers that they can't go to HR, there's no one to report to. They feel incredibly alone, incredibly isolated, and a lot of them are pushed out of their jobs. And the suit was eventually settled for 18 million, but the suit itself seemed to really wake up and enliven. It gave Blizzard workers something to fight for and fight around because there's really concrete things that need to be changed at this company here. both by fans and enshrined in the games themselves, were personally responsible for trying to lure women to a hotel room that they called the Cosby Suite. And this actually led to one of the characters from the video game Overwatch having their name changed from McCree, which was, he was named Jesse McCree literally just after one of these guys. And his name is now Cole Cassidy.

He's like a small step, but it shows you how much the culture of harassment and abuse were ingrained in the companies themselves. I've heard lots of other stories about how some of these devs have really abused their power in terms of how they speak to fans and et cetera, et cetera. But it just seemed like what the suit itself painted a picture of was like, there are people at this company that really feel like working at Activision Blizzard gives them a free reign over the bodies of their employees. And it seemed like company employees were very aware of that. And they were incredibly frustrated that nothing had changed. So when that suit happened, I believe shortly after Activision Blizzard workers walked out. And that was the

first of what has become many walkouts and now is an ongoing strike at Activision Blizzard. So that is a pretty cool thing to result of it, but it's incredible. It's just an extreme amount of tragedy. You don't need to be like this to make a video game. That's my personal opinion. Yeah, you know, obviously, I couldn't agree more. And, you know, what you described there is just so completely shocking, like no one should have to deal with something like that. I want to talk more about the response of the workers. I also want to talk more about the revelations that came out about the CEO himself. But before we get to that, I just want to get to a few other points around those initial revelations. You mentioned the Cosby Room. Maybe

that should go without saying, but just for the listeners, that's a reference to Bill Cosby, who was slipping women, date rape drugs and raping them, actresses who wanted to come up in the industry. Just if that's not clear to the listeners, just to make that very clear. So it's shocking that there would be a room named after this man. They had a portrait also of him that they would hang in the room. And the lame excuse that they gave was like,

oh, our carpet had a pattern like a Cosby sweater. But at the time of this occurred, there were already rumors that had already been reported in places like Jezebel that Bill Cosby had been committing sexual assaults for multiple decades. So it doesn't pass muster for me. Yeah, no, completely. And just to note some of the other things that you mentioned, some of the things you didn't, you know, it was reported that men would be able to play video games while they were on the job, but women were not allowed and often had to provide

like really detailed accounts of their work days, what they were doing. So, you know, very clear discrimination there. They were held back from promotions, as you said, paid less. Women reported jokes about rape in the office, being groped by their coworkers. You know, obviously the sexual harassment, the discrimination that the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing called a frat boy culture. And then it was also revealed, you know, on top of the Cosby room later, videos resurfaced of things happening at events where women who were, I believe, fans or developers were not treated with respect and stories about recruiters harassing women when they approached to seek to join the company like at events or conferences or things like that. So, you know, it's just a very shocking level of,

you know, sexual harassment, discrimination that's going on at this company. And it kind of feels shocking that it took this long for something like this to actually come out about it. Well, part of it, I think, has to do with sort of where we are on the pendulum swing of culture. And another part of it has to do with the incredible amount of abuse and harassment that video game developers get just as a consequence of working in video games, completely unrelated to the labor conditions, right? Workers at Activision Blizzard receive daily harassment on the internet that is also racially and gender motivated. So if you look at the Starbucks union right now and the IATSE, the potential strike there and the

Wirecutter strike, those things were successful because they had a lot of buy-in from people outside of those companies being like, hell yeah, keep going. Wirecutter today just reached a deal for their contract, their first deal ever with New York Times. And they said part of the reason why this happened was because they did that five-day strike over the Black Friday weekend period. And also because people donated enough to their strike fund that they were able to do that strike and not completely deplete their bank accounts. So if you were facing harassment on the outside, and then also facing harassment on the inside, it's incredibly hard to create any kind of momentum around organizing in a really, really concentrated way. Those are fantastic points, right? Like,

it makes total sense. Like, this is a very hostile culture anyway. You know, we can get into that in a little bit. But you know, the can get into that in a little bit, but you know, the way that gamers can respond to developers and to anything that seems like it's trying to make a political point or, you know, make any kind of social progress, right? I did want to ask a specific question before we move further on the Activision Blizzard story. Did it seem like these allegations were confined to Blizzard and to the World of Warcraft team in particular? Or does it seem like this is a broader thing across the entirety of the company? Or is it hard to say?

It's hard to say for sure. Being a person who plays video games, I know a lot more about Blizzard because I do play Overwatch. I do have friends that are really, really into World of Warcraft. I myself got really into Starcraft 2 for a little bit. I know it's a dead game, but whatever. It's still good. And I'm very familiar with the architecture of that company and have spoken to developers there. Activision, Emmanuel Mayberg, my boss at Motherboard, loves Warzone, but I do not really play Call of Duty. It's so interesting. As a fan, you really learn a lot about how these companies operate just by being

a player. So I have no idea what developers are like in Call of Duty, what their work conditions are like, because I am not like on the Reddit and being like, why is this gun like this? And then a developer will be like, well, it's like this, you know, eventually. And I can learn a little bit about what their day to day might be like, or what kind of issues they think about in terms of how to develop these games. But I do know that a lot of these issues that are affecting the Blizzard side of the company, there's no reason why they wouldn't affect the Activision side as well. Especially the ongoing strike that's happening right now

is over laying off 20 contract QA workers, QAs with the testing phase of video games. QA is an incredibly important part of the process. You want to know why Cyberpunk 2077 was such a mess? It's because they didn't have enough time in QA. They couldn't catch all those bugs. Also, I think important to note a very low paid part of the industry as well. It's often seen as entry level, which is a real shame because video games are so dependent on QA in order to ship the product. Those are the people that need to be there through all steps of development to actually see if it's playable. Or if players will not figure out some weird exploit to completely destroy your video game. Which has also happened quite frequently.

One of my favorite little QA tidbits of Nintendo is for Super Mario Odyssey, QA testers would use the Mario's jump and like hat thing to jump to really high, weird places. And instead of like putting like barriers to keep players from going there, they would just hide secrets there instead. They're like, oh, that's neat. Like, didn't know you could get there.

Crazy, let's put a bunch of coins there. I think it's very cute. Love it. Yeah, right? Like it is really a shame that it's so undervalued. And the Activision Blizzard workers are really taking their... They said that they're striking for the 20 workers that were laid off,

and they will stop striking when they are turned into full-time employees instead of contract employees. So it's clear that the people who make games also value this very much. But when you're several steps above that, when you're in the C-suite, it can be difficult to see 20 QA workers as being essential to the process of making games when they actually super are. Just to add to what you're saying there, when I was younger, and I was really into Linehead Studios games, which is a whole other story, Peter Molyneux, you know, whatever, but I had some, yeah, I had some insight into what was going on there as well, because I knew people who work there just from the forums and shit like that. But you know,

and then also to say, you know, on Activision, okay, maybe we don't have as much reporting on what's going on there. But at the same time, you have to think like, with the politics of the Call of Duty games, maybe there's something weird going on there, too. But again, that's a whole other story as well. But you mentioned the C-suite, right? And the C-suite may be having a different perspective on things. At the time that the stories came out in July about the fair employment and housing suit, the CEO at the time acted like this was a surprise to him, that it was something that he didn't know very much about and was really committed to taking care of. But then I think it was in November, the Wall Street Journal reported that was not true at all. And the CEO,

Bobby Kotick, was not only aware, but even involved in this sexual harassment and had settled a number of suits himself. So tell us a little bit about what is going on with Bobby Kotick. So like two walkouts later, Wall Street Journal puts out this report that says essentially, not only did Bobby Kodak have personal knowledge of the harassment and abuse that occurred at Blizzard, which he had specifically denied to press into his board, that he hid this from the board. And he was also in some cases, a perpetrator of a hostile environment up to and including telling a former assistant on a voicemail that he would have her killed. So I don't know. I wouldn't want to work for that guy. That sounds like a bad job.

Yeah, really, though. Yeah, I don't. I don't think it's appropriate to threaten to kill people for not doing their assistant duties correctly. I'm pretty sure you can handle that shit yourself, Bobby. Grown man named Bobby. I just I the It's difficult to hide my lack of respect, and I decide that I won't. So shortly after the initial lawsuit from July, of course, the C-suite and the board denied all knowledge and were like, blah, blah, we stand behind our leadership, we're going to do better. And in particular, an email was sent out to staff that was signed by Fran Townsend, who was sort of a legal team, anti-labor, sort of

smoothing over kind of letter. And the staff immediately leaked it to press because they hated it so much because it denied all of their own complaints. And this Wall Street Journal report revealed that Bobby Kotick actually wrote that letter. He wrote it himself and pretended it was someone else. And then after employees were like, oh, we hate this. We are so upset. He was like, yeah, I think that letter was pretty tone deaf. Like you wrote it. My God. Oh my God. I know. Just stop. Like the reaction of the rest of the C-suite and the board has been incredibly perplexing to me in light of this. Because of course he had knowledge of all the abuses that happened at his company. It's his company, like a fish rock from the head.

That kind of attitude, treating your workers that way, that comes because other people saw an example that you made for them. But the board immediately released a statement after that Wall Street Journal report on how Bobby Kotick knew, saying that they stood behind him 100%. Workers started walking out that day. People called on the board to fire him that day. And it's perplexing to me. Me and my partner watched a Mad Money segment on CNN, mainstream news. Jim Cramer. Jim Cramer, yeah. We were like, well, I wonder what Jim Cramer has to say about Actualized Litter. And they just had a chart of the stock just in free fall, really had been lowering and lowering for over a six-month period and was still going down. And Jim Cramer was just sitting there just like, really like confused girl hours,

just like, I don't know why the board is standing behind Bobby Kotick. I just don't know why this is a very bizarre decision. And it's only become more bizarre, as this has turned into, like, I think, ironically, the legacy of a guy that's as caustic as Bobby Kotick, he's got a reputation in the video games industry already. As soon as this news came out, Seamus Blackley, who I follow on Twitter and is known as the father of the Xbox, he worked for Microsoft during their development of the Xbox. He just said, couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Wow! People are not shy. Tell me how you really feel.

Seriously. He already has a huge reputation for being a huge pain in the ass to deal with and a really upsetting, mean person. So it just doesn't make sense. I look at the board and it's like all these dinosaurs, people who have probably just known Bobby Kotick for an incredibly long period of time. But they're on the board for like LACMA. One of them's on the board for Common Sense Media. And you're saying that Bobby Kotick's behavior was like, okay, what? This company is losing money right now. The stock is like, I simply do not understand. Is it really that the threat of organization, like the threat of having a unionized workforce is so scary to them. It seems

like it must be, but the actions they've taken have led directly to this moment where union cards are being passed out at this company. And, you know, at the same time, you would think that if they were really concerned about organizing and unionization, replacing Kotick would probably be a better way to try to diffuse some of that anger, right? Rather than keeping him there when the workers clearly like do not like him. And even, you know, to go further than that, you mentioned like the person who was involved in the early days of the Xbox speaking out about it. But at the same time, the CEO of PlayStation and the head of Xbox also released statements like kind of saying like, this not acceptable and so like it's not like this

is something that nobody's talking about like really high up people in the industry that activision depends on to distribute its games are like we're looking into this this is not okay yeah playstation has a significant marketing partnership with activision for call of duty uh i have a ps5 and i can't turn it on without seeing advertisements for Call of Duty. I can't go to the store without seeing advertisements for Call of Duty. I mean, just think about every time you've been in a big box store,

something like a Target, you will see a display for Call of Duty, usually with just one of the console's versions of the game. And that's because they are interlinked with each other and they need each other in a lot of ways. Something I think people who are very invested in the world of video games have a hard time understanding is that most people in the world kind of buy one game, maybe two games a year and only play that. And for a lot of those people,

that is Call of Duty. It is a massive game. I personally, just in my personal life, referred it to as subsidizing the rest of the video games that those guys make. It makes truckloads of money. And video games take a lot of money to make. So if you wonder why sports games come out every year and they largely look the same, it's because EA is using those sports games to subsidize everything else they do. It seemed like to me on the day that the chief of Sony and the chief of Xbox, which rarely, you know, make any kinds of statements like this. They sent out these statements to all their staff. To me, that feels like that's just kind of begging for it to be leaked to press because internal communications like that, that say such interesting things, rarely don't get leaked to press, you know?

Yeah, they knew what was going to happen. They knew what was going to happen. And the message was very clear. It was Bobby Kotick, shut the fuck up. You know, like, I think the specific wording from PlayStation was we are reevaluating all aspects of our relationship, which is a threat from a pure, like a cynical, like an inhuman business perspective. There's really no reason for the board to stand behind Bobby Kotick.

And yet they are. It is really shocking, right? And as I was just saying with the organization question, it just seems like from every metric, you were talking about Jim Cramer, who does get it right every now and then, showing the stock falling. If the duty of the board and of the executive team is to deliver for shareholders, then they're not even like doing right by shareholders by keeping him on. And I know a number of shareholders have even

called for him to be removed as well for him to resign. But you know, so far, at least as we talk today, there's been no movement toward that. And, you know, this is over a month now, I believe this story has been out there. But as you mentioned, you know, workers have walked out over this, workers have been organizing about this, union cards were being handed out recently. So what is happening with the workers at Activision Blizzard? How are they responding to this? So when the initial lawsuit came out in July, from the state of California, a sort of workers advocate group started springing up that was communicating with journalists, but mostly being used to elevate the issues of Activision Blizzard workers

to outside the company so that they could get more support. It was called A Better ABK, Activision Blizzard. And at first, I really wondered whether or not this would lead to unionizing because we talked a little bit before the show about Game Workers Unite, which happened in 2018. It's a similar game labor advocacy group that never really blossomed into a widespread labor movement, unfortunately. But they did go to big industry events like Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and E3 in Los Angeles, which E3 stands for something. I just think of it as Electronic 3. I think that's what it is. I think you're right, actually. Yeah. Every year we go to the Electronic 3. I love it. See all the big advertisements for the new video games. The only year that I went, it was the Sonic and Mario Does the Olympics game, which womp womp, and they had a giant climbing wall on the floor. They saw it every day.

But Game Workers Unite, they were able to actually inform people of what a union is and what a union does, right? So that was, I think, the major benefit of this labor movement. Yeah, you know, as we saw with Game Workers Unite, you know, started around 2018, had, it seemed like it was having a moment in 2019. But then I believe it was in early 2020, that it kind of fell apart. And Communication Workers of America kind of pick up the torch, I think, you know, Emma Kinema, who was one of the co founders of Game Workers Unite is helping to lead the charge with Communication Workers of America's effort to organize tech and game workers. She was on the show last year telling us a little bit about that. But now, you know, in response to the details about

Bobby Kotick and the board's refusal to give him the boot, kick him out of the company, and actually, you know, take the action that is necessary on all the revelations that have come out over the past six months or so about this company. You know, as you mentioned, workers are forming this alliance. Workers have walked out. Workers have started a strike fund, which I checked last night is up to over $300,000 and are signing union cards.

So what does this tell us about potentially where this might be going? I think that we have a very, very good chance of actually seeing Activision Blizzard unionizing. And from there, I'm not actually sure what will happen. This would be in America, at least. You've mentioned that video game development happens in other countries, other countries have better protections for workers and have unions.

But in America, given how egregious the abuses are for workers in America, this would be a huge sea change for the entire industry. Earlier on the show, you mentioned that in the wake of reporting on Riot, which my former co-worker, Cecilia D'Anastasio, wrote a report about Riot for Kotaku, detailing some of the sexual harassment and labor abuses that go on there. There's also been reports about Ubisoft having incredibly egregious sexual harassment and sexual assault, like just straight up assault stories. Ethan Gack from Kotaku also really hit that beat incredibly hard. And EA has been known for years, like Bungie has been known for years, like all these companies have known, we've all known for years just how difficult it is.

It could really radically change the industry for the better. The reason why I think it's likely now, it just seems like all the conditions are right, right? Like there is a straightforward goal that they're trying to reach, right? Which is getting these workers rehired as full-time employees. And they have actually just begun their work stoppage. All studios everywhere, people are striking every single day instead of going to work. Their strike fund was able to raise $300,000. They have a goal of a million. I think they have a pretty good chance of reaching it, honestly. And this has been like a steady raise in escalation. It's really good organizing, you know, a very steady raise in escalation every single step of the way, starting off with just,

you know, letters, starting off with asks, starting off with one day walkouts, two day walkouts, leading into this ongoing strike. Another thing that really is helping the situation is that you see, unlike in other situations where people are just like, oh, you have a fun job, oh, you work in video games, they have a strong support from the fans. If you look at the strike fund, what's very interesting to me is you'll find a lot of people who are like, here's what I would have paid for my World of Warcraft description this month. I'd rather pay it directly to the developers. Here's what I would have paid for my Diablo 4 pre-order. I want to pay it to the developers instead. Let's talk about power of numbers. There's so many more Blizzard fans and workers of the company as well. If they can see

the abuses and they are on the side of the developers, developers are not going to feel as scared or nervous to sign those union cards and vote yes. You know, they're already sending out like very classic anti-union emails to the staff. You know, Brian Bulatau sent out an email to staff that was just like, you know, if you sign with your CWA, you lose the right to discuss your job with us. You know, it was like, well, at the very least now, the information about what a union is and does and who the union is made up of, the workers, is actually available to these people because of organizations like Game Workers Unite. We're also at a moment where unionization in other areas that we didn't think was possible is also happening right now with the Starbucks union.

More Starbucks shops have unionized today, which is just incredible news. And we're going to see the Amazon workers get another chance to vote on unionization because the National Labor Review Board found that, you know, Amazon did some stuff that was illegal, which surprising. Wow, how weird. Yeah. And you know, it's not the topic of this conversation, but it's hard to imagine that after seeing what happened in Illinois with the tornado, that that won't force more Amazon workers to look at unionization because that is just ridiculous. Yeah. When you're basically having multiple triangle shirtwaist fires on one day, I feel like workers will then understand how severe the actions are. What I've seen from Activision Blizzard workers on Twitter is just like, they are at the end of the rope. Like they've tried every single avenue that Blizzard have offered for them to try to make

the conditions of their work better. And none of them have worked. They need collective bargaining. It's not like a want anymore. They need it. What you're saying is really important. And one of the things that I was interested in, you know, you're talking about the fans, the support from the fans, which is incredibly important. We were talking earlier about how there is still kind of an abusive aspect to the fandom and a certain part of the curious to what degree that, you know, kind of movement and and kind of the people who drove it are still a part of this kind of gamer community and the degree to which they are impacting the conversation on these topics, or if the conversation and the community itself has kind of shifted over that time to the degree to which those kind of views are much more marginalized than they would have been five years ago.

One thing that Gamergate did is really make everyone aware of the level of abuse and harassment that occurs within the gaming industry from fans towards developers in particular. And I know that more and more developers have spoken out since Gamergate just about the level of public pressure they receive from fans that simply just don't know what they're talking about and are yelling at just anyone who is available to them. And a lot of the time, forces like Gamergate can also bring down a level of attention on individual workers that is completely inappropriate and is usually also racially or gender motivated. I'm thinking in particular of Jennifer Helper, who was a writer at Bioware, who simply said, I really love writing on Bioware games. I wish there was a mode where I didn't have to do all the fighting and I could

just read all the dialogue, which I think a lot of people who have played Bioware games have actually thought because Dragon Age's combat is fine. There's simply nothing to write home about in Dragon Age combat. You are not playing the game for the combat. You're playing it to have sex with the Iron Bull, which I've done multiple times. I replayed the Mass Effect trilogy recently as well. Also Bioware. And you know, like what I find important is that is like the stories and the relationships between the characters, not like, you know, shooting the gun at various geth and other enemies all the time. Like,

you know, I couldn't be bothered if that was like removed from the game or much more like marginalized. I play games on easy mode. So like the fighting is easy, and I can just get to the next part of the story. I've played Dragon Age Inquisition multiple times, because it's just like it for a time was just sort of like, I'm very depressed. And this is the only thing I can even just think brings me joy at all. So I would put it on easy mode and then just like, it for a time was just sort of like, I'm very depressed. It's the only thing I can even just think brings me joy at all. So I would put it on easy mode and then just like press A essentially during all the combat sequences. And I'd be like, okay, let's get going. Wrap it up.

We got to go. I just want to see the next bit of dialogue. Let's go. But yeah, she was harassed to the point of having to leave the industry for saying that. And people that were in the Gamergate movement had convinced themselves that they were actually on the side of the developers, protecting them from the evil left wing journalists who wanted to create scandal, you know, and tell lies about stuff. But when you talk to those people, they will be nominally against things like crunch, and they will be nominally against things like, you know like major workplace abuses,

like anything that anyone understands that makes a job much harder to do. But when it comes to talking to them about organizing, they only look at it from the perspective of the consumer. So it's very interesting to look at what the legacy of this is because there is still within the fandom of video games this idea that the consumer's word is law, the consumer is the most important person in this process. But that belies the sort of baseline belief here is that games are not like an artistic practice. They're just a complete corporate product and they should be delivered regularly every single year, the same exact thing, because I need to play my

Assassin's Creed mommy. Like, sorry, It doesn't take labor organizing into account because it doesn't see labor as a part of this operation whatsoever. I think that this general hostility in the air has made it a lot harder for developers to actually talk about the issues of development on their games. Because a lot of the time, these games that have a lot of bugs that are developers trying to reach out to fans to explain why the game is in the state, that is a result of like bad project management and like a bad labor practice already. And if they were able to be more honest and just say like, hi, our manager sucks. We've all been crunching on this forever. And it's just that our manager sucks and crunches a bad way to get a project out. I don't know if you've ever worked past midnight, but every time I do it, I'm just

like, none of this makes sense. Like I might as well go to bed. The response often is like, why are you making excuses? You know, any kind of fandom mob becomes completely self centered and completely unable to see how there might be broader issues at play here. Yeah, it's really interesting, though, to hear how that has developed, I guess, or grown over the past few years, even though it is still, you know, very centered on narrow questions and ideas, how that has changed, you know, even though these people still exist, and will still, you know, freak out every time there's like, you know, a woman who's not scantily clad in a video game or some like ridiculous stuff like this. My favorite example was there is a minor change in one of the characters designed for this video game. I think it was it was a Japanese RPG. And I think it might have been this video

game is a crossover between Persona and Fire Emblem, whose name I completely forget. But it's a completely ridiculous game. It's like you're a pop star and you get magical powers also, which is, I mean, it's tight. And one of the people was like, look, you see, they censored her. They removed her vagina bones, referring to that little muscle line you get there. It's like, they removed your vagina bones. You're right. They did. You're right. Like, what do you even say? It's so frustrating because sometimes that voice can become louder than the ones that are trying to elevate real issues in terms of how these games are produced. It's like the same way that like Gamergate was able to latch on because it latched onto a core truth, which is that there are issues in game journalism.

There's tons of ethical issues in game journalism, tons of ethical issues in journalism as a whole. Like it's not a perfect industry. It's just not the problems that they were saying were the ones that were so important, which is that there's too many left wing people working in these industries. I would say very demonstrably that that's not true. Yeah, we could definitely push back against that assertion. That's for sure. You know, I think I want to end with this question. We've been talking a lot about what has been going on in the games industry, the evolution of, you know, the labor model, what workers have been doing in terms of organizing, but also the revelations

that have been coming out about, you know, these issues that are happening in the industry. And, you know, we talked about how across many industries, the lack of unionization is an issue, but also how workers are increasingly building power to push back on things. I was interested in, you know, a development that I'm seeing emerging over the past few years, where there seems to be an increasing merging between games and film as well, in particular, you know, the increasing use of CGI and things like this, you know, we can see in The Mandalorian, where it pioneered the use of this kind of sound stage that was a completely virtual environment using, I believe it was the Unity engine in that case. It might have been Unreal. But then whichever one they're using, the other one is being used by other productions now as well.

So there seems to be this development in this direction. And with the release of the new Matrix movie that is coming out soon, Unreal was pushing, you know, this big kind of virtual VR experience that is built to kind of show what the future of these technologies might do. So I wonder what you make of this kind of increasing coming together of games and film that we're seeing and what you think the implications of that might be. You know, in the case of the Matrix, actually, it's very funny that it's Unreal that's partnering with the Matrix because I remember back in the day, I just watched the Animatrix for a different podcast. I'm on Waypoint Radio if you wanted to listen to it. And we were noting that one of the segments, Final Flight of the Osiris, had the most in common with the Unreal 5 tech demo for The Matrix that's out now that's called The Matrix Awakens. The final fly of the Osiris is nominally like a narrative short that delivers some plot information

that should probably have definitely actually been in The Matrix Reloaded, but we won't get into that. And it's notable because it was animated by Square before they merged with Enix and became Square Enix. Square Enix needed to do that merger because they put in so much of their own money into developing an animation studio that would compete with Hollywood

and would make photorealistic animated films, starting with Final Fantasy, The Spirits with it. And that movie flopped hard, so hard. The last time this animation technology was used was final flight of the osiris for the end matrix but it does have the same essential effect watching it now now you look at the final flight of the osiris and while it's like really impressive animation it does give you like video game cut scene a little bit like the skeletons feel very floaty there's a before they figured out through practice like a lot of the things we need to know

about digital animation in order to make characters feel like they have real weight. But it's remarkable because it looks like a very recent video game cut scene. And when you look at the Unreal 5 tech demo, you can see some of the same things. They just want to show off. Like here, we can make cars with realistic reflections,

real-time reflections, right? We can make the fabric and hair, like-time reflections, right? We can make the fabric and hair, like pores no longer look so incredibly egregious on characters' faces. I remember reading, Patrick Klepek interviewed one of the people who worked on both The Matrix Awakens and The Matrix sequels. And he said that one of the things they couldn't do in the burly brawl was take Neo sunglasses off. They couldn't figure out eyes, how to make eyes look like they belong to a real human being. So you see the expansion of this technology and you see, you know, I read a really interesting

Twitter thread from developer Mike Bithell, who worked on really great games. Like he did the John Wick game, John Wick Hex, which I think is a really fun strategy game. And Thomas Was Alone, which is a very well-written puzzle game I like a lot. He's a super fun guy. He wrote a very interesting thread about how he looks at this as a game developer and sees its applications in video games in terms of how to create something that is similar to an asset shop, but also has higher quality assets that it can produce. But I look at it also and I'm just like, the reason why they're using movie stars to promote this clearly

is because they also want movie studios to use Unreal 5. You look at it and a lot of players are saying, I do not see the distinction between the real world and the virtual world a lot of the time. I can't tell what's real or not in this thing. And that's the desired result.

If you look at movies, you can really tell when people are shooting in a big empty green screen room, and they're just kind of throwing glowing orbs at each other. And that has become more and more common. Almost every Marvel movie turns into a story about people throwing glowing orbs at each other in a big dark room. And I mean, I think you're 100% right. And I think that much has been made about VFX workers not being organized in comparison to the rest of Hollywood. And it's hard not to see it as especially because of the kinds of players who are taking advantage of these video game tools, like especially Disney and Marvel Studios, as a cost cutting measure in terms of not having to pay for organized labor. So I can only see, to bring us back around to unionizing, I can only see video game workers unionizing as a very good sign for VFX workers too. Like there's so much crossover in that space that I'm sure the people who work in VFX

will see that Activision Blizzard can unionize and so should they and so can they. I completely agree with the importance that you're talking about there, right? Of ensuring that these workers are unionized to kind of push back against the effort to shift this kind of production to ununionized workers versus, you know, the usual union, like set design workers and things like that, that you'd have on set. And, you know, just as you mentioned Disney there, just to, you know, remind listeners, Disney has a history of union busting, going back to trying to oppose the animators union, way, way back when under Walt Disney himself. So just something to keep in mind.

Gita, I have really enjoyed chatting with you today, learning more about what's going on in the video games industry, all of these important developments. And hopefully we're both hoping that we're finally going to see a video game union very soon. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. I had so much fun talking to you.

This was a really wonderful conversation. Yeah. Solidarity. I'm a proud union member myself. Solidarity with all the video game workers out there fighting for better treatment. Gita Jackson is a staff writer at Motherboard, Vices, Tech Vertical,

and you can follow them on Twitter at at xoxogossipgita. You can also follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at techwontsaveus. Techwontsaveus is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.