Labor rights group for the video game industry
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6 episodes with Game Workers Unite
4 episodes with Game Workers Unite
3 episodes with Game Workers Unite
2 episodes with Game Workers Unite
2 episodes with Game Workers Unite
2 episodes with Game Workers Unite
3 episodes with Game Workers Unite
ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 144. Jessica Gonzalez stops by to talk about the labor of making games—and specifically, the vitally important, structurally maligned discipline of Quality Assurance—in the context of her work with ABetterABK, Game Workers Unite, and CODE-CWA. Building on our previous conversation with Emma Kinema here on the show, we discuss where game development … Continue reading "Democracy at Work, with Jessica Gonzalez"
Workers at a division of games conglomerate Activision Blizzard shocked the industry by becoming one of the first collective bargaining units in U.S. gaming. The post Belabored: Game Workers Unite and Win, with Emma Kinema appeared first on Dissent Magazine.
Link to Article: https://bit.ly/3uAz67XAn internal statement from Activision Blizzard on unionisation has been released online, seemingly persuading employees against the practice.From VP of QA Christian Arends, the message refers to employees' rights to discuss potential unionisation and answers some key questions.The message was shared online by former employee Jessica Gonzalez, one of the founding members of the ABetterABK employee group. "VP of QA at Activision just posted this shit in company slack LOL," she wrote.Arends begins by stressing that the company respects employees' rights to unionise.However, many of the answers he gives to questions relate to the negative impact of unionising for the company."A union doesn't do anything to help us produce world-class games, and the bargaining process is not typically quick, often reduces flexibility, and can be adversarial and lead to negative publicity," he said."All of this could hurt our ability to continue creating great games. While many union contracts include a 'just cause' provision and a grievance process, this is really just a different way to deal with disciplinary issues."On comparing bargaining with a union to a direct relationship with the company for individual employees, Arends explains that a direct relationship is quicker, whereas in a union it "often takes months or years to come to a collective bargaining agreement"."A unionised company cannot act quickly on its own if the union does not agree with its position," he said, noting "In both situations, the company remains free to disagree and maintain a different position."He also mentioned that employees don't have to vote for a union in an election if signed up, and encouraged employees to "perform [their] own research on the union".Support the show (https://bit.ly/2XdAlJC)
Welcome to the 49th episode of the First-Person Podcast. After being off for a month we are coming back strong for the beginning of a new semester to look at what has been going down in the videogame industry since we've been away. Oh boy! We are joined by Daniel Joseph from Game Workers Unite to have a look into the Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft mess that has been taking the academic spheres by storm. However, many people have already broken down the events for us so we will be looking at the game workers side of things in the industry for a more “positive” approach?
Another week on the Illumination and we're having a fish fry! We talk about the Martez Sisters arc and how it relates to the real world in so many unique and diverse ways. There's also a conversation on Mon Cala-Mari….We're not sorry. Come for the Martez Sisters, stay for the lawsuit and COVID coverage! Follow Us: Twitter: @SithtyMinutes @AAA_Photog @LooksJediToMe Instagram: @PaulaBear92 @RBW3000 @General_Leia_The_Pup Show Notes: Alcoholic THC! Cooking With Cannabis Mon Cala-Mari High Republic Wave 3, phase 1 Martez Sisters are the Soul of Star Wars ActivisionBlizzard Sued By California Full Complaint Zepla's Response Blizzard Bans Pro-HK Democracy Player Acitivision Fired their Call Of Duty team after it was a smash hit Game Workers Unite! COVID Spikes force Republicans to criticize the unvaccinated “Anti-Vax ‘myths' holding state back” -GOP Governor Red States Cutting Reporting Tools as Cases Skyrocket New CDC Guidance on Masks The January 6th Committee Hearing “Pelosi Republicans”
Bienvenidos al Episodio #10 del podcast de Vidas Infinitas. Esta semana contamos de nuevo con un invitado que nos hace mucha ilusión. Borja Pavón, también conocido como Kidcoltrane, creador de contenido en YouTube y autor de algunos de los doblajes más desternillantes que puedes encontrar por internet viene a compartir un programa que queda completamente impregnado por su humor. Con él compartiremos el contenido de nuestro programa, y seguro que te vas a divertir escuchándolo tanto como nosotros haciéndolo.Esta semana en el apartado de actualidad os hablamos de Outraiders, de su demo y de la decisión de sus creadores de castigar a los tamposos. Os contamos como Robert Kirkman ha puesto punto y final al comic de The Walking Dead sin apenas haberlo anunciado. También repasamos el tema del momento, el atasco que el buque Evergreen provocó en el canal de Suez y como eso puede afectar a los videojuegos. Hablamos también del anuncio de hasta 60 títulos en el evento de Xbox, comentamos el informe de Game Workers Unite en el que desvela lo que nos queda por trabajar para alcanzar la igualdad salarial en los videojuegos. Cerramos el apartado de actualidad recordando a nuestro compañero Omar Álvarez, entre otras cosas ex-PR de Nintendo, que tristemente nos ha dejado. Que la tierra le sea leve.En nuestro bloque central hablamos con Borja sobre como funciona la creación de contenido para canales como Twitch o YouTube, nos cuenta algunas curiosidades sobre el doblaje, sobre como se hace negocio en estas plataformas. La monetización, los copyrights y un montón de curiosidades y datos que seguro que te resultarán muy atractivos.En el apartado de series hablamos de Madres Forzosas. Otra de esas series que se apoya en la nostalgia para sorprendernos con su inesperada frescura que perdura a lo largo de los años.Para cerrar el episodio de hoy volvemos a traer unas cuantas recomendaciones hechas con todo el cariño de nuestra parte y también de la de Borja. Que las disfrutéis.No olvidéis seguirnos y compartir vuestros comentarios en nuestras redes sociales.Recomendaciones en este episodio:Manu: No Mans Sky, Baba is you, Orchard.Wako: Overcooked, Moving Out, La TripulaciónBorja: Viajeros de un mar de nubes (libro), Mundaun
Paris Marx is joined by Emma Kinema to discuss how workers are organizing in the video game and tech industries, the challenges faced by those workers, and the importance of organizing to improve workplaces, but also larger economic structures.Emma Kinema is a former tech and games worker who is a Campaign Lead with the Communications Workers of America on the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. She also co-founded Game Workers Unite. Follow Emma on Twitter as @EmmaKinema.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 and Passage at readpassage.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Emma spoke about labor organizing in the video games industry at XOXO Festival.Paris wrote about why game workers are organizing in Australia, Canada, and France.In January 2020, GDC’s State of Games Industry report found 54% of game workers thought they should unionize.Workers at Riot Games walked out in May 2019. Workers at Blizzard Entertainment walked out in October 2019. Workers at Lovestruck went on strike and got an average raised of 78%.Rockstar’s co-founder said there were 100-hour weeks ahead of Red Dead Redemption 2. Bioware workers said “depression and anxiety are an epidemic” within the company. CD Projekt Red said there wouldn’t be crunch on Cyberpunk 2077, then enforced it anyway.Support the show (https://patreon.com/techwontsaveus)
Roqayah is off this week, so Kumars is joined from the top of the hour by two veterans of arguably the first successful video game worker strike in history, writer Krissy Perez and returning guest Emma Kinema. Krissy is the most senior writer for Lovestruck, a mobile visual romance novel game distributed by the US subsidiary of Japanese developer Voltage Inc. and played by millions worldwide, and a member of Voltage Organized Workers (VOW). Emma Kinema is a former game developer, one of the founders of Game Workers Unite, and currently serves as Campaign Lead for the CODE-CWA, the Communications Workers of America's initiative to organize unions in the North American tech industry. Krissy gives listeners a lay of the land at Voltage USA, explaining how the Lovestruck writers’ famously prolific output has come at the cost of brutally tight deadlines and industry-low pay. The gang walks through a timeline of the VOW strike, which lasted 3 weeks and ended in a decisive win, securing the workers substantial pay raises among other concessions. Krissy and Emma reflect on the Voltage workers’ messaging making it clear that they are all members of marginalized genders and/or sexualities, and what worker power means to Lovestruck’s heavily female and queer fanbase. You can follow Krissy on Twitter @kepmakingwords, Emma @EmmaKinema, CODE @CODE_CWA and the Lovestruck writers @VOW_Together. If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!!
The last installment of our conversation with Emma Kinema of Game Workers Unite and Communications Workers of America. UW Voices: Mike C. Nelson, Rob Fitzgerald, Kevin AshworthUW Guest: Emma KinemaTopical Links: GWU, @GameWorkers, CWA, @CWAUnionRecorded February 25, 2020, at Southpaw Studios / ASG CastingSound Engineer: Shaan Sharma Sound Editing: Craig Welzbacher Executive Producer: Jack Levy jack@podcastsage.com / 818-233-0640Email us at info@unionworking.comUnionWorking.com
Part 2 of our conversation Emma Kinema of Game Workers Unite and now Communications Workers of America. UW Voices: Mike C. Nelson, Rob Fitzgerald, Kevin AshworthUW Guest: Emma KinemaTopical Links: GWU, @GameWorkers, CWA, @CWAUnionRecorded February 25, 2020, at Southpaw Studios / ASG CastingSound Engineer: Shaan Sharma Sound Editing: Craig Welzbacher Executive Producer: Jack Levy jack@podcastsage.com / 818-233-0640Email us at info@unionworking.comUnionWorking.com
UW sits down with the amazing Emma Kinema of Game Workers Unite and now Communications Workers of America. Gamers struggle for fair wages and working conditions. We talk organizing history, stats, and principles.UW Voices: Mike C. Nelson, Rob Fitzgerald, Kevin AshworthUW Guest: Emma KinemaTopical Links: GWU, @GameWorkers, CWA, @CWAUnionThis episode of the UnionWorking Podcast was recorded February 25, 2020, at Southpaw Studios / ASG Casting. A big thank you to Arlene Schuster-Goss (ASG Casting) & Justin Radley (Southpaw Studios)!Sound Engineer: Shaan Sharma Sound Editing: Craig Welzbacher Executive Producer: Jack Levy jack@podcastsage.com / 818-233-0640Email us at info@unionworking.comUnionWorking.com
Emma Kinema, organizer for CODE-CWA and co-founder of Game Workers Unite, joins Dylan for a wide-ranging discussion on organizing workplaces in games, tech, and beyond. We talk about organizing in […]
Emma Kinema, organizer for CODE-CWA and co-founder of Game Workers Unite, joins Dylan for a wide-ranging discussion on organizing workplaces in games, tech, and beyond. We talk about organizing in light of COVID-19, finding where workers draw power, the importance of solidarity, and challenging the old wives’ tales used to suppress worker wages. Got a question for the show? Join us on Discord or email us at contact@ward-games.com!
ETAO Podcast, Episode 76. Game Workers Unite is at the forefront of the effort to unionize the games industry—and according to Emma Kinema, the best way to do that is to treat it as an industry, organized under a single union rather than broken up by role or discipline. Why is that the way to … Continue reading "That Real Genuine Connection, with Emma Kinema"
2020 is interview season for the pod. This week we speak to Sagan Yee, who talks about their collaborative art and video game practice, their role in running the not for profit Hand Eye Society, and the relatively recent emergence of labour politics on to the video game making scene. Find Sagan here: http://www.saganyee.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaganYee Check out the Hand Eye Society: https://www.handeyesociety.com/ Or follow them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HandEyeSociety Artists and artworks mentioned in this podcast: Nadine Lessio: http://nadinelessio.com/ Hannah Epstein: https://www.han.ski/ Kenton de Jong’s ‘Regina Cemetery Tours’: https://reginacemeterytours.ca/ Kai Hutchence’s ‘Queen City Chaos’: http://www.queencitychaos.com/ Now Magazine article on housing costs an artist incomes: https://nowtoronto.com/lifestyle/real-estate/cost-of-living-in-toronto-2020-lowrates/ Art Stats report from TAC: https://torontoartsfoundation.org/tac/media/taf/Research/2019-TAF-Arts-Stats-booklet-FINAL-web.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0B1EivnD-FrlQPeAUcBfqGnpply5CJPYipoRmwEwBNAJ_FI9Vj8_Rytmg Mayworks’ ‘Unfeeling Capitalism’: https://www.nghtshfts.org/unfeeling-capitalism Game Workers Unite: https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ ‘Rockstar spouses’ controversy: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/rockstar-spouse-accuses-dev-of-pushing-its-employees-to-the-brink Find us elsewhere: http://spek.work/ https://www.instagram.com/spekwork/ http://twitter.com/spekwork
This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by Lana Polansky, a Montreal-based video game critic, designer and journalist whose writing has appeared on Vice, Paste, and Kill Screen, among other outlets. After charting her personal journey to the intersection of gaming and left-wing politics, Lana explains the experimental impulses behind the category of indie games, with the help of a series of essays for the digital arts and culture outlet Rhizome detailing how the concept of empathy has become a buzzword in the industry. Lana then gives listeners a lay of the land with respect to labor conditions for game workers and their efforts to organize, including her retrospective on Gamergate and the function of far-right cultural politics as worker suppression in a completely neoliberal industry, the new campaign by the Communications Workers of America in collaboration with Game Workers Unite to help unionize workers at game companies, and her own work with Game Curious Montreal, the “radical book club for games” bringing gaming enthusiasts together with local social justice organizers. You can follow Lana on Twitter @mechapoetic, tune in to her weekly Twitch streams at twitch.tv/mechapoetic, keep up with her independent work on her personal website sufficientlyhuman.com and her other other independent work at patreon.com/Lana Polansky. If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!
Haydn, Chris and Brendan are on hand to talk through some of the latest industry news, starting out with the messy story of Video Game Tax Relief in the UK. It was revealed earlier last week that global games companies had claimed millions upon millions in tax relief, sparking a debate about whether the scheme was working as intended. Meanwhile, Monument Valley developer Ustwo Games faced accusations of union busting after it allegedly fired key programmer Austin Kelmore over his involvement in Game Workers Unite. Finally, Sony announced a considerable price cut for its game streaming service PlayStation Now, and we discuss Sony's tendency to merely dabble with new toys, rather than commit wholeheartedly like rival Microsoft.
What’s up everyone! We have a bit of a special episode this week. A few weeks ago, Caleb and Ben had the opportunity to talk to Kevin Agwaze, Treasurer of Game Workers Unite UK. We wanted to go more in depth than we could on our Unionization episode, so we went straight to the source! Our conversation with Kevin was great, and covered anything from European laws that protect their workers, to what a game engine really is. There is a lot of value in this talk.We want to thank Kevin and Game Workers Unite for being so willing to talk to us. It was a blast. Enjoy!NOTE: Because Kevin is in the UK we had a few audio mishaps and drops, so please forgive some of the choppiness!News for the week:Spider-Man to Stay in MCUMedal of Honor Returns, In VRAre We Getting a New Batman Game?Jedi: Fallen Order Gets New TrailerLast of Us 2 Gets Release DateYou can listen to us below, or on iTunes , Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Play! So whether you have an Apple or Android device, we are available for streaming and download. Give us a rating and a subscribe, we would really appreciate it. You can also catch the episode on YOUTUBE!!!RSVP for the Twitch STL Fall Meetup!@LubWub@sketchsawyer@RebornRiderGame Workers Unite
This week Martha just got back from the XOXO Festival and Conference in Portland! She gives a run down of all the cool video game related content and what it was like to be there. Then Stephen talks all about Randomization and how you can use it to enhance or detract from your game. Stephen manipulates the RNG, Mark doesn't understand loot color coding, and Martha just wants to sort things. XOXO Festival 0:19:53 Martha MegarryEventsXOXO websitePIG (Portland Indie Game Squad)Rose City GamesSmallbü animationLater AlligatorBrian David Gilbert of Polygon's “Unraveled” video series about ridiculous vide…Here are the instructions and character sheets for calculating your pet's HPEmma Kinema of Game Workers UniteHundred Rabbits Randomization 0:52:05 Stephen McGregorGame Design Procedural generation episode "Mutual butt-kicking." Loot episode "There's loot in your DNA!"“If Your Office was an RPG” - Rooster Teeth
This week Martha just got back from the XOXO Festival and Conference in Portland! She gives a run down of all the cool video game related content and what it was like to be there. Then Stephen talks all about Randomization and how you can use it to enhance or detract from your game. Stephen manipulates the RNG, Mark doesn’t understand loot color coding, and Martha just wants to sort things. XOXO Festival 0:19:53 Martha Megarry Category Events XOXO website PIG (Portland Indie Game Squad) Rose City Games Smallbü animation Later Alligator Brian David Gilbert of Polygon’s “Unraveled” video series about ridiculous vide… Here are the instructions and character sheets for calculating your pet’s HP Emma Kinema of Game Workers Unite Hundred Rabbits Randomization 0:52:05 Stephen McGregor Category Game Design Procedural generation episode "Mutual butt-kicking." Loot episode "There's loot in your DNA!" “If Your Office was an RPG” - Rooster Teeth
IT’s that’s time again, yep, the Nerds are here with another fantastic episode of random pop culture news. So please ensure your seats are in the upright position and trays are folded away as we are expecting to experience turbulence. This week we are taking a look at Western Australia with Buck. Apparently NASA and the European Space Agency are spending time there in preparation for their upcoming missions to Mars. Apparently it is as close as you can get to Mars conditions without going there. Just with super spikey Spinnefex grass to poke holes in your clothes, body, and anything else you put near it. This stuff is more painful than a cactus. But the main reason why NASA and the ESA have scientist out here isn’t for an all-expenses paid holiday. No, they are here to work. What is that work, well it is the first topic so listen in.Next we hear about a bunch of dead beats who didn’t pay a kid for his hard work making an awesome game. That’s right, a gaming studio has actually shown themselves to be a bigger bunch of scumbags then a politician on the campaign trail. Apparently they only have a small number of employees though, so it was all just some misunderstanding. Wait a minute, hold on, Buck hit’s a sore point here and makes sense in regards to what the dirtbags are up to. Of course this is utterly outrageous, particularly if he is right; my goodness, if he is we’ll never hear the end of it. But if he is, oh the humanity, oh no, this is devastating. But if you want to know more of what I am rambling on about then you know what to do, that’s right, listen in.At the sound of Tinker Bell waving her magic wand please turn the page… ohh, um, wait a second, are you still here? Dang nabbit! Well in that case We have the DJ for you with a story about a new spin-off for the terminator. James Cameron has announced his plans to reboot the series and is planning to do so after he finishes the Avatar series. So it is a race to see what comes out first, the new reboot of Terminator or Star Con, um, Star Citizen… Well I think we will all be old, even the Rolling Stones won’t be touring anymore by then. Perhaps One Direction will be back together for a reunion tour…oh the humanity, the torture, please stop. On a better note check out our friends at “Off With The Fairies” another outstanding TNC podcast. After this we have the usual shout outs, remembrances, birthdays and special events. As always, stay say, look out for each other and stay hydrated.EPISODE NOTES:NASA and the Outback - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-01/nasa-in-western-australia-looking-for-clues-to-mars-mission/11452250Chucklefish no pay - https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/588619-starbound-dev-allegedly-worked-hundreds-hours-no-payTerminator trilogy - https://deadline.com/2019/08/terminator-dark-fate-james-cameron-on-re-wired-franchise-possible-new-trilogy-1202707063/Games currently playingBuck– Albion online - https://store.steampowered.com/app/761890/Albion_Online/Professor– Dicey Dungeons - https://store.steampowered.com/app/861540/Dicey_Dungeons/DJ- Dungeons and Dragons - https://dnd.wizards.com/Other topics discussedPilbara (large, dry, thinly populated region in the north of Western Australia. It is known for its Aboriginal peoples; its ancient landscapes; the red earth; its vast mineral deposits, in particular iron ore; and as a global biodiversity hotspot for subterranean fauna.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PilbaraSkylab crash into Australia- https://www.thebigsmoke.com.au/2018/05/28/the-small-town-middle-universe-skylab-crashed-australia/Snake on a coffee machine- https://au.news.yahoo.com/brisbane-uni-student-finds-snake-on-coffee-machine-053316494.htmlSilurian (a race of reptilian humanoids in the long-running Britishscience fiction television series Doctor Who.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_(Doctor_Who)Snakes on a Plane (2006 American actionthriller film starring Samuel L. Jackson)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_on_a_PlaneSpinifex (plant)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinifex_(plant)MARS Rover Lander Structure- https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/spacecraft/entry-descent-and-landing-configuration/lander-structure/MARS Rovers and their specifications- Rover - https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover/- Curiosity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_(rover)Riot Games Lawsuits- Sex Discrimination lawsuit – https://www.engadget.com/2019/08/23/riot-games-settles-class-action/- Pay dispute lawsuit - https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/riot-games-under-investigation-over-pay-discrimination-1203242044/Telltale games having crunch culture as a necessary evil- https://www.pcgamer.com/au/telltale-co-founder-crunch-was-necessary-to-keep-studio-afloat/Game Workers Unite- https://www.gameworkersunite.org/Defiant Development, game studio famous for Hand of Fate games shuts down- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-07-24-defiant-development-to-close-after-nine-yearsAvatar 2 (upcoming sci-fi film)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_2Star Citizen Squadron 42 (Game)- https://starcitizen.tools/Squadron_42Tim Miller (Movie Director famous for Deadpool, Terminator Dark Fate & Sonic Movie)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Miller_(director)Movie to TV series- Lethal Weapon (2016 TV series) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_Weapon_(TV_series)- Shooter (2016 TV series) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooter_(TV_series)The Orville (2017 science fiction comedy-drama television series created by and starring Seth MacFarlane)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_OrvilleLand of the Giants (1968 science fiction television series)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_GiantsTwilight Zone accident- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone_accidentDr Who (1963 Sci Fi TV series)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_WhoHow the Tardis sound effect was made- http://www.themindrobber.co.uk/tardis-sound-effects-materialisation.htmlWilliam Hartnell (First Doctor in Dr Who)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_HartnellRegeneration (biological ability exhibited by the Time Lords in Dr Who)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_(Doctor_Who)D100 dice- http://940ee6dce6677fa01d25-0f55c9129972ac85d6b1f4e703468e6b.r99.cf2.rackcdn.com/products/pictures/795485.jpgPierre de Coubertin medal (also known as the De Coubertin medal or the True Spirit of Sportsmanship medal)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Coubertin_medalJesse Owens (American track and field athlete and four-time gold medalist in the 1936 Olympic Games)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_OwensRecent Pierre de Coubertin medal winner : Han Meilin - Chinese artist most recognized today for his creation of the Fuwa dolls for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_MeilinBloodhound Gang – Why’s Everybody Pickin’ On Me- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaGKxAgCguUOff with The Fairies (TNC Podcast)- https://thatsnotcanon.com/offwiththefairiespodcastShoutouts1 Sept 1902 - A Trip to the Moon, considered one of the first science fiction films, was released in France on this day in 1902. The brainchild of French film pioneer Georges Méliès, the silent black-and-white film tells the story of an astronomer’s dream: a group of men travel to the moon by way of a giant cannon. - https://www.historychannel.com.au/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-science-fiction-film-released/2 Sept 1752 – Great Britain, along with its overseas colonies, adopts the Gregorian calendar. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_calendar#Great_Britain_and_its_colonies2 Sept 2019 - Max Sylvestermade a dramatic emergency landing when his instructor passed out mid-flight says his studies saved his life. It was Mr Sylvester's first lesson in the two-seater Cessna and his third lesson overall, and his wife and three young children were watching from the ground. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-02/emergency-plane-landing-pilot-credits-study-for-saving-him/114711404 Sept 2019 – 13 years since Steve Irwin died, Irwin's children, 21-year-old Bindi and 15-year-old Robert both work with their mother at Australia Zoo, continuing the effort's their father dedicated his life to. -https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/world/steve-irwin-remembered-by-family-on-13th-anniversary-of-deathRemembrances2 Sept 1973 – J.R.R Tolkien, English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, who is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit,The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Forbes ranked him the fifth top-earning "dead celebrity" in 2009. He died from a bleeding ulcer and a chest infection at the age of 81 in Bournemouth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien2 Sept 2005 - Bob Denver, American comedic actor, widely known for portraying Gilligan on the 1964-1967 television series Gilligan's Island and beatnikMaynard G. Krebs on the 1959–1963 series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. He died from pneumonia at the age of 70 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Denver2 Sept 1937 - Pierre De Coubertin, French educator and historian, founder of the International Olympic Committee, and its second President. He is known as the father of the modern Olympic Games. The Pierre de Coubertin medal (also known as the Coubertin medal or the True Spirit of Sportsmanship medal) is an award given by the International Olympic Committee to athletes who demonstrate the spirit of sportsmanship in the Olympic Games. He died from a heart attack at the age of 74 in Geneva - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_CoubertinFamous Birthdays2 Sept 1877 - Frederick Soddy, Englishradiochemist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements. His work and essays popularising the new understanding of radioactivity was the main inspiration for H. G. Wells'sThe World Set Free, which features atomic bombs dropped from biplanes in a war set many years in the future. Wells's novel is also known as The Last War and imagines a peaceful world emerging from the chaos. In Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt Soddy praises Wells’s The World Set Free. He also says that radioactive processes probably power the stars. He was born in Eastbourne,Sussex - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Soddy2 Sept 1936 - Andrew Grove, Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, author and a pioneer in the semiconductor industry. He escaped from Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 and moved to the United States where he finished his education. He was one of the founders and the CEO of Intel, helping transform the company into the world's largest manufacturer of semiconductors. As a result of his work at Intel, along with his books and professional articles, Grove had a considerable influence on electronics manufacturing industries worldwide. He has been called the "guy who drove the growth phase" of Silicon Valley. In 1997, Time magazine chose him as "Man of the Year", for being "the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and the innovative potential of microchips." He was born in Budapest - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove2 Sept 1966 - Salma Hayek, Mexican and American film actress and producer. She began her career in Mexico starring in the telenovelaTeresa and starred in the film El Callejón de los Milagros (Miracle Alley) for which she was nominated for an Ariel Award. In 1991, Hayek moved to Hollywood and came to prominence with roles in films such as Desperado, From Dusk till Dawn, Wild Wild West, and Dogma. Her breakthrough role was in the 2002 film Frida, as Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, for which she was nominated for Best Actress for the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award. This movie received widespread attention and was a critical and commercial success. Hayek's recent films include Grown Ups, Puss in Boots, Grown Ups 2,Tale of Tales and The Hitman's Bodyguard. She was born in Coatzacoalcos,Veracruz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salma_HayekEvents of interest2 Sept 1807 – The British Royal Navy bombards Copenhagen with fire bombs and phosphorus rockets to prevent Denmark from surrendering its fleet to Napoleon. - https://www.onthisday.com/events/date/18072 Sept 1946 – The Interim Government of India is formed, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru as Vice President with the powers of a Prime Minister. This government was entrusted the task of helping the transition of India and Pakistan from British rule to Independence as two separate nations. The Interim Government was in place till 15th August 1947, when the nations of Indian and Pakistan received Independence from colonial rule. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interim_Government_of_India2 Sept 1901 – Vice President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt utters the famous phrase, "Speak softly and carry a big stick" at the Minnesota State Fair. Roosevelt described his style of foreign policy as "the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1901_in_the_United_States#July%E2%80%93September4 Sept 1966 - The Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon was first aired to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). The Muscular Dystrophy Association was founded in 1950 with hopes of gaining the American public's interest. The show was hosted by comedian, actor, singer and filmmaker Jerry Lewis from its 1966 inception until 2010. The telethon would raise $2.45 billion for MDA from its inception through 2009. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jerry_Lewis_MDA_Labor_Day_TelethonIntroArtist – Goblins from MarsSong Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJFollow us onFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamatedSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrSiTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rssGeneral EnquiriesEmail - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.com
This week we discuss the Game Workers Unite initiative. The post #225 At What Cost? appeared first on Orbital Jigsaw.
In this very first Bonus Narrascope episode I speak to several Adventure game developers on the first day of the conference. Today we join 2 parents who attempt to colonise planets and raise their children at the same time, we play a mixed reality experience with Fly Jamerson, we discover about the work that Game Workers Unite do and how they help game developers and we investigate the death of a CEO!- Rachel Helps, Our Personal Space, Space to Grow Rachel Helps Twitter- Fly Jamerson, Time what day- Game Workers Unite- Gene Mocsy, Solve it: Death of a CEO, Haiku Games Adventure Games, Perils of Man, Duke Grabowski, Mighty Swashbuckler, A Vampyre Story, Ghost Pirates of Voojoo IslandNarrascopeIf you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more interviews with more adventure game developers then please subscribe, rate and review wherever you listen to podcasts.More details about this podcast here:www.adventuregamespodcast.comYou can find links to my social media links here:FacebookTwitterInstagramDiscordYou can also listen to this podcast on Itunes and Spotify and all other major Podcast Platforms!You can also find the RSS feed here:http://www.adventuregamespodcast.com/podcast?format=rssAdventure Game Podcasts logo by Jake Vest. You can check out his work here:https://jake.re/Music is Speedy Delta (ID 917) by Lobo Loco and can be found here:http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lobo_Loco/Welcome/Speedy_Delta_ID_917_1724
This is a clip from GduX.me, a three day free livestreaming event for Game developers. Emma Kinema joins us from Game Workers Unite to talk about the latest status of worker's rights and breaks down the misconception about unionization. For the video version, please visit https://youtu.be/G7RWveVbmt0 To watch future GDU episodes live, go to twitch.tv/blu_champs every Tuesdays at 11 AM PST This episode is brought to you by Quixel. Goto Quixel.com and enter code GDU10 for 10% off for the first year! Support us on Patreon to get episodes a week early, ad-free! Grab some Merch! Give us a rating on iTunes: apple.co/2IKxTmU
100-hour work weeks. Stress-induced breakdowns. "Visionary" bosses that treat you like machines. All of these things are currently part of the magical recipe that goes into making your favorite videogames.And guess what? This model is making videogames worse.But there's a simple way that everyone wins: gamers and workers... Okay, so maybe not everyone--the bosses won't view this as a win lol. By empowering workers with unions, we all get a videogame industry that avoids the current levels of abuse and burnout, while creating protections and space that will lead to greater power for workers to make the games they want to make.We speak with Kevin Agwaze, a game developer and organizer with Game Workers Unite UK to talk about the videogame industry and all the lovely things that a union can achieve.Learn more about Game Workers Unite here: https://www.gameworkersunite.org/Subscribe to Future Left Podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, TuneIn, and YouTube.Reading list:https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-video-game-union-movement-20190412-story.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/video-games-layoffs-union.htmlhttps://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/23/18507750/fortnite-work-crunch-epic-gameshttps://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2018/10/20/an-employee-speaks-out-about-working-conditions-at-rockstar-games/#48184cb2371bhttps://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17130056/telltale-games-developer-layoffs-toxic-video-game-industryhttps://kotaku.com/telltale-employees-left-stunned-by-company-closure-no-1829272139 https://qz.com/quartzy/1467237/video-game-companies-leave-much-more-than-just-money-on-the-table-if-they-lack-diversity/https://www.gameworkersunite.org/worker-co-op-resource
Mark (and special guest Dale!) got back from GDC on a red-eye flight, took a quick nap, then immediately joined Martha and Stephen in the clubhouse to recap the year's largest gathering of game creators.Nindies (Nintendo Indies) Showcase Spring 2019 - Nintendo, YouTube"Developer Is Making an Official Zelda Game" - Tom Marks, IGN Music from Eric Fullerton - Eric Fullerton MUSIC, YouTube GDC 2019 Sessions 0:08:06 Mark LaCroixEventsGDC on YouTube - YouTube#notGDC - notgdc.fungamedev.worldIndiepocalypse 14 v 18"Valve redesigns Steam game library, adding Steam Events" - Michael McWhertor, Polygon Dale Makes GDC Magic 0:25:17 Dale LaCroixEventsAmir's game about anxiety: @unboxedexperience - @unboxedexperience, TwitterKate Compton's “Illegal zines.” - @GalaxyKate, TwitterThe Full GWU @ GDC 2019 Schedule!Copenhagen Game Collective's "The Undie Game"Schell Games Unveils Virtual Reality Sword Fighting Game ‘Until You Fall' The MIX 2019 0:49:05 Mark LaCroixEventsUntitled Goose GameFalcon AgeAway: The Survival SeriesBeast PetsThe Sojourn Mark Does GDC Business 0:53:56 Mark LaCroixEventsGame Connection America "Developer/Publisher Relations (with Kongregate's August Brown)" Nice Games Club episode is a good episode to learn about meeting with a publisher Developer/Publisher Relations2019 Digital Media and Video Game Conference Game Workers Unite! 1:11:16 Mark LaCroixEvents"Tim Schafer Talks Unionization, Streaming, And The Future Of Double Fine" - Maddy Myers, Kotaku SplitscreenGame Workers Unite
Mark (and special guest Dale!) got back from GDC on a red-eye flight, took a quick nap, then immediately joined Martha and Stephen in the clubhouse to recap the year's largest gathering of game creators. Nindies (Nintendo Indies) Showcase Spring 2019 - Nintendo , YouTube "Developer Is Making an Official Zelda Game" - Tom Marks , IGN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWlmE51efA4 - Eric Fullerton MUSIC , YouTube GDC session recap 2019 0:08:06 Mark LaCroix Category Events GDC on YouTube - YouTube #notGDC - notgdc.fun gamedev.world Indiepocalypse 14 v 18 "Valve redesigns Steam game library, adding Steam Events" - Michael McWhertor , Polygon Dale makes GDC magic at GDC 2019 0:25:17 Dale LaCroix Category Events Amir’s game about anxiety: @unboxedexperience - @unboxedexperience , Twitter Kate Compton’s “Illegal zines.” - @GalaxyKate , Twitter The Full GWU @ GDC 2019 Schedule! Copenhagen Game Collective's "The Undie Game" Schell Games Unveils Virtual Reality Sword Fighting Game ‘Until You Fall’ The MIX 2019 0:49:05 Mark LaCroix Category Events Untitled Goose Game Falcon Age Away: The Survival Series Beast Pets The Sojourn Mark does business at GDC 2019 0:53:56 Mark LaCroix Category Events Game Connection America "Developer/Publisher Relations (with Kongregate’s August Brown)" Nice Games Club episode is a good episode to learn about meeting with a publisher Developer/Publisher Relations 2019 Digital Media and Video Game Conference Wrap-up/Game Workers Unite! at GDC 2019 1:11:16 Mark LaCroix Category Events "Tim Schafer Talks Unionization, Streaming, And The Future Of Double Fine" - Maddy Myers , Kotaku Splitscreen Game Workers Unite
Já faz um ano que as discussões em torno da sindicalização da indústria de jogos surgiu na GDC 2018. Durante o evento, a Game Workers Unite (GWU) foi formada e contando com diversos desenvolvedores insatisfeitos com as condições de trabalho, o movimento propôs a criação de sindicatos e trouxe a tona o debate sobre os diversos problemas que todo profissional dentro da indústria sofre. Alimentado por diversas denúncias de assédio, abuso sexual, longas jornadas de trabalho e demissões em massa como o recente caso da Activision/Blizzard, o assunto ganhou repercussão e já trouxe resultados com o primeiro sindicato sendo formado na Inglaterra. Como um movimento internacional, a GWU possui capítulos em diversos países, como no Brasil, com cada região se organizando e trazendo o debate para o foco. O Holodeck acredita na necessidade de melhorias na indústria e apoia a GWU. Logo, para divulgar a causa, recebemos André Asai, game designer e atualmente na Skullfish, a pesquisadora, game designer e co fundadora da JoyMasher Thais Weiller e Gilberto Ricci, programador e membro do Infoproletários. Teremos também, no final do programa, o audio enviado pela Marijam Didžgalvytė, a Presidente do Comitê de Comunicações da GWU International. Fica o aviso que o áudio é em inglês, mas você pode conferir as perguntas (tentarei transcrever e traduzir as respostas em breve) enviadas neste link. Lembramos também que a Game Workers Unite estará presente novamente na GDC, que ocorre de 18 a 22 de março, então fique por dentro do assunto e confira a agenda de eventos da GWU na GDC 2019 aqui. Tem alguma dúvida? Entre em contato conosco em contato@holodeckdesign.com.br Siga o Holodeck no Twitter, Instagram, YouTube e Facebook. COMENTADO NO EPISÓDIO E LINKS RELEVANTES: InfoproletáriosMatéria Kotaku sobre demissõesMatéria Waypoint sobre sindicalizaçãoMatéria do Henrique Antero na Vice sobre sindicalizaçãoGDC 2019Telegram Infoproletários Discord Glitch MundoGame Workers Unite INDICAÇÕES DO EPISÓDIO: Livro Trabalhadores e Sindicatos no Brasil - Marcelo Badaró MatosLivro O Que é Sindicalismo - Ricardo C. AntunesHBomberguy Artigo opinativo na Polygon sobre demissões Músicas: HOME – Above AllFoewi-Traffic
Unionizing game workers caught a major spark in discussion across the industry far and wide and has reached a fever pitch in recent months. Game Workers Unite is at the forefront of the movement and it is no doubt that this upcoming 2019 Game Developers Conference will be about Unionization in a huge way. To help lay out what developers can expect and also come to GDC prepared for, Emma from Game Workers Unite joins us this week to share their plans. This episode is brought to you by Quixel Megascans. Megascans is the definitive standardized content resource, with everything fully PBR calibrated, and all 3D scans consistently topologized, UV-mapped and LOD:ed. Because of this, it has already been adopted by all major AAA and VFX studios Goto megascans.se and enter code GDU10 for 10% off for the first year! Give us a rating on iTunes: apple.co/2IKxTmU
On this week's episode of The 1099, Game Workers Unite co-founder Emma Kinema joins Joseph to talk all about the struggle to unionize the video game industry. Why are so many studios laying off hundreds of workers without any severance packages? Why are so many studios overworking their employees? How could collective bargaining (AKA a union) help those employees stave off the financial, physical, or mental toll of working for exploitative studios? Games media is rife with accounts of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into our favorite games, but maybe it's time to cut back a little on all of those and give developers the security and freedom any modern American deserves from their full-time job. Question is: How do we get there? Game Workers Unite: https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ Emma Kinema: https://twitter.com/EmmaKinema Game Developers Conference: https://www.gdconf.com/ Joseph on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JosephKnoop 1099 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/the1099Podcast ZWBuckley: https://www.zwbuckley.com/
On this episode, Caitlin and Jess are joined by the incredible Emma from Game Workers Unite to talk about the org's first anniversary, dig into the next round of high-profile layoffs, and much more. Follow the crew! Caitlin: @CGRRRRRRRR Jessica: @jessacogs Monti: @threedsboy Support our guest: Twitter: @EmmaKinema Patreon Sources used in the show: Activision's CEO Made $28.6 Million Last Year, 306 Times The Median Activision Employee Activision-Blizzard Employees Brace For Massive Layoffs EA's Australian Studio Hit By Massive Layoffs Guild Wars 2 Developer ArenaNet Plans For Mass Layoffs Game Workers Unite Is Giving Gamers A Way To Fight Back Against Corporate Greed Game Workers Unite! Art for the show: @sorbetdraws Join the YGGP Discord server here! Check Out the YGGP Merch Store Here Find More Your Geeky Gal Pal Content Here
This week Adam talks to developers/advocates Emma and Steve (not their real names) from Game Workers Unite, an organization dedicated to advocating for workers' rights in the games industry. We discuss their experiences working under intense pressure, hear all about that terrible word "crunch," talk about the challenges of unionizing, and more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Σε αυτό το επεισόδιο οι δυο φωνές γίνονται τρεις αφού το κυρίως πιάτο είναι οι εξελίξεις στην Activision Blizzard οπότε τα λέμε και με τον Σταύρο Βέργο που έχει το «κουσούρι» να παρακολουθεί συγκεκριμένα την εταιρεία. Ύστερα έρχονται εντυπώσεις από Ηλία και Μάνο για τις πρόσφατες διοικητικές ανακατατάξεις στην Sony Interactive Enterainment αλλά και μια εκτενή συνέντευξη του Shawn Layden στο Game Informer. Για το τέλος μένουν οι εντυπώσεις από το Nintendo Direct της 13ης Φεβρουαρίου και η φυσική κατάληξη της θεωρίας περί remakes του Ηλία. Μπορείτε να επικοινωνείτε μαζί μας μέσω email. Social links Ηλίας Παππάς - Facebook Μάνος Βέζος - Facebook | Twitter | Instagram Ι Apple Music Σταύρος Βέργος - Facebook | Twitter Activision Blizzard Blizzard Axes 600 Employees, World of Warcraft Dev Team Not Affected Activision Blizzard Announced Fourght-Quarter And 2018 Financial Results Kiss My Ass, Activision Blizzard Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy shipments top 10 million Petition Created by Game Workers Unite to Fire Activision CEO Bobby Kotick Sony Interactive Entertainment Shawn Layden On PlayStation And The Future Sony's Shawn Layden says PS4 “open for business” on cross-play, but Wargroove developer says, “we were told no” Entertainment Software Association Acting Director Pushes Back Against WHO Gaming Disorder Classification New Management Structure of Sony Interactive Entertainment Nintendo Direct 13.02.2019 Nintendo Direct 13/02/2019: Ανακοινώσεις, trailers, παρατηρήσεις, σκέψεις
This week we're diving deep into game creation as Danny sits down to talk about design with Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers Please and Return of the Obra Dinn. iTunes Page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noclip/id1385062988 RSS Feed: http://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/rssGoogle Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/If7gz7uvqebg2qqlicxhay22qny Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5XYk92ubrXpvPVk1lin4VB?si=JRAcPnlvQ0-YJWU9XiW9pg Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/noclippodcast Watch our docs: https://youtube.com/noclipvideo Sub our new podcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHBlPhuCd1sDOdNANCwjrA Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.videoBecome a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyerFunded by 4,756 Patrons. -------------------------------------------------------------- - [Danny] Hello and welcome to Noclip, the podcast about people who play and make video games. Our guest this week is an independent developer responsible for 2013's political passport checker, Papers Please, and the recently released seafaring dither punk solve-'em-up Return of the Obra Dinn. Today he lives on the island nation of Japan which makes me even more grateful for his time today as it's currently 9:00 a.m. here in Maryland, which makes it around 11:00 p.m. in Tokyo. But if the conversation flows we should hopefully get him in bed before midnight. I'm delighted to be joined by Lucas Pope. Lucas, thank you so much for making the time today. - [Lucas] Yeah, thanks Danny, I'm happy to be here. - [Danny] Do you feel like you have sort of a less busy schedule these days? I mean, you finished up on Obra Dinn and then I'm guessing you then spent a lot of time sort of fixing bugs and what not, has it eased off a bit now? - [Lucas] Yeah, definitely, it was exactly that basically, where I released the game and spent a long time fixing stuff that was broken, more or less. And then that's cooled off a lot now. I mean, the work stuff has cooled off but I was sort of holding off so many other things in my life with family stuff and everything else that once even that work stuff was done, there was a huge stack of things I needed to take care of after that so most of that also was sort of out of the way so now I'm finally able to kinda cool down a little bit and take it easy. - [Danny] Now you're able to do your podcast backlog for the previous four and half years. - [Lucas] More or less yes, actually exactly that. - [Danny] How's the game backlog looking? Did you get much time to play stuff over the development of it or? It sounds like it's a lot of work making these games, especially on your own, so do you sort of like disconnect from mainstream game releases for awhile? - [Lucas] A little bit, yeah. On the things that I would normally play, yes. I was still playing things like Mario games with my kids and Switch games and stuff like that but on the stuff that I should be checking on, most of that, yeah, was just stuck in a pile somewhere and I'm kind of going through that now very slowly. - [Danny] Awesome, let's go back in time just a little bit before we sort of dive into the design of the two games that most people will know you from. I feel like if there was a Venn diagram of people we talk to on Noclip, the biggest one sort of section would be folks who worked on Quake mods and you apparently fall into that department as well. - [Lucas] Yeah, represent. - [Danny] Was that your first sort of foray into design, what did you work on? - [Lucas] I wouldn't say that, it was my first foray into 3D design and also where you could put a tiny bit of effort in and then see it in 3D was just mind blowing. So I had done like small sort of C64 games or HyperCard games or basic type in kinda things before that but Quake was the one where you could just open up a texture in an editor and draw a few things and then you could play it in the game in 3D. It was like the kinda stuff you would dream about with SJI work station kinda things or when you see N64 and just blown away by the fact that it's 3D, Quake was where you could edit that stuff in 3D which was just kind of a revelation for me and a big change from what I was doing before, which was just kinda 2D simpler expected things in '96 or whatever, by that time most of the other kinds of games were pretty mature 2D stuff so Quake was yeah, kinda mind blowing. And again, it wasn't just the texture stuff, it was everything, you could make models, you could do animation, you could write code, it had this really nice Quake C system. So it was just really the perfect thing for me at that moment in time, just to be able to do that kind of stuff easily and then get it right into the game and actually play it. - [Danny] What was the aspect of it that appealed to you back then because, you know, you seem to be the type of person who enjoys many facets of this type of work, was there an aspect of it that spoke to you in particular back then, was it programming or was it, did you just like, I don't know, making something that actually sort of existed as quickly as possible in that process. - [Lucas] Yeah, probably that last one. I started doing textures which was the easiest thing, you could just take one of the textures and there were tools right away that would convert to the, you know, some PNG or BMB that you could edit and then it would convert back to the Quake format. So that's what I started doing. I guess at that time I fancied myself an artist, although it really wasn't very good. You could be not that great and it'd still look okay 'cause it was transforming so much to put in 3D. So I started with textures and I was at the time actually studying compute science so it was kind of a natural slide right into the Quake C stuff and programming some of the logic when maybe our programmer had too much stuff to do or something on a couple of the mods we were working on and I decided to just like slip in and write some system or fuck around with the code a little bit. And once I was kinda in that position of being comfortable doing art and then programming I, I mean, I kinda realized this before that time but it was I was very comfortable, basically, doing lots of different stuff and sort of not killing myself on any one thing. Kind of trying to decide where I should spend my energy and what would be important in this case, would it be better looking or better behavior or better sounding, I kinda like that engineering challenge of allocating resources and it worked out for me because, not that I could all those things very well but I was at least interested in doing all those different disciplines when making a game. - [Danny] Right, and I can sort of appreciate how you ended up then working as an independent developer. What I'm kinda interested in then is what was it like working at Naughty Dog where I imagine you were probably pigeon holed into a specific type of work, right? - [Lucas] Sort of, Naughty Dog was really nice because when I started there I was the GUI tools guy, which means making the graphical tool for the designers to use or the artists to use or things like that, and that was not a popular position. - [Danny] Right. - [Lucas] So, maybe I was pigeon holed but my hole was huge and on the other side of that was a huge space for me to play around in 'cause nobody else was directing me at all basically. I could decide, okay, the designers need this kinda tool and I'm gonna make and then they're happy with it, great, they need these features, I'll do those too, that sorta thing. So for me Naughty Dog was very liberating because I had all that space and no one else was really telling me what to do, but at the same time I was working alongside just brilliant programmers and amazing artists and it's kind of a dream position basically because I needed to integrate really well but kinda on my own terms and it just worked out perfectly for me 'cause I could make these tools and then the designers and the artists could use them and I could see the final result and when you have that caliber of artist or that caliber of designer they could use anything and it'll look good so, you know, maybe it wasn't even my tools that were any good but at least I got the satisfaction of seeing the awesome stuff they were making with my tools, so it was perfect. - [Danny] When we talk to independent developers, sort of these days you're getting a lot more, I feel like graduates who are jumping straight into it but of a certain generation. Like for instance, I was just over with System Era in Seattle, they're working on Astroneer which is coming out this week, and a lot of that crew are ex-343 people. Do you think that having that sort of triple A experience is kind of like, was very important to your professional development or was it the type of thing that just, you know, even if you were learning independently you feel like you would've got to where you are now? - [Lucas] That's a good question, I think, I wouldn't generalize and say triple A but I would say specifically Naughty Dog taught me a lot about production and about kind of seeing what's important in your game as you're making it and using that to triage and to cut things and to really focus on what you have decided is important about your game, that was all critical. I think there's a slight danger in working in triple A, the quality of things that the artists and designers and sound guys and everybody and the programmers create is super super high and just the sort of production style in general is that you have very skilled people and you can give them difficult tasks and they will do a great job. And that, in my opinion, does not scale down to smaller studios, you kind of have to cut more corners, you have to rely more on your tools and your pipeline and you have to make more concessions to just produce the same amount of stuff and that's kind of, I mean, a snapshot of what I do is I try not to compete in that way. I consciously say, there's no way I can match the art skill of a Naughty Dog or a triple A studio so I'm gonna try to kinda leap, not leap frog, but I'm gonna just gonna go a completely different way and not compete on those same terms at all. So part of the challenge of making a game for me is finding that way to not compete and to make sure that the things that I create are not gonna be compared one for one against what a bigger, more resourceful studio can do. So I wouldn't say like working at Naughty Dog taught me that I can just do anything with the art, like the artists can make the most amazing things and the game is gonna be awesome for it. It was more about just the style of production that they had there taught me a lot about focus and real kind of, think about what the final result is gonna be, don't think about the components that make it up as much. I mean, the components are important but one problem I used to have as an engineer is that I would want the code to be perfect, I wanted the systems that I was designing to be elegant and to, if an engineer looked at them I wanted them to think, yeah man, that's pretty good code he's got there. But what I learned at Naughty Dog was none of that matters, what matters is what happens when the player puts the controller in their hand. And a lot of the times those two things are connected but a lot of times they're not and it's a difficult lesson to learn if you're strictly an engineer all the time, to sort of back off on your number one OCD skill. - [Danny] Right. - [Lucas] Actually, what's more important is that, even if this is kind of shitty code here, it works pretty much, I can predict how it works and I know that the end result will sorta be like this and that feels really good to the player so that was a good lesson too. - [Danny] Right, yeah, we'll get into the sort of, the economy of independent development in a second 'cause I'm very interested in talking to you about that, especially somebody who sort of works from home, myself as well. But first of all I guess, that initial leap to go your own way, to leave the collaborative workspace of Naughty Dog, where did that come from? - [Lucas] Well, it started before Naughty Dog actually because in college I was working on Quake mods with a couple of friends, international friends, we decided to start a company in Virginia, not far from you actually. - [Danny] Yeah, was it Richmond where you grew up, in that area? - Yeah, yeah, in Richmond. - Yeah, cool - [Lucas] We decided to start a company together and we were small, you know, four or five guys, and we were workin' on weird games, different games that we thought could sell. So that didn't work out in the end and I ended up going to LA to get real work where somebody could just pay me but in the back of my mind, even working at Naughty Dog or working in serious games, I had always kinda felt not out of place, but man I really wish I could be working on my own stuff. And when it came time for Uncharted 3 I basically thought, well, I have a bunch of ideas that I want to do, small games, experimental stuff that I can do by myself or with my wife, who's also a game programmer so I'm just gonna try to do that now instead of staying around for the next sequel or whatever, I'm gonna try to do that instead. So it wasn't so much that I was rejecting anything about Naughty Dog, it was just I was kind of pining for the old times when I had less responsibility but also not a small piece of a big picture but kind of the only piece of a very small picture. - [Danny] At that stage was there projects that you had sort of on the horizon, like on your mind's horizon that you wanted to do or is it more a case of just having that sort of process where you could, you know, set your own destination and work on things the way you wanted to? - [Lucas] Well at Naughty Dog on Uncharted 1 and Uncharted 2 was pretty crazy, it was a lot of work so I didn't have a lot of time to think about other stuff. I was totally occupied with those games while I was working on them but there was a time when we had shipped, I don't remember the date exactly, but there was a time when I had some free time, basically we had just shipped something or we were about to ship something, some big milestone had finished, and I wrote a game called Mightier with my wife and it was experimental kind of puzzle platformer game. That was a lot of fun and just working on that was kind of the culmination of an idea I had been thinking about for awhile and we made it and it was a lot of fun and we got nominated for the IGF and that kind of put a little seed, you know, planted a little seed that maybe I should start thinking about these sorts of games more. And that's kinda just what happened over the next year or whatever when I was still working at Naughty Dog, thinking, you know, I gotta couple ideas here and there but actually none of that was a reason to leave, it was more just that Uncharted 2 had shipped and if I'm gonna leave now is really the best time. I don't wanna start working on a new project and leave in the middle of that, if there's gonna be a sever it's gonna be now so. We hadn't really figured out what we're gonna do when we left our jobs until we left, we left and we kinda just played around with a bunch of ideas and then came up with Helsing's Fire. It wasn't, you know, oh man, I really wanna make a Helsing's Fire, I gotta leave Naughty Dog to do it, it was more, okay now what are we gonna do with it, we've left and we decided to try this independent games thing, let's try this, a couple different ideas, and okay let's do this one sort of thing. - [Danny] It's been fun diving back into your design history, especially on your website, you have a bunch of games on there, sort of Flash games that people can go play right now. And it's been fun I guess backwards charting maybe some design influence that came from those early projects too, but the game that most people sort of know you from, even now perhaps, is Papers Please, which is interesting because it's a game that's sort of the elevator pitch for, not necessarily something maybe that you'd imagine people would get very excited about but obviously, as game playing experience, it's incredibly compelling. What do you think it is about Papers Please that actually sort of cemented its place within the gaming zeitgeist when it came out in 2013? - [Lucas] Good question, if I knew I could sell it in a packet. I mean, I think, you know, if you ask me I would say it's very different from the other games that are available so if you in the off chance want a game about checking passports you gotta come to me, basically and that was kinda my theory about me making games alone is my only chance is really to make something you can't get somewhere else easily. So Papers Please was kind of that and it was, I didn't have visions of grandeur with that game, I was sort of making the game that I would wanna play as a kind of analytical kind of OCD-ish kind of details oriented person. And I tried to capture good gameplay and weave it with a narrative just kind of, you know, as I would want to be in a game I play so I didn't kind of think, I'm aiming for a zeitgeist here, I was thinking, okay, I need to make something different and these mechanics I have work pretty well for this kind of story and if I can put them together in an interesting way then I would like the way it turned out in the end and yeah, it's a little bit of luck I think as well. The timing kind of worked out with the explosion of streaming games or YouTube let's plays and sort of things where Papers Please I think works pretty well in that format because you can role play as the inspector and, you know, somebody who's playing that game can be funny and can be fun to watch when they play it and I think that lined up pretty well with just the timing of when I released the game, which is pure luck, you know, that's not something I had planned. Marketing wise I didn't do anything for that game that you would actually consider marketing so, you know, there wasn't a whole lot of clever planning on my part for that, I was really just trying to make a game that I thought I would enjoy and everything else sort of, you know, fell into place. - [Danny] You say that that wasn't a lot of sort of marketing done around it, but it did have a very strong trailer, like I still remember the music, you know, maybe it's just 'cause I'm a video guy or whatever but I remember it was very well cut to the music and compelling, did you work on that as well yourself? - [Lucas] Yeah, I made that too. So, one of the things about picking game ideas for me, when I sit down I collect, as I'm doing anything I'm always thinking, okay, that might make a cool game, and I'll just write down a quick note about it. And I sort of collect those over time and then the ones that stick in my mind the most I sort of focus on those more. So something like Papers Please or even Obra Dinn, when I'm even thinking about the idea I'm thinking, how could I express this in a trailer? If it can't imagine right now a cool trailer for this then it's probably not worth pursuing. And it's kind of part of the decision I think about making games is at the very beginning like that. So it's not the idea that I like this other game and I wanna make a game like that, only better, it's that I wanna make this game and I can sort of see all the way through how it's gonna be, how I can market it, in air quotes, or how I can talk about it or how I can think about it for, you know, a year or four and half years or whatever it will take to get it done. So the initial idea is very important to me. So something like Papers Please where it's a game about checking passports, I can already kind of imagine that it, you can have a trailer just showing the guy denying passports the whole time and it can be interesting, basically. - [Danny] Last week had Marijam Didzgalvyte on who works for Game Workers Unite and we were talking about politics and games and political games and we talked about Papers Please 'cause it was actually something she wrote an article about years ago. Sort of, she's Lithuanian and she was quite critical of it because she felt like wasn't political in the way that she was maybe expecting. Were you trying to make a political game or were you literally trying to make a game about checking passports and the sort of, the wider theme that's very well presented in the game sort of came from that, like what was the impetus of this? Was it meant to be political or was it something that you were just compelled with that sort of, you know, that OCD nature of checking passports at border sections? - [Lucas] Yeah, I never set out to make a political game and I think for me personally, I couldn't start with the message and then make a good game out of it. If you gave me an assignment and said make a game that projects this message I probably couldn't do it very well. It was really the core mechanics that I had that I felt, first I can make a fun game out of it, for me, I can make it where you're just checking, you're correlating information, that could be fun, the mechanics of that could be fun. And then I started working on the narrative and I wanted that kind of complexity of that lack of clarity 'cause a lot of politics is about lack of clarity in my opinion so I wanted to express sort of how, not both sides are equal but both sides believe in their cause fairly strongly and it's hard to present that in a movie or a book but when you have an interactive medium like games it becomes a lot more possible to put the player in the position where suddenly it's not so clear cut what they would do in the situation. And it wasn't until I had the mechanics and some idea about the narrative that that became important to me to express that. And I didn't wanna make it very clearly for one side or the other because, I don't know, to me the game is a lot more powerful when the player's kinda stuck in the middle there and they're not, they don't have enough information really to even decide who are the good guys and who are the really bad guys so to me that's like life, you don't ever really know the whole story of anything and you still have to make decisions, you still have to live and work that way. So, yeah, I did not start out with a message and an idea that I wanted to teach the player something, it was more, with the tools I had I recognized there was an interesting way to construct an interactive narrative here that the player could enjoy. - [Danny] And then obviously the game went onto great critical and commercial success as well, and I believe the only other time we've ever talked actually was I believe you received, was it the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the IGF that year? - [Lucas] Yeah. - [Danny] Gamespot had me backstage interviewing everyone coming off and we talked for probably about 30 seconds but obviously you know, then you know, you were well known within the industry and within the independent industry but then you became sort of infamous within the wider game player community. So what was it like then trying to make a second game? Because suddenly, you know, you've got a lot of eyes on you and there have been many creators who have created a game that has been very successful and then the pressures of having that follow up prove to be too much, how did you sort of deal with it and how did the concept for Obra Dinn sort of come out of that? - [Lucas] That whole follow up thing, sophomore effort, you know, it's not my sophomore game, I've made a lot of games so there wasn't as much pressure in that sense, the can I even do it, or can I even make a game, that was fine, there was a lot of pressure of about how to follow up with Papers Please. I spent a couple years worrying about that, and that's, you know, one of the reasons why Obra Dinn took so long, it took me a long time to get tired of worrying about that, more or less, which is what happened. You know, I stressed out about it for two or three years and then finally said, I just gotta finish this game. Not, fuck it, but very close to, fuck it, I gotta finish this game, more like, damn it, I've gotta finish this game. - [Danny] You got kids, you know, you gotta be careful. - [Lucas] Yeah well, that's a good point, I got kids and they're growing in front of my eyes and if I don't just finish this game then I can't sort of focus on them again. I wanted to put the game away and focus on the kids more so that was a good incentive. And that's enough, you know, having kids was actually really important for me because even if Obra Dinn sucked and was a huge failure my kids don't care, they don't even know about any of that stuff and so that support was always there, whether Obra Dinn was good or not, so that helped a lot and that took a couple years to even see because of just kind of Papers Please was a whirlwind for me and it wasn't until things cooled off and I'd been working on Obra Dinn for a long time that I realized that like, even if it sucks I'm just gonna finish it and release it. But the other thing is kind of the way I make games is I try to get a lot of pieces together that I think will make a good game without actually knowing exactly how the game is gonna turn out in the end and changing things along the way, maybe the way I envisioned the game originally is not how it ends up but what I envisioned was made of these parts and then I just reshuffled them along the way and added a few things and took away a few things and then I released the game. And Papers Please was like that, and Obra Dinn was like that too. So from very early I had pretty good confidence in the pieces I had for Obra Dinn. I wasn't confident that I could actually make a good game out of it but I thought the individual pieces, there's probably a good game here, maybe I can't find it but I feel like these elements could come together and could make a good game so it's worth working on the elements sort of independently without seeing exactly how they're gonna work together, just having kind of a little bit of faith that they're gonna go together okay. And that pulled me through, you know, a couple down periods over the years as well. - [Danny] I've read before about how Papers Please sort of came from, you know, your travels and going to border guards and having that experience and, you know, that the idea sort of springs from that. How about the Return of the Obra Dinn, where did you come up with the sort of overall concept? There's one game actually that's on your website dukope.com, the Sea Has No Claim which I've really enjoyed playing, which has some sort of both graphical and sort of thematic connections to Obra Dinn, is there any connective tissue there or where did the idea for Obra Dinn sort of stem from originally? - [Lucas] I mean, the project itself started with, I wanna make a one bit 3D game. So I didn't have the idea of the ship or anything, the murder mystery, the watch, the flashbacks, none of that, it was really, let me sit down and try to make a one bit 3D game. And once I started doing that I had a couple different ideas I could do with it, one of them was set in Egypt, one of them would be on a ship, one of them was somewhere else, a power plant, and just sort of thinking about having to do everything I thought, well the easiest thing is gonna be a ship 'cause it's a contained space so I kinda just decided, okay, it's gonna be a ship and then I started researching. And at the same time I was getting my chops down with Maya again, I'd used Maya a long time ago but I hadn't done a lot of 3D stuff recently so a lot of learning was happening on the tool side which meant less focus on what am I actually gonna do with this so by the time I realized the ship was gonna be a huge pain in the ass and a ton of work it was too late, I was already committed to it. So that kinda gave me the ship idea, and you're right that there's kind of vapors of Obra Dinn in my other games, there's another game called Six Degrees of Sabotage which is kind of where you're recognizing connections between groups of people, which also is thematically similar to Obra Dinn. I thought about this a little bit when I was giving, somebody asked me for some advice about their game and my advice kinda boiled down to add a lot more people to your game and so when that happened I realized that the way I think about narratives I guess and gameplay really falls back on just having lots of people, something about having a lot of people and characters and interactions, to me is mechanically provides a lot of opportunity and also gives me kinda motivation for building an interesting narrative. So Obra Dinn is just a ton of people, and like I said, I didn't know exactly how they were all gonna fit together but I kinda felt, if you gave me 60 people there's gotta be something I can do with that, there's gotta be some way I can put this together. It's kind of like establishing the problem space and then recognizing not the solution, but that okay, I seen the shape of that problem before and it looks really interesting, I wanna try to solve that. - [Danny] When you look back at that, you know, the manifest of all those names, those 60 people, is there any ones that stand out to you, that became like little favorites of yours? - [Lucas] Well, an interesting element of the game is that I did not attach the names to those characters until kind of late. I modeled them randomly, I just created a bunch of random characters, dressed them randomly as well and then named them randomly at the end, or near the end at least. But what I tried to do is I tried to make a lot of people kind of human, so not black or white or not clearly evil or clearly good, maybe there's one or two fully evil guys there but you know, they have motivations that maybe could be justified in some way. So one thing that surprised me is that when I created the characters and I kind of assigned their stories and wrote all the scripts and things like that, I was thinking very mechanically at the low level, so I need to sprinkle enough clues around that the player can figure out who they are, and also at the high level of what do these characters mean to each other and how are they interacting and who generally is on this side or on that side. And I wanted to show that on these ships that it's, first off, they're very dangerous, people die all the time, and so your survival depends on, to some extent, getting along with people. And you know, you spend a very long time in a very small space with these people and it just by the nature of it, you have to get along. If you don't get along then someone gets hurt or someone dies or they get off at the next stop or something like that so I wanted to express that in the game, I'd read a lot of literature about these ships before designing the story and the characters and things, and some of the characters, when the player meets them initially they look like bad guys and I wanted to sort of set that up where your first impression is that this guy is a murdering asshole but as you see them more and more you realize that they're human and they have friends who were killed or they were put in these difficult situations that sort of flipped the switch in them or just made them worry more about their survival than everyone else's survival or things like that so one of the good examples of that is this guy Brennan, Henry Brennan, who when you first meet him seems basically just like a tough guy who's bloodthirsty and wants to kill people but if you think about in the context of a ship and what people's duties are, he's not doing half bad, you know, maybe he's a little bit aggressive but you kinda need somebody like that on a ship or you need people to do that sort of thing in these situations when there's, I can't say these kinds of disasters 'cause it's pretty fantastic, but when there's that kind of trial, you know, these guys are not necessarily bad guys, they're just the ones who have a clear vision of what to do and if some people get hurt in the acts then kind of that's something they also calculated. So Brennan was one of those guys and what surprised me actually is my wife was the first person to play the game all the way through and the whole game didn't come together until maybe two months before release, to be actually be able to play from beginning to end. And she really liked Brennan which was kind of an indication that the kind of set up that I was going for worked because he, yeah, he's pretty, he kills a lot of people, basically. - [Danny] His face kind of keeps appearing. - [Lucas] Yeah, he's a pretty aggressive dude but he has qualities enough that my wife was, liked him, basically. - [Danny] That's awesome, yeah. You know, I encourage anyone who's played the game to Google Henry Brennan and once the face pops up you'll know exactly who we're talking about. One of the things that stood out to me as well as an Irish person who, you know, I lived in London for a number of years too, was the voice cast for this game was tremendous. And, you know, even outside of that I felt like I sort of had an unfair advantage in that, you know, accents were very cleverly delivered. There was one actual accent that was from the north of Ireland that I thought, oh, that must be somebody from Ireland, there's a character called Patrick O'Hagan in the game, I actually went to school with somebody called Patrick O'Hagan so, can you talk about the, I guess, the work in getting all of those voices? How much did you know about different voices in the British Isles and Europe I guess as well, and also abroad, there's quite a complex number of languages being used as well. How much work went into that and did it come easily to you or was it the type of thing that took a lot more work than you were expecting? - [Lucas] That's a good question, actually it's one of my favorite questions about Obra Dinn and it's good to talk to you about it 'cause you know these accents. I do not know any of these accents but I knew that they were important and one of things I like about making games is to pick something like that that is normally not important and make it important. So, normally when you hire a voice actor they can do lots of different accents and it would've been very easy for me to hire a few Americans to do all those accents and just call it a day, but I knew that, first off, I would be torn up in the UK because they would know they were all bad. - [Danny] Absolutely. - [Lucas] I personally have heard people, foreigners do bad southern US accents so I know that feeling when it's wrong and I didn't want anybody to have that feeling but I had made this sort of critical importance on the accents. And it's the same thing with the audio in the game, I wanted to make a game where, it's not just that I wanted a game with great audio, I wanted a game where the quality of the audio was actually critical to the, I mean, it's kind of making it hard for me but the quality of the audio is important to the actual mechanics of the game. So in this case the accents of the characters was important to the mechanics of the game. So I basically had to just find native voice actors for every case and because I don't know those accents myself I have friends who were there at least who could help me decide if they're, you know, if it's not somebody, if it's somebody doing a Welsh accent for instance, it's actually kinda tricky to find good Welsh actors easily. One of the things I didn't do was I didn't hire a casting agent to go out and do this for me, I basically just went to Voices.com or Voice123.com and talked with their casting people and they would do it but all of those actors there kinda skew for a certain region so some roles were hard to cast and like I said earlier, a lot of different people can do a lot of different accents so it's not that when you say you have an Irish character you may get lots of people who are not Irish auditioning for that. And in some cases I would use those guys if I could play that there audition for a native speaker and they could tell me, that dude sounds Irish, then okay, he's good. What was most important to me was the performance. If their performance sounded convincing I wanted to hire them for the role. Then I would send it to somebody who could recognize that accent and they would say it's good or it's bad. Hopefully they would say it's good and I could use that performance and that actor. Sometimes they would say it's bad and I would say, well, okay, I'm sorry, I have to find somebody else. In one case, it was bad, or it was not the accent that I wanted for the region that I wanted but the performance was so good that I changed the character to be a different region, basically. So he was supposed to be Welsh but he had a straight up English accent, RP maybe, and so I decided this guy is, for the purpose of this character, I need the performance to be very good and his performance was excellent so it's more important to get that than it is that his location is correct so I changed his location in the game. - [Danny] Yeah, and I guess then sort of how that reacts to the mechanics of the game in that, you know, I felt like I had an unfair advantage 'cause I could pick out a Welsh accent and a Scottish accent as opposed to say, a north English accent. But then also, there's a lot of sort of classism going on on a ship, right, so you have second mates and the captain and all them, you know, and the bosun sort of had a, they're a certain strata of English society, well I guess in the case of the bosun he's Austrian, but you know, you're talking sort of well to do private educated English people but then you also have like you know, all of the midshipmen who were from sort of more working class parts of England. So, like, how did you account for the fact that people in the British Isles would probably have basically more information to solve these clues than, you know, people who weren't from there? - [Lucas] Well, it's a good point about that, and what's interesting to me is that I didn't know all that stuff, really. I didn't know that most of the people in the UK can pick out, within 100 kilometer radius, where somebody is from based on their accent. - [Danny] Totally. - [Lucas] And not only that, but their class within that region, they know where they are on that scale of, you know, working class or well to do. I had an idea about that but not really how specific it was, how powerful that skill is in most British people so, luckily, when you hire native voice actors and you tell them about the character they know, so they know how to read, they know how to perform, the actors know this stuff so on that side the authenticity was okay because I didn't know but the actors knew, that's one reason you know you hire good actors. On the gameplay side I didn't know any of these things. So for me, I can assume those clues are there but I can't rely on them, personally. So I had to supplement all those places where this guy's identity is revealed by his Scottish accent, I had to supplement that with some other clues somewhere else, for me personally but also for anybody else who's not from the Isles. So that was just kind of naturally baked in to the way the game was made by an American who doesn't know these things as well as a British person would. So I knew it had to be accurate but I also knew that I wouldn't be able to tell and it wouldn't help me personally so kind of a tricky thing to think about but it basically meant that I had to be okay with people in the UK would play the game and would have more clues than other people who didn't know those accents, which was, you know, I think a small sacrifice in my opinion because I didn't know how useful those clues were I couldn't really consider them as something really that I should worry about. - [Danny] Yeah, and I mean, as you've said, you know, having sort of accents in games are so often the opposite, they're kind of misleading, you have to kind of read the intention of the author in a way where as, I can definitely say that from my perspective, it added a richness to the experience that I really appreciated. So too did the just general sound effects of the game. A lot of this game involves, you know, sort of stepping, you know, not using your eyes at all and just kind of going into your minds eye and imaging the scene before it's eventually sort of presented to you at the end of the sound clip. Can you talk about the process of doing that because, you know, the production value on those is very, very high but also there's lots of clues. Like, you're telling clues in audio which we're not really used to in games. - [Lucas] Yeah, that was, like I said earlier, that was kind of a thing I recognized I could do and I really wanted to try it, basically. It was a really interesting challenge for me, is to make the audio mechanically important. I have done sound effects in a lot of games for myself over the years so it's something I enjoy doing. When starting this project I didn't realize the challenge really, the full scope of the challenge, it was extremely difficult and one thing that made it harder was I didn't record much of it myself. I recorded a few full effects here and there but most of it was sourced from sound libraries. So what I would mostly do is just spend a long time, a long time, searching sound libraries for just the right sound effect. And a lot of times not finding it and deciding to rewrite things or change things a little bit so that I could express what I wanted, something useful or some kind of clue or something. And I wrote the whole game so instead of, like you can imagine if it was a team of multiple people with the sound guys here and the story guys and design guys separately, it would be a lot harder I think, but for me, because I wrote the whole game I had every scene in my head, I can close my eyes and see the whole thing, in movement and where they are and what the ship is doing and everything else, it's all just in my head. So pulling out from that what's important sound wise was a little bit tricky. Sound is about focus, if you actually stick a mic in one of those situations you would be overwhelmed with the amount of things that you would hear. So part of the challenge there was figuring out exactly what I need to be playing for it to give the information to the player but also enough sounds that you feel like you're there. So it's not just the key sounds that you would need to figure out what's going on, but also to make you feel like you're on a ship in this place during a storm or whatever. And then balancing all those things together, yeah, it was a pain in the ass. And it was the kind of thing where I normally when I work on a game I jump around from here to there, so I work on some art and then okay, get tired of working in Photoshop so let me do some programming, let me do some sound, I do some music. For the audio sound effect stuff I had to sit down for a month and a half basically and just work on it straight. So yeah, it was hard and it required a lot of focus over a long period of time which I wasn't used to at that point so it was kind of a production wrinkle for me but in the end it was a lot of fun, it was a lot of fun and I, the thing I like most about it is that it's, it's like I said earlier, I wasn't just trying to make it sound good, I had a gameplay core mechanic goal with the sound that I tried to execute. - [Danny] You talked about how the ship, the idea of the location for the ship was sort of born from an earlier process and then you sort of went into that, the story telling process to try and flesh that out, one of the interesting things you said, like sort of making something that's not important important, one of those things in this game is I guess the language of seafaring. Like, I feel like everyone, once they've completed this game they sort of get boats in a way that maybe they didn't when they started. Was that an advantage maybe of, you know, from like a world building perspective or even from a puzzle perspective, that fact that like people don't know what a bosun is maybe or a midshipmen or topman. - [Lucas] When I started, when I decided I'm gonna make a game about an East Indian trade ship that has this problem I researched a lot about it and when I was building the ship itself I had to do a lot of research about how those ships are constructed, and that is a deep, deep. -Yeah, I bet. - [Lucas] Deep rabbit hole, let me tell you. People have been making model ships for hundreds and hundreds of years and those guys are crazy, full on 100% nuts. So every single piece of a ship has a specific name and they're all weird and funny and they're usually like, it was heard in Italian and then repeated by the Portuguese and then British started using it kinda thing. So that to me was super interesting, just how deep, how both wide and deep the custom knowledge is for sailing ships. And I didn't even begin to scratch the surface of that with the game because I knew that I couldn't, there was just too much crazy shit in there that I could've referenced that I didn't. I basically wanted just enough to add the flavor, like you say, but without confusing the player too much, or at least in cases where it wasn't that important. And what's funny is there's a glossary in the game that defines a couple of these terms, that was like in the last two weeks of the game I added that glossary. - Oh, really? - [Lucas] That wasn't in there, yeah. I had this idea that people would go search for it on Google or something, which, you know, what a terrible idea. - [Danny] I think I did, I think, yeah, I remembered looking at the glossary maybe 40 minutes in and I was like, all right, you know what, fuck this, I need to like learn about this sorta stuff. But I had Googled on my phone I think what something was, like a midshipmen maybe or. - [Lucas] Yeah, all the terms, nobody else uses them so you just gotta use a few of them and suddenly you feel like you're there kinda thing. So I recognized that very early, that the potential was there and I really wanted to do that. And, again, that's the kinda thing where there's not a lot of games that are gonna reference these terms as if they're important. They may throw them around just for some flavor but in this case you actually need to know what a topman is or what a midshipmen is so I also like that aspect of it, and I tried to pick words like that where they weren't totally abandoned words, they were kind of maybe, someone might've heard them recently if they read like a Patrick O'Brian novel or something like that, they would get the references. - [Danny] I could see that, yeah, there sort of evocative of what they are as well, some of them, you know, other ones maybe not so much. I've got a million questions for you about Return of the Obra Dinn but I feel like I should throw in a couple of Patron ones, seeing as they're the ones funding all this, is that okay? - [Lucas] Yeah, absolutely. - [Danny] Thanks so much to all of our Patron to help make our work ad free and they all get this show a day early, but of course, like all of our stuff, it's all free for everyone. Patreon.com/Noclip if you're interested in helping us out. The first one comes from Brett G, says, what do you consider the cannon monitor choice for Obra Dinn, Macintosh for the win. The art style of the game, very unique, I can sort of, I'm reading into what you're talking about, it's maybe a way for you to do a lot of art on your own in a 3D space without going absolutely insane. But yeah, what's the cannon monitor choice for you, which way do you play? - [Lucas] Definitely Macintosh, he's right, of course. That was the first color, that was the first and only color I had for a long time until somebody asked me, or a couple people asked me for RGB sliders-- - Oh, really? - [Lucas] For the black and white colors and I'm not a guy who's gonna put RBG sliders in because there's too many ones that look terrible, basically. - [Danny] You literally made GUI tools, like that should be right down your alley. - [Lucas] Yeah, my solution would be to give like the nine colors that looked good basically and not give those sliders to make the bad colors. And that's kinda what I did and I, so the Mac colors are the ones that for me, I developed a whole game on the Mac. And then when I was sort of playing through the game and testing it a lot I would try one of the other colors and the one I like the most, after the Mac, 'cause there's an IBM sort of brownish brown and white one that I like as well, I can't remember the name of it but it's not the green IBM one, it's the other one. It is a nice soothing color as well. - [Danny] Next question comes in from Chris Petter, says, did you draw inspiration from other detective games when designing Obra Dinn? If so, were there any aspects in how that genre has been tackled in past games that you wanted to rectify on your own? I was watching a live stream you did on the GDC channel recently and I was interested to hear that lots of the games that have come out over the past couple of years are first person detective games like the Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you actually hadn't played. Yeah, was there any games that did sort of inspire you with Obra Dinn? - [Lucas] I don't think so, not with the detective aspect anyways. I was visually inspired by the Macintosh games I played as a kid but design wise, no, I was trying to do something different and then games like Ethan Carter or Edith Finch or some of the Sherlock Holmes games, people would tell me that they're kinda similar to the old demo I had or they would suggest to me, check them out. But I kinda just, I felt like if I look a those games I'm either gonna change what I'm doing or try to do something different. I figured like the best thing to do was just not play those games until I'm done with. - Right. - What I'm working on here. Yeah, and Obra Dinn, like I said, I had the pieces of what I felt could make a good game but I didn't have the whole thing together in one piece until very late. So you could kinda say I didn't know what I was doing for a long time, which meant, if I'm inspired then I kinda would put them together in a certain way but I was putting them together in lots of different ways trying to figure out the best way to to do it, yeah, on the one hand I'm trying to make a different game so I don't want to take too much inspiration from anything. But on the other hand I don't really know what I'm doing so I'm even not together enough to be inspired properly I guess. - [Danny] Ben Visnes asked, when I played Obra Dinn I was struck by how consistent everything was. I didn't notice any information that would be misleading or a red herring, so my questions are, what was the writing process like, did you write every crew members story up front? - [Lucas] No, definitely not, and it's a good point he makes because I intentionally avoided red herrings. There were a lot of places where I had the opportunity to fool the player into thinking one thing but then revealing another. And I actually do it in I think, there's one death where the means of death is not totally clear and I did that intentionally there but for identities I tried very hard to make your first sort of supposition the right one. So not trying to fool the player, just because there's 60 people, it's just too much. When you start trying to put red herrings in and kind of tricking the player I felt like that was just way too much. I was really worried the whole game that I'm asking way too much from the player and the book itself is kind of my solution to that to help the player understand what is going on, who is who, to let them traverse the web a little easier. So I was very worried that the game is just way way way too hard the whole time I was working on it. So I consciously avoided red herrings like that. That doesn't mean there aren't any in the game, actually, there is an unintentional one, a pretty big one near the beginning of the game where I didn't realize it but there's some dialogue about a character that's referring to one character but actually if you play the game and you're not me who doesn't know everything you would think it's referring to a different character and you would be confused about that for a long time, and that's, yeah, I regret that that slipped through. My wife didn't catch it, I didn't catch it, it's only later on when people started talking about the game they thought, oh, this guy was that guy for the longest time and I, you know, kinda just sighed and regret that a little bit. So I really didn't want that to happen, I wanted it to be not tricking the player just because, not that I love the player but I was sure that it was just way too difficult and I shouldn't be fucking around like that. - [Danny] I mean, how did you even play test this? If you're saying your wife is the first person to play the game from start to finish, were you still like sending it to other people and having them give you feedback? 'Cause like I just can't imagine how you would possibly be able to put your self in the position of a new player when you know how everything works, you're the puppet master. - [Lucas] Yeah, this is another question I like. I didn't play test this game very much at all, I play tested and old build without the book and that's when I realized I need the book. But my solution was tools, lots and lots of tools. So one of the things I do when I try to solve a problem is I need to visualize the problem. So in the case of this game, there are ways you can build tools that let you visualize that there are enough clues everywhere for this character, for example. So you don't need to play through, you just can see, okay, there's a clue for this guy here, here, and here, that's enough. This person's identity is revealed at this point and then he, once you know his identity you can figure out this other guy's and this other guy's identity. And you can, without playing the game you can graph that on a directed acyclic graph, you can graph when identities are revealed. And that hooks into my kind of heavy dependence on tools to make this happen, is that I can write a tool that generates that graph, then I can just look at the graph and I can see, there's a problem here, this guy, you're not gonna know who this guys is in order to figure out who this guy is so okay, I need to add more clues in the scene. So basically figuring out sort of the problem space and then the way to visualize it for me was the solution instead of building something and having somebody test it, building it again and having somebody play it, that sort of loop of play testing I didn't need for this particular thing because I could express it and visualize it in a way that allowed me to just check it instantly, basically. - [Danny] Wow. The book is obviously a massive part of the design of this game which solves a lot of problems I'm sure for you, but I can't imagine how difficult it was to sort of figure out how to use it. It's almost like a diegetic interface in a way and also the ability for you to, I guess travel on the pages at least between the different death scenes. I remember hearing a bunch of people getting frustrated that they couldn't just, you know, bounce between, you know, teleport almost between the different death scenes after a certain point, but can you just kinda speak to the design philosophy of the book, was it really important that people, you know, got familiar with the boat and walking around it and that the death scenes themselves were sort of more isolated little pockets that they couldn't get too lost in? - [Lucas] I think so, yeah. That decision is kinda rooted in the original concept of the game where you didn't have the book so how are you gonna fast travel if you don't have the book? The book seems obvious in retrospect but I was pulling my hair out for a long time about how to structure and arrange the events on the ship for a long time in a way that the player could reference and understand easily. And actually if you look in the book there's a deck map which shows all the flashbacks, the location of the body of each flashback and there's like this, once you've finished them all there's like this really crazy system of arrows that connects them all and if you look at it it's just a jumble of spaghetti arrows and Xs and shit. That was originally my solution to letting the player understand, there was no book, it was just that map with arrows everywhere on it. So you can see, it took me a long time to get from that to a full book with a page for each flashback, divided into chapters with referencing and bookmarks and all that stuff. But once I had the book I realized how useful it was and how it contextualized almost everything in the game and the metaphor is so easy to understand that I got a lot of things for free basically by doing the book. And, you know, even having like a death on each page wasn't obvious from the beginning, I had tried a lot of things for how to arrange the structure of the book and sorta ended up with this one. So in my mind the book was always a supplement to helping you understand the story, it wasn't a way to navigate. And I have this long term problem with the Obra Dinn that there is frankly way too much magic going on. There was a real conflict for me between the watch and the, spoiler, the mermaids. And, you know, let's be real, if you had that watch you would get right back on that rowboat, go straight back to the mainland and just rule the world, basically. So I had a lot of really cool ideas about things to do with the watch and I cut them all. I decided, the watch cannot be the star here because if the watch is the star here then nothing else about this story is important at all. So I tried to downplay the watch a little bit, and likewise, the book, to me, being able to fast travel with the book is just too video gamey, too magical. Now, that's kinda dumb because it's a video game and there's a lot of stuff about this that's very video gamey and I personally usually lean towards being more video gamey when it's convenient to the player. But for some reason, maybe because of the way that the book came about and the way the game was developed, I just could not give up the player having to walk around the boat to go to different areas. To me, that way of showing the player's intent was just too good. To say like, you don't flip to a page and click a button to say you wanna see this thing again, you put the book away and you walk to it on the ship. And yeah, it was a really tough call for me because it is inconvenient for the player so it wasn't easy for me to say you're not gonna use the book but it just, to me I couldn't have you skip right to the flashback. I felt like, one of the problems is like, you skip right to the flashback let's say, through the book, and then you're, the way you're playing the game is by skipping around, so you would wanna skip out of the flashback too. But I've got this system where you walk through a door to get out of a flashback, so I could satisfy the first one and say you can travel to the thing. But then I've also gotta satisfy the fact that you can get out of it quickly. That kind of slippery slope to me was just, especially at the point where I finished this game, I was beyond done with this thing. I was so exhausted from working on this, and I made so many very big design changes near the end that it was basically like, I don't care if this game gets like a 0% because you can't fast travel, I can't deal with the design changes that that's gonna inject into this game. So, you know, I could justify it now and say that I don't want the player traveling around but really one of the really important parts of that decision is that it would've changed so many things so late at that point in the game that I just couldn't manage it. - [Danny] Another sort of, I feel like, aspect of the game that gives the player a little bit of help is the verbs. Am I right in saying that there are some deaths that you can sort of say stabbed or speared or there's a little bit of wiggle room there? - [Lucas] Yeah, there's a lot of wiggle room, actually more than I anticipated at the beginning. It's funny, when I first had the idea for the design of this game it was mostly about figuring out how people died, it was the means of death that was the important thing. It wasn't until I had a lot more of the game together that I realized, I mean, you can see how he dies, there's no challenge there, that's not fun, and so that whole idea of constructing a sentence became kind of perfunctory, I don't know, became kind of unimportant. The identity's important but how he died, maybe we don't really care how, not that we don't care, but you can see it, it's like okay, he died this way, maybe the book can just tell me, I don't need to answer it. But for me, always, the act of building a sentence as fun. This is one of those kind of like really carnal sort of low level joys, is just selecting those verbs and those nouns and those subjects from a list and then having a sentence at the end that you could read was fun, that very low level thing was fun for me. So I never wanted to give it up, I wanted you to have to select. But I didn't want you to get hung up on it, and that was a real, real big problem actually because I didn't, when I designed, there were too many things pushing on this games design basically. So when I designed the way people died, it was on context of how to make it interesting for the player to see and how to make it fit within the story of the events of what's happening. And it was not at all how to make a sentence, how to make it easily describable with a sentence. So there are a lot of cases where, yeah, he's getting hit by something thing, what is that, is that a spear, is that a spike, what is that? And I didn't want the player to get hung up on that so what I did is I made it you could say either speared or spiked. Now the problem with that is that actually doesn't help you get hung up on it or not, you still get hung up on it, you still need to select one of those, they're both right, but you don't know that when you're worrying about which one to put in, so that is kind of a failure but I still really like just the act of building grammatical sentences with the kinda cheesy book interface, I like that. And it became I liked it so much I put a lot of work into keeping it, so doing the things where multiple fates are possible or rewriting the fate system multiple times to support localization, which was a huge can of worms. - [Danny] Got it, yeah, I can imagine, especially with the subtleties involved in those words. You know, I'm not sure if I've picked the right one but you said there was one character where their death was maybe a little bit difficult to deduce, 'cause it could've been a few things, was that by any chance Charles the midshipmen? - [Lucas] No, but he's another good one. Actually, that was a case where he died in a very cool way which is little bit undescribable in the very simple sentences that I had. So yeah, I just had to kind of put a lot of options in for that one. - [Danny] Oh is there multiple options for how Charles dies that you'll get? - Yeah. - I was wondering, 'cause like at the point of his death he's like being burned and spiked and is just like. - [Lucas] Yeah, what's kinda cool about that one is that one made me realize, and I implemented this ina few other deaths, but this one kind of opened it up a little bit, he's getting spiked, he's getting burned, and he's also getting potentially stabbed by a crewmate. So I realized that your selection says a lot about how you interpret this situation in the scene and the guilt of people. So if you think he's being stabbed by, say you don't like this character who is maybe stabbing him, then you would put in, he's being stabbed by this guy and that would be in the record, and noted by the crown or whatever. And that kinda opened up a nice extra aspect of the game that I didn't originally intend. And so I went through and I kind of tried to grow that a little bit in a few more of the deaths. But the one I'm talking about that I intentionally made ambiguous it's somebody who's dying who you think is bleeding out but actually at the moment he dies something happens that is hard to notice. And his original death was, he is bleeding out. I wrote the whole thing that way, the scenes written like that, the voice actors recorded it that way, and it wasn't until very late that I realized the potential for a small subversion in what the player expected here. Which actually ended up working better because I had this kind of, I had this problem that I needed to kill people in lots of different and interesting ways, which is a weird problem to have. And some people die in really cool ways, really quickly, you know, an explosion or their head's cut off or what not, and some people bleed out. And I gotta tell y
This week we dive into the issue gripping the development industry; workers rights. Marijam Didžgalvytė joins us to tell us about Game Worker's Unite - a global grassroots organization dedicated to advocating for workers' rights and unionization within the game industry. iTunes Page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noclip/id1385062988 RSS Feed: http://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/rssGoogle Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/If7gz7uvqebg2qqlicxhay22qny Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5XYk92ubrXpvPVk1lin4VB?si=JRAcPnlvQ0-YJWU9XiW9pg Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/noclippodcast Watch our docs: https://youtube.com/noclipvideo Sub our new podcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHBlPhuCd1sDOdNANCwjrA Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.videoBecome a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyerFunded by 4,756 Patrons. -------------------------------------------------------------- - [Danny] Hello, and welcome to Noclip, the podcast about the people who play and make video games. I'm your host, Danny O'Dwyer. Our guest this week is a tech and politics writer and workers' rights advocate, with bylines on GamesIndustry.biz, Kotaku, and The Guardian among others. She's also a youtuber on her channel Left Left Up, where you can watch her insights on gaming and tech news from a radical perspective. Today we're gonna talk to her about game dev unionization as she is also chair of communications committee for Game Workers Unite International, a global grassroots organization of game workers organizing unions to improve working conditions within the industry. Speaking to us from her home in London, England, I'm delighted to be joined by Marijam Didzgalvyte. Marijam, thanks for taking the time to talk to us this week. - [Marijam] Hi Danny, thank you so much. Thank you for your lovely introduction and for covering these important issues. - [Danny] No problem, our pleasure. I think it's something that we've had a bit of a blind spot on for the two and a half years we've been working, so I'm delighted to start the conversation. Before we get into the nuts and bolts, because I have a lot of questions for you, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up? What were some of the games that sort of inspired you as a young person? - [Marijam] I grew up in Lithuania, and being eastern Europe, we were really big with Counter-Strike and Quake, and Quake is something that definitely continued with me. I am an avid player of Quake Champions right now, and I sort of, I was thrown as an economic migrant to London right when I was 17 and was still playing a lot of gaming, however in the leftist circles that I found myself in, gaming was judged. I don't know, it just seemed to be seen as this sort of waste of time activity, whereas in 2017 I know it has overtaken the films industry in terms of profits, so it is a huge political space. It's the biggest cultural outlet there is. However, progressives have really not been in that space and really abandoned it, and in that vacuum, obviously, right wing politics have developed. I've sort of taken it on myself, about two years ago, to try and change this and to try and encourage progressive voices and a critical view in this industry out of that. Yes, I've written for quite a few publications, GamesIndustry.biz, Kotaku, Vice, the rest, I developed my video series and then a year ago, things have really changed obviously with what happened at GDC, and obviously I'm alluring to the Game Workers Unite movement being born. It seemed like all of my loves came together. My love for a class war, my love for trade unionization, my love for gaming, so obviously I was extremely privileged and lucky to be at the right time and the right place and get involved. - [Danny] Yeah, so I guess we're mostly here talking about Game Workers Unite International, which is coming up on its first birthday because it was sort of founded out of GDC last year, is that right? - [Marijam] Yes, it's actually incredible that it was only a year ago and still so much has been achieved. Yeah, so IGDA had a silly idea of doing a panel discussion that was fairly anti-union. They posed the question, whether unionizing is the way to go in this industry. I think they were understanding that there is already a bit of a movement or at least some quiet talk about unionization and I think they freaked out and wanted to sort of whack their finger being like "No, no, it's gonna be very, very bad for the industry "if you do," so yeah, weren't into that. Hashtag GameWorkersUnite started trending, a logo by Scott Benson was created, a Twitter account, website, that was all, incredible work was done at the GDC, but a few dedicated organizers, Emma Kinema being one of them, and it really hit the nerve. It seems like that's just something that that was just a culmination of very, very many things, and chapters sprung up all across the world. There are most of the states, well, quite a few states in the US, Canada, we got Brazil, we got obviously UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, Singapore is about to also have a Game Workers Unite branch, so it was born, it exploded, and obviously a very, very important moment for this movement happened in December, when Game Workers Unite UK declared to be the first legal trade union of this entire effort. It's actually amazing, in the space of what, seven, eight months they got themselves together and formed a legal trade union and quite a few other places are now talking about it too, so yeah, it's incredibly inspiring. I am very sad that I won't be able to make it to the one year parties at GDC, but everyone, if our Saturday's launch is anything to go by, it's gonna be a sick party and everyone should go. - [Danny] Yeah, tell us a little bit about Game Workers Unite UK and the sort of the collaboration with IWGB, which is, I understand it as sort of like a gig economy trade union. Can you tell us bit about sort of how that, I guess, relationship was formed and I guess the goals that GWU UK has as a sort of chapter onto itself? Because you guys have, it's almost like a distributed sort of organization, right? Everything is locally operated? - [Marijam] Certainly. I have, it's been the privilege of my life to be so close to the birth of this trade union. Really, in March 2018, when I saw what was happening in GDC, it seemed like all of my worlds collided. My love for trade unions and my love for class war, my love for video games, so I had to definitely get involved and Declan Peach was already organizing at the Score Chat here in the UK and we had our first national meeting in Manchester at the beginning of June, and I was just so incredibly inspired by what workers were how they were organizing in a very horizontal manner and yet, because there was a lot of work involved to establish, and wasn't really just based in London, I think seven cities, or seven or eight cities in the United Kingdom have all got their own local chapters where they all meet and discuss the issues and sort of try to raise membership and raise awareness around. Basically, yeah. Summer came and went, there was a lot of sort of talk and meetings with different trade unions, because basically we had three roots. One was to create a completely new trade union from scratch, which would require quite a few thousands of pounds and a lot of lawyer time and in general just a lot of resources, something that we didn't feel like we had at that particular moment. Second route was to join one of the big trade unions, so Unite, or Unison who have like two million members. Again, the organizers have definitely had quite a few meetings with them over the summer, but then I think everything fell into place around September when we met IWGB, Independent Workers Union of Great Britain is only about four years old. It's a small, dynamic, quite militant trade union that is mostly, whose members are mostly migrant workers working in very precarious conditions and industries such as cleaners and foster care workers, Deliveroo couriers, Uber drivers, so really people that are often on zero-hours contracts, sometimes just cash in hand. Again, people that really have that are sort of at the I guess the most precarious contracts. Sometimes I hear people like "Well what about QA workers? "Surely they're gonna be so difficult to unionize "because they're so precarious." I'm like "No guys." IWGB is like "If they got Deliveroo couriers covered, "testers are gonna be just fine." And that meeting was I think the beginning of sort of realizing that GWU UK has found home, because it's not gonna swallow up the branding, it's a small, effective trade union and it's really allowed for GWU UK organizational structures to stay in place, all the branding, and the relationship with the international, et cetera, and was really excited to work with another industry that is not traditionally unionized. And again, IWGB only has like 3,000 members. Again, sort of every penny, and also the president of the union only earns like London Living Wage plus one pound, you see? Again, it's not one of those often corrupt and bloated trade unions, it's a union where you can see where your monthly dues are certainly going. And yeah, in December there was an inaugural meeting, executive committee was elected. It was a packed meeting, so many members turned up, I think the membership is at a good couple of hundred now and growing every day and at that inaugural meeting, three pillars were, sort of campaign pillars were discussed. They're sort of around crunch pay and diversity, that's quite a long document that at some point I'm sure will be published in detail, and those will be the campaign goals for the next year. - [Danny] Excellent, so that's I guess what the key focus is for GWU UK. Do you find this, everyone within the organization has had in some way been affected by either zero-contract hours or crunch or do you find that a lot of your members or the members of the UK chapter as it were are sort of more so protecting themselves against the eventuality that perhaps within their career at some stage they'll run into that sort of thing? - [Marijam] It's difficult to really say what was the main decision for every member to join. I think they all come from varying different contracts and there are different parts of the country and various different parts of the games industry. Some treat it just as an insurance in case they get fired, the union would be able to negotiate severance pay and et cetera, so they won't just be out in the cold as such. And some really have, have probably had terrible experiences perhaps around harassment or crunch and that sort of stuff, and they are thinking, and perhaps they have individual issues that they would like to bring up. However the union, and this is sort of a public service announcement, the union can only deal with incidents or any issues that have only sprung up three months before one joining the union, so although someone could be like "Oh, two years ago this and this happened," the union can't necessarily help with that. And yeah, so sometimes it's only individual members of a particular company that will be joining a union to protect themselves, but obviously the more workers in the particular company are unionizing, the better, because then they as a whole body at least as a majority can push, not only be on the defensive, they can push for better working conditions for bigger pay, for less crunch, for a bigger bar in their office or something. - [Danny] More ping pong tables. - [Marijam] Yeah well actually I say this, but I'm joking here, but actually it's, that's the sort of irony that a lot of people think that because there is yeah, a pool table or an arcade in the office that there is some sort of glamorous industry whereas actually quietly people are really suffering and under this allure that they should be lucky to be in this industry. For instance, that they are really hiding their terrible experiences. The secretary of GWU UK, Austin Kelmore has written a very eloquent piece with his experience a couple of years ago, where he was under 100th hour crunch and he was by himself in the office with one other co-worker and on his birthday and it was his co-worker's birthday as well, and around 1 a.m. they just shared a drink, like a can of Coca-Cola at like 1 a.m. for 15 minutes as their happy birthday and then had to go back to work. Again, people that are in the executive committee that are the front of this union and are going to be making decisions mostly, and again, these are elections, one can be on exec committee every year and put themselves out there. They really know and they see the darkest of this trade union. Two other exec committee members, they are freelancers, so again, we got freelancers covered as well. As long as there is some sort of contract, whether, obviously it mostly helps if it's written, the union will have you covered and IWGB has experience with working with professions, that they're now literally having to argue in court that they're workers. IWGB has actually one in court to now class Deliveroo couriers as workers, something that was not in the UK employment law before. - [Danny] Right. - [Marijam] IWGB, although tiny, it is not afraid to take on the big shots. - [Danny] Let's talk a little bit about then I guess trying to get people on board, right, so your role is obviously, you're the chair of the communications committee for sort of the international umbrella group as it were that sort of oversees a lot of what's going on in these localized chapters. The sort of forward-facing stuff that I guess you sort of talk about is the parties and the social aspect of it. I'm interested in the sort of utility of that type of thing. Why is having these sort of meetups important? These sort of more relaxed social gatherings. Why is that important? And also I guess, what's the barrier to stop people from joining a trade union? I understand from, I grew up in Ireland and I lived in England for a number of years and sort of the image of the trade union, either by sort of the elements within the political establishment which would make you, funds that sort of negative image or via the sort of the corrupt nature of some trade unions over the years. It's that sort of 80's idea or the TFL stuff in more recent years. Do you have to fight against that sort of negative image of what a trade union, some people has seen? And is there a reticence from people to join up for a part of larger studios because it might negatively impact their employment? How do you convince people to get on board? And what's the sort of utility of having these social gatherings? - [Marijam] You're completely right. There is certainly a stereotype of trade union that we're trying to fight. I'd like to think that as part of this small, more new minted trade unions that have sprung up, the new trade unionism as I call it, we are really challenging the view of trade unions who are, let's be honest, I'm not gonna beat around the bush, most trade unions are rubbish. They just are. They have been, obviously there's been a political project in the past 40 years, especially here in Britain to really dismantle trade unions, to create this bad rep around them, but they're not helping themselves a lot of the time as well. A lot of the time they're bloated, pall-mall, stale, sometimes corrupt, they're in bed with the employers rather than employees, you pay your monthly dues and then an issue arises and you can never even get in touch with the trade union. That happens, that has happened. I am not going to sit here and defend the entirety of trade unionized movement, because it has failed and failed workers again. I would separate IWGB from that because it's worker-led, completely, and it has already proven itself in the last four years in its militancy and dynamism. The sort of dynamics that it reproduces. And this is where I think the social stuff comes in. Just to sort of plug, but also reflect on the incredible two weeks that we had with Game Workers United International where we have pushed for something called GWIRL, which eight cities across the world have utilized and attempted and thus far we've had incredible response. Basically, we've asked for our local chapters to do just, whether that's a small dinner party or a huge rave, how it happened in the UK, just create something along, just create a real-life gathering, because we think that, especially in such alienating industry as the games industry, real life relations are so important. That's where people establish solidarity with each other, that's where they meet each other and something that is as abstract as workers' rights becomes part of their every day, it creates that empathy and creates that solidarity between workers which is something that will be necessary whenever some problem will arise, whenever we will ask for numbers to, whether to start with simple as sign a petition, whether that is to come out on the streets and be there with us. For instance, the different branches between, so IWGB is sick at throwing parties. Mostly there are salsa dance parties, they're incredible, but the reason why they do it is because they have many different branches, right, so there's electricians branch, couriers branch, cleaners branch, foster care branch, well now there is a gamers branch. And they by themselves don't necessarily have the numbers, but if all of those meet each other and dance and then create those relationships, we know that for instance electricians will turn up to the cleaners protest, or game workers will help in terms of IT for the couriers branch, let's say, see? Rather than these being abstract groups, they then meet, they dance, they perhaps share a cocktail, and it all becomes a lot more real. And I think so much of our activism in general and so much of our political organizing, but it just can be so, we're so often just on the defensive, we're defeated and it can just be a drag and whereas those moments of victory, of empathy, of creation of a communal experience, that's what it's meant to be. That's how sustainable political projects work, and that's how sustainable workplaces should be as well. When people have empathy to each other, when workers understand that something problematic that has happened with one worker can very much happen to them, and creating that empathy to each other is sort of at the core of the trade union movement as it should be. Not this sort of client versus service provider relationship that some of the bigger unions have perpetrated a bit more. Yeah, and again, we're utilizing in our communications we're utilizing or we're planning to utilize more innovative ways to talk about unionization, whether that's Twitter takeovers or a podcast or yeah, just another push for these IRL events and perhaps also establishing solidarity with existing strikes, so the teacher's strike in America or perhaps Wetherspoons and McDonald's worker strike here in the UK. Sorry, I'm being very UK, US-centric here, but I guess this is just, these are the sort of places that I'm presently working with right now, however I'm obviously supporting the local chapters all across the world. But yeah, so we're just looking at ways to raise awareness towards our issues, but also to inspire broader political education and class-based politics inspiration towards the new generations. The idea for me that some 16 year old that is playing Fortnite that perhaps looks at Game Workers United Twitter account and sees that there are actually lots of cool gatherings happening, and that's the hook for them, rather than this boring statistics on work. And that's the hook for them and they get excited about what this could be and their politics shift. To me, that is a really exciting part of what we could be broadly achieving. - [Danny] Yeah, let's talk about that sort of the other side of the transaction I guess, which is game players. The audience of sort of Noclip enjoys, we do have a lot of developers who watch our documentaries and listen to the podcast and obviously we also have a lot of game players who do this same thing as well and we try and sort of bridge that gap, and I know that a lot of the folks in our community and our patrons have been sort of asking about what it is that they can really do in terms of boots on the ground activism, be it online sort of stuff or actual in real life, as you said, that more substantive action that they can do to sort of help out. I guess I sort of have the general question of how people can help, and also, I'm just sort of interested in how you feel about engaging with the sort of online discourse in relation to this? We live in a post-Gamergate world and it seems now that most people sort of widely understand that the Trojan horse of consumer advocacy that was sort of used and that was not sincere and really it was just a bunch of horrible bad actors attempting to target women and minorities within the games industry. Is the idea of getting into this sort of the consumer advocacy world or the way in which the online discourse over this sort of stuff, is that something that you think the Game Workers United should be engaging with or is it something you are keeping at arm's length? - [Marijam] Okay, so I think games industry consumers are in a very unique position where they are closer to the producer of their product than in many other industries. Their voice is much more listened to than for instance, I'm thinking the McDonald's workers or something, right? The person that they're selling perhaps the burger to will not be as easily aware of the issues that the McDonald's worker is having to deal with, right? Or in any corporate, other corporate job perhaps, again, the relationship between the consumer and the producer is much more, is much more invisible. Whereas games consumers, a lot of the time they are on social media, they are vocal, and really what we can ask for is just every little bit on every little tweet that you can do towards the companies that have really abused their workers. That is always extremely helpful. Content creation, I've been extremely impressed by Jim Sterling, Jimquisition, who has really taken the time to talk about these issues. And again, for better or for worse, gaming communities do have their influencers and they do influence opinions and then I think a lot of the people that perhaps weren't aware of these issues will find out because of people like you doing these podcasts or because of people like Jim Sterling that really have a huge reach. Something like top six of his 15 latest videos at one point were the most popular ones, were on workers' rights. Not only that people that this content gets created, it is certainly popular and watched by what I assume to be quite a young audience, so that's incredibly exciting. But really, researching the modes of production of a particular game is very important. I am also, and I'm now sort of saying this as just someone that is looking at games industry in the critical point of view in terms of my content, I don't think we should be stopping just at game studios and game creation, I am interested for our movement and talking about modes of production to grow into something that the fashion industry is well ahead of us, talking about terrible working conditions in the factories of the gadgets where we are enjoying games are created, right, so whether that's the mineral mines in Democratic Republic of Congo or the Foxconn factories in China, something that we're completely ignoring and yet the conditions that are terrible and much worse than probably whatever happens in the worst games industry studio, and that's something that we are still very much silent about. I'm obviously hopefully gaining trying to gain momentum first on these issues and establishing worker solidarity here, but we have to be we have to understand that we mustn't just stop here, that this is a much wider issue and so I'm interested to sort of start talking to consumers about these issues as well and not just talk about not just stop these conversations on studio-level. But yeah, create content, research modes of production, spread the word. I think Game Workers Unite UK have their merch, so buy the merch! It's so funny, I think they will also have a donations website as well, and I think thus far it's been an extremely they have been extremely transparent as to where the money is spent and I think that will continue in the future and yes, I think that the consumers in this industry, more than in any other, even more than in the tech industry I would say certainly can make that difference. - [Danny] Speaking of people who donate to things that they support, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions from our patrons? - [Marijam] Sure, gladly. - [Danny] Awesome. First one comes in from Ralph Elliott, he asks when looking for new members, do these trade unions target specific companies? I'm sure indie developers are important too, but surely the power of union comes from having members who are working at larger corporations. Is that something that the trade union chapters sort of actively do? Or is there any reason why they wouldn't be able to do that type of thing? - [Marijam] I think that our meetings currently being taking place with the workers of a few companies that have come together and said that we want to unionize our entire company, they're actually surprisingly some of the bigger ones and they're meeting with the this is I'm talking about the GWU UK of course and they're looking how to come to bosses saying like "Look, a few of us have organized "and we want to unionize this trade union." In terms of indies, we had really lovely response from a few of them messaging. Actually the boss is messaging being like "Hey, I am not gonna join the union," well first of all because they're not eligible as bosses, but also because it just wouldn't make sense, but I actually think that's for the betterment of my workplace, it only makes sense that the people do, so if we could do that as soon as possible that that would be great. Another thing that the union is planning is sort of accreditation system for studios that have really great working conditions. Not only to be on the defensive, but to also celebrate good working conditions. I guess we'll start with small indies, and then once enough of them are organized, we can push towards the triple A's being like "Hey guys, if these people can do it, "then you can do it of course too." Really, if you read through the GWU UK eligibility rules, mostly it's like the bosses can't join, and then people that just don't have any contract at all, I suppose so like a student and not working, or if you're working just for a mate, then it's really unlikely that union can help with you a lot in the UK employment law, but no, I can't say that we have really focused on bigger versus smaller sort of thing, and lots of freelancers are joining as well, so that's really exciting. But yeah, the more the better. And yeah, the union's actively sort of talking with a few studios, et cetera. - [Danny] That sort of bleeds into the next question I have here from Nick, who's asking what positions the union would cover? You sort of answered already, but I'll just throw this one at you as well because it is an important part of the conversation. QA, quality assurance traditionally gets shafted when this topic comes up and I'd argue that if anybody gets abused the most during crunch it could be QA. Most times, it's waved away with the excuse that that's outsourced, but that of course is some, not all studios. You're saying that at least the work that the sort of the IWGB, I guess that's all covered as well, that type of outsourced or contract labor, right? - [Marijam] 100%, I think QA workers from what we're hearing especially here in the UK are the ones that are getting the worst deal for sure. You hear of zero-hour contracts, you hear of abysmal pay even in London, you hear of terrible crunch. QA workers are certainly the prime contingent to be unionizing, and so that's something that they should definitely be looking into, especially since the monthly fees, they are divided into different pay grades, so people that are not earning enough, they really won't have to pay that much at all but they will have that insurance. And also, if enough people in the studio unionize then they can ask like "Okay you guys, "you're ending zero-hour contracts," or if we're outsourced, all right, we're you have to bring us back in-house, right, no agency work. And IWGB is actually extremely experienced in bringing back agency workers in-house, that's victories that they have achieved with cleaners mostly and I think they're talking with a few electricians in their branch as well. Cleaners are outsourced in a particular establishment, perhaps in a museum or something, and IWGB gets together, they do a lot of pressure on the media, they get articles out, they do demonstrations outside the venues and what not, and the institutions usually cave in and then bring those workers back in-house, which is an incredible achievement for sure. Yeah, QA's are very much I think the sort of prime membership material. But obviously everyone else, no, your other question was like who should be looking into this? Really, I think the main focus has been at I suppose developers and artists, et cetera, but even if you're in a games company and you're at like HR or what not you should be still looking at joining this union. Perhaps there are other unions that perhaps would be of more interest to you, but I think IWGB is just sick and everyone should join it in general, but yeah, so it really, as long as it is sort of and you work in a games studio then you should be eligible. There is now a conversation, now even at some point in the future to bring in board games, so that's exciting. My personal sort of dream down the line would be esports players. I think that's something else that has been completely sort of over-glamorized et cetera, whereas these workers are doing, and it's not perceived as work but actually esports players are creating profit for someone else, a lot of the time they're sort of chewed up and spat out and yeah, I think esports is a space where unionization, conversations around that will be happening very, very soon. - [Danny] Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that. We interviewed Scott Smith, SirScoots he's know as-- - [Marijam] Oh, he's a legend! He's an absolute legend. - [Danny] He said he set up the Player's Association, which is a sort of I guess a Counter-Strike professional players' union, which is trying to do some of the things that you're talking about there. - [Marijam] So you see it's this is interesting, this is a conversation I had with him and we've had this one disagreement, but it's I think he shouldn't be afraid of the word union. I think he thinks that union, the word union has certain connotations attached to it, whereas association doesn't, that is a bit scary to the employer or what not. I think that we should be going back to the roots of what the victories that unions and unionization has achieved and really being and reclaim this word from the, I guess failures of the past 40 years of some of the unionization efforts. But yeah, he said he went more towards the safer routes, but we'll see how it'll go in the future. - [Danny] Could there be sort of an element of a difference in culture between the UK and the US with that one? Because the other big union that I think of here is SAG-AFTRA, which refer to themselves as sort of a guild rather than a union and they do represent people within the games industry insofar as voice actors. There was that famous strike back in 2016. It went all the way into 2017. Yeah, do you think there's a cultural difference? I guess you must think there is, because you've got all your chapters working independently. - [Marijam] Yes, perhaps you're correct. It's here in the UK that we've experienced really crushing, really substantial crushing from political actors in 1970's to do with miners and many other industries that have now been outsourced. The word union has a very particular historical connotation that has been lost and has been co-opted by the sort of new Labour view of what a trade union looks like, and I think we're just trying to reclaim that. But I know what you mean, that as you say, that SAG-AFTRA is extremely effective as an association in the US, and perhaps if that's a more fitting description of what essentially hopefully will be the same thing then so be it. But I just think that, yeah, we shouldn't be afraid to really understand that stuff like pensions and weekends and maternity leave, these have all been brought by trade unions in 20th century, sometimes under terrible oppression from the states and there is a history in that word that we should be taking with pride. - [Danny] Yeah, absolutely. It seems like the sort of the history of union-busting is seems to be relatively well-known. - [Marijam] Yeah, no one ever says association-busting, right, nobody. - [Danny] Exactly, and in recent weeks even, just looking at the government shutdown that happened here, ultimately it was the union of air traffic controllers which were the one that finally sort of beat down that door and got almost a million people who were working for free. It seems like it's on the tip of everyone's tongue. I want to talk about a question just quickly we got here from Farhad who lives in Berlin, who is asking the question, he said "I have no idea how or if there is such a thing "in the US, are there any good examples?" This individual is also living in Berlin. Can you tell us where Game Workers Unite International, where the chapters are? Whereabouts they're located, so people who are maybe listening can get involved. - [Marijam] Yeah, Game Workers Unite Deutschland is definitely a thing and you should definitely be looking them up. I spoke with them recently and they're looking at setting up, at being a bit more active than they have been, but again, the law is so different in different countries that some countries I find it way easier to establish a trade union than others. Right, okay, yes, people across the world, if you live in Atlanta, Austin, Australia, Baltimore, Bay Area, Boston, Brazil, Chicago, Dallas, D.C., Detroit, Deutschland, Spain, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York City, Orange County, Orlando, Ottawa, Seattle, Sweden, France, Toronto, Triangle, United Kingdom, or Vancouver, there is a Game Workers Unite chapter in your area. If you are a games industry worker quietly suffering in any of these places, definitely get involved, check their Twitter, check their websites, get on their Discord channels, meet up with them, and really start understanding that you should not be feeling guilty or abused in the position that you are. If your city of country hasn't been read out, then set up your own. These have, no but really, so now there's someone that got in touch being like "Hey, I think a few of our friends are in Singapore "would like to do something along these lines. "How do we do this?" And we're like "Okay, yeah, so these are little things "that you do, get Discord, "then we're gonna hype you up on our social media, "then more people will join you." And again, from the international, and again, these things, yeah, they're just springing up like mushrooms after rain, in this drought if I can use such a cheesy metaphor. But certainly it's something that it seems like across the world, everyone's very, very thirsty for it. Yes, definitely the German one is there and US, that's not legal, there are no legal trade unions just yet, I mean, there's not even a year of this movement yet and already so much has been achieved. - [Danny] If anyone wants the list of those again, you can go to GameWorkersUnited.org and there's a map that has all of them in there. It's amazing to see so many of them close to me here. Baltimore, D.C., and I guess the Triangle area is North Carolina. There seems to be quite a lot of them. Even just looking at Europe, I'd love to see a little pin on Ireland. I know IMERC is a really good organization that operates out of Ireland. - [Marijam] There are conversations going. There are conversations going. - [Danny] Oh cool, it would be awesome to see something over there, because I know there's a great spirit of revolutionary advocacy in my home country. I have one more question here, this one's from Sharkie81 on Twitter who says "I'm pro-unionization. "Creators must have good working conditions. "But could this mean that making games "could take even longer than now? "A lot of triple A titles have four or five years "of development, even with crunch." What would you say to that? Do you think sort of crunch is an element of game design that makes them come faster or is it the product of bad planning and worker manipulation that could be-- - [Marijam] I think you know what I'm gonna say. - [Danny] Yeah, bit of a loaded question there from my part, sorry. - [Marijam] I think whereas perhaps 10, 15 years ago, crunch perhaps was an accident and it was, I suppose, I don't know, a failure of management or what not. Right now it certainly is plan of the management. It is part of the project creation. That culture is now so embedded, and sometimes workers are even competing between each other who is gonna do more crunch. The culture is so rotten that we just have to call the whole thing out. Obviously managers are, yeah, I also think they are just failing and whatever it is that they're doing is inexcusable because it hurts workers so much, but the things have become so bad that there is literally now, and there's so little solidarity and it's so, it's such an individualized industry that is so sad to see sometimes, even workers volunteering to do more work than the other and that's how they feel like they are gonna get a promotion or something like that. In terms of games taking even longer to be made, I'm kind of a bit like boo-hoo. If that means that workers are gonna have better lives, then I think that's worth it. Of course, I mean you look at huge company like Apple. It churns out an iPhone very, very easily because they're outsourced in Foxconn and workers that get, I don't know, $10 a day or something like that and there are just terrible accidents and incidents that you hear of from those factories, et cetera, and is that what we want games industry to be? I'd like to think not. And I'd like to think that there are ways perhaps of employing more people or just more creative ways of implementing certain features to the game that need to be found. I don't know, if things are so bad now that if it's gonna affect the company, the fact that workers want better conditions, they just have to come up with a better plan. They just have to completely adapt. That means completely rethinking their business strategy, their production management strategy, or throwing in their whatever they saved in the vaults, the investment money perhaps, not towards the studio hardware or what not but towards I guess recruitment and human resources and that. Then that's just something they have to do. Yeah, I'm sorry, times have changed. 2018 has proven that you can't get away with stuff any more and if that means there needs to be some sort of revolution and rethinking as to how they make games, well that's on them, but they can't be on the lowest, well it can't be on the workers, that's it. Times have changed, get on with the program. - [Danny] Marijam Didzgalvyte, thank you so much for your time today. Where can people find you on the wild world of the internet? - [Marijam] I post all of my controversial opinions on @MarijamDid on Twitter and my YouTube channel really is just the archive. I mostly post my videos on Twitter first and I will leave an archive on YouTube, but it's Left Left Up, and yeah, do check out my portfolio. I've written a lot of articles, I've done lots of panel discussions and guest lectures. I'm interested in sort of gaming communities, the push, the way for progressives to reclaim this space in an empathetic manner and looking at the modes of production of this huge industry and how can we change the cultural hegemony towards the better. Danny, thank you so much for covering this. It's been a huge pleasure, and I think we should be celebrating what we've achieved in the last year. Game Workers of the World, unite. Let's see what happens. - [Danny] Awesome. I have one more question for you actually, because I watched a really good lecture you did at the University of Lincoln. Just before I let you go, I'm basically saying you can take off your Game Workers United hat now and put on your sort of Left Left Up hat for this question. You did a really good talk, it's available on your YouTube channel with University of Lincoln, and there was one element that stood out to me, well sorry, it didn't stand out to me just in relation to this podcast, because next week our guest is Lucas Pope, who made Papers, Please. - [Marijam] Oh! - [Danny] I'm interested in your perspective on this, because obviously, Return of the Obra Dinn came out last year, his previous game, Papers, Please sort of came to great critical acclaim. Obviously your perspective I think is incredibly valuable on this, not just to somebody who sort of rallies against that sort of milk toast, pat yourself on the back liberalism that has dominated a lot of the speak of the left over the past couple of years, but also as somebody who's from Lithuania, a Baltic state, a former Soviet Bloc nation, and the sort of made up country of that game obviously lends itself somewhat to that sort of general culture politically. In that talk, you sort of talked about how the game was sort of, you don't like political games as it were. Can you speak to that a little bit? What is it about political games that you think is sort of preaching to the choir a little bit more? It doesn't actually change minds or make people do any sort of on the ground political work after they've played them? - [Marijam] Yes, oh, fascinating. Right, so I have to give a bit of context here. My master's was in art and politics. It was at the politics department of Goldsmiths University and the entirety of that course was an attempt to really understand how culture can affect political change or the other way around, and there was a lot of sort of dissection of political art in particular, so I think I've gained an understanding and a critique of political fine arts that I'm then applying to the games industry, which is obviously very, very late in this game when it comes to political themes, and the trend that has sort of sprung up in the fine art department has been, especially since sort of post-9/11, post 2001 WTO riots, et cetera, was that trend of very attempting to be high-brow political art that really doesn't look into modes of production. Because it is very edgy and fashionable and cool to create an object that gives you that high status of someone that is thinking of politics, that it sort of straight away it puts you into some sort of a holier-than-thou category, whereas real activism and real, I even hate that word, activism, but real change requires us looking into global manufacturing chains and looking at modes of production and looking at how our Western, I suppose, consumerism in a very real manner is affecting the global south, and these are questions that are not necessarily solved by these tokenistic pieces of art. I'm just sort of thinking ice, polar bears, or - [Danny] Right. - [Marijam] Or stuff like that, stuff like this that has just as you've basically just said before is just preaching to the converted. I don't think there is a political project in there that is just basically a way for a particular artist to feel a bit better about themselves with the fact, or even edgier or cooler with the fact that they've touched on a political theme. I am yet to find anyone, so yes, I've basically then wrote a critique of Papers, Please about two years ago that gained a bit of traction where I say that Lucas Pope has created this somewhat, I suppose one of the first viral politically-charged video games, then was traveling across the world, collecting awards, collecting a BAFTA for himself, and not ever really talking about real issues of migration, of our brutal borders, of the fact that United Kingdom, where he collected the BAFTA, imprisons hundreds of people in really brutal detention centers. Basically he used a very particular I guess theme, he sort of picked a particular battle that is not his, that he hasn't really done anything with it, hasn't really created any he hasn't pointed it out, pointed the capital he gained from it. I don't mean material capital, I mean social capital towards any real organizations that are trying to solve the migration issues or whatever you call them, and I just felt it was such a, yeah, it's a very sort of lazy liberal attempt and a very self-glorifying attempt at politics that I think should be challenged. I think there are more creative ways to achieve cultural significance and to basically attempt to convince people from the other side than this. I actually have examples in fine art, when I think certain fine artists do do that, so that would be Santiago Siarra, who really works with actual migrants in his work and then puts himself on the line as to being, so he pays for instance a prostitute, the amount that those of harem would cost and then he tattoos something on her and some people were like "Hey, but what are you "just abusing a prostitute or something?" And the prostitute actually tells that this person has given me more time and has looked at my issues more than most of these people that come to galleries ever would. Or Hans Hakia, who as actually done a lot of investigative journalism into Manhattan real estate industries and then literally in a gallery just produced all the evidence of corruption. Again, that's sort of real engaging with particular issues and trying to find a solution. In terms of video games, I was very impressed by the Uber game, which it sounds like a political game, but the Uber game was, basically it's an Uber simulator. You are just a driver, and it looks like it's not that much difficult of a job and I will, spoiler alert basically, at the end of it all it seems like you actually earned a lot of money. And then at the end of the game, all of your expenses go away and actually you see that you've earned like four full dollars an hour, et cetera, but that's not what interests me about it. What interests me about it is its mode of distribution. This game was released by a Financial Times, which is a center right wing, sorry, newspaper, right? If it was released by The Guardian, I would just think it's another quite sad liberal attempt, but because it is released by a right wing medium, I think it has a chance of actually changing someone's mind. I think modes of distribution are much more interesting way to apply politics into gaming than the form of them or the plot of them. That's why I've been very, very critical of the new Brexit games, that are just like "Ooh, Brexit will be a dystopia," and play in this terrible zombie land Brexit. Is there gonna be a Brexit voter that you're gonna show this video game to that is gonna be like "Oh shit, yeah, you're right, crap, that's true. "It will be a dystopia." No, it's just preaching to the other lib dems, and yeah, I just think it's such a lazy attempt at politics, however, it gives you a lot of social capital and it kills me. Sorry, so that's a long response to this but I just got so much, I've got a lot of passion towards this. - [Danny] Well I appreciate it, Marijam, thank you so much for your passion and your incredible insight. And thanks for sharing it with us today. We'd love to have you back on, maybe to talk about Game Workers Unite after another year or so. Who knows? - [Marijam] Yes, hopefully all the victories will happen in the next year. Thank you so much for covering this. - [Danny] Our pleasure. If you're listening, thank you so much for well, you are listening, because you're listening. Thank you so much for following our work. You can follow us at NoClipVideo on Twitter, I'm @DannyODwyer on Twitter you can hit it up, or /noclip for all our subreddit stuff, including a bunch of outreach stuff we're doing on there. If you're a patron, of course you get access to all of our special patron posts as well. Special thanks for our patrons for making all of this possible. I have the podcast available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, I think that's a thing, Google Play, we have a YouTube channel after the podcast, archive is separate to our regular video stuff so go searching for that. You can get this show earlier for our $5 tier, but otherwise it is ad-free and supported by our incredible patrons to listen to a day later. Thank you so much again for listening. Hit Patreon.com/NoClip for any more details on how to fund our work, and even if you don't, we'll see you next week. See you then.
We are joined again by Tim (@burgerdrome) to discuss his latest piece about Game Developer unionisation for Polygon: https://www.polygon.com/2019/1/16/18178332/game-developer-union-crunch Check out Game Workers Unite for more info: http://gameworkers.com.au/ *** Support our show and get exclusive bonus episodes by subscribing on Patreon: www.patreon.com/BoontaVista *** Merchandise available at: boontavista.com/merchandise *** Twitter: twitter.com/boontavista iTunes: tinyurl.com/y8d5aenm Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/s?fid=144888&refid=stpr Pocket Casts: pca.st/SPZB RSS: tinyurl.com/kq84ddb
(2019-01-21) - A conversation with Game Workers Unite representative, Marijam Didžgalvytė, about the past, present and future of game developer unionization efforts.
PUBG is secretly still more popular than Fortnite. We were surprised too! This week, Blizzard kills Heroes of the Storm’s esports scene, Discord launches a salvo in the publisher wars, and Game Workers Unite gets its first official union. Plus, Kingdom Hearts III leaks super early and Epic Games gets sued over flossing.Haven’t donated to our Extra Life fundraising efforts? There’s still time! Donate here: https://www.extra-life.org/participant/shelvedgamesWant to be a part of our Game of the Year discussion? Hop onto the Discord server and send us your list of the top 5 games you played in 2018! https://discord.gg/0cnPsuJSU8De134Z
Epic is getting sued by Carlton and "Backpack Kid", Steam might be making Xbox crossplay easier, we have a name for the next Xbox, Discord is offering devs a pretty good deal, HotS sees some cuts, the COO of Riot Games is getting some unpaid time off and Game Workers Unite is official in the UK!
In den letzten Wochen wurde viel darüber diskutiert, unter welchen Arbeitsbedingungen „Red Dead Redemption 2“ entstanden ist. In dieser Folge „RUSH“ interviewen wir einen ehemaligen Rockstar-Mitarbeiter und besprechen das größte Videospiel des Jahres. Außerdem: Ein wilder Ritt durch die Geschichte des Western-Genres. 00:00:00 Was habt ihr gespielt? Red Dead Redemption 2, Pokémon Ultra Sonne, Hitman 2, Call of Cthulu, Fallout 76, Dead By Daylight 00:06:33 Red Dead Redemption 2 in einem Wort 00:10:30 Die Welt 00:18:50 Das Gameplay 00:35:58 Interview mit Martin Ganguly über die Geschichte des Westerns 00:44:30 Die Story 00:56:30 Arbeitsbedingungen bei Rockstar Games 01:09:00 Interview mit Declan Peach von Game Workers Unite UK 01:19:00 Sollten Spiele-Reviews auch über Arbeitsbedingungen bei Entwicklern sprechen? Das Interview mit Declan Peach auf Deutsch: RUSH: Hallo Declan, erzähl doch mal von deinem Werdegang. Declan Peach: Ich bin ungefähr seit zwei Jahren in der Industrie. Ich hab meinen Master in England gemacht und in einem kleinen Indie-Studio als Designer gearbeitet. Ich hab mich immer schon für die Politik rund ums Arbeitsrecht interessiert. Meine Eltern waren Gewerkschaftler. Und in der Uni wurde uns immer erzählt, dass es Crunch-Kultur und viele intrinsische Probleme in der Games-Industrie gibt. Und als ich von Game Workers Unite gehört habe, habe ich ihnen direkt eine E-Mail geschrieben. Ich hätte aber nicht gedacht, dass ich derjenige sein würde, der den britischen Ableger von Game Workers Unite gründen und koordinieren würde. Aber kein anderer wollte es machen, also hab ich es gemacht. Und jetzt gründen wir eine Gewerkschaft im Vereinigten Königreich. Im Vereinigten Königreich ist ja auch der Geburtsort der Gewerkschaftsbewegung. Wissen bei euch viele junge Leute was Gewerkschaften sind? Nein. Junge Leute wissen das nicht und das ist ein großes Problem, auf das wir immer wieder gestoßen sind. Die Menschen verstehen nicht so ganz die Rolle der Gewerkschaften im modernen Arbeitsrecht, vor allem im Vereinigten Königreich. Wie erklärst du jungen Leuten, was eine Gewerkschaft ist? Ich erkläre, dass man sich in der Gewerkschaft unabhängig vom Arbeitgeber trifft und sagt: Okay, wir haben eine Macht, dass wir zum Beispiel streiken könnten oder dein Geschäft stören, wenn du nicht mit uns verhandelst, um unsere Situation zu verbessern, zum Beispiel die Bezahlung. Viele verstehen nicht, dass es das ist, was eine Gewerkschaft macht. Viele wissen nicht, dass es das ist, wofür Gewerkschaften gegründet wurden. So erkläre ich es und das lieben junge Leute dann. Das klingt für sie großartig. Ja, ich finde es witzig, dass wir jetzt in der Gaming-Branche so viel über dieses sehr alte Konzept der Gewerkschaften sprechen. Ja, in der Tech-Industrie ist das total interessant, weil sie sich gegründet hat, als die Gewerkschaften gerade sehr schwach waren, in den Neunzigern. Und jetzt ist es zu einem Punkt gekommen, an dem wir sagen: Es gibt echt Sachen, die wir tun könnten. Wir können zusammen verhandeln und für eine bessere Situation kämpfen. Wie habt ihr den Launch von Red Dead Redemption 2 erlebt? Das war interessant. Rockstar ist historisch nicht so großartig zu seinen Mitarbeitern. Es ist einfach so eine riesige Organisation. Und die Dinge, die sie produzieren, sind so riesig. Ich habe von Leuten gehört, die dort in der Qualitätssicherung arbeiten, dass ihre Arbeitsstunden schlecht sind und dass Überstunden verpflichtend sind und erwartet werden. Aber es war interessant als Dan Houser stolz getwittert hat, dass manche von ihnen vor Release 100-Stunden-Wochen gearbeitet haben. Und dann gab es diesen Backlash, vor allem wegen Bewegungen wie unserer, die diese Zustände kritisieren. Und deswegen kam dieses Thema in die Öffentlichkeit. Das ist natürlich toll für uns. Aber es ist schrecklich, dass so etwas heute noch passiert. Er hat es dann zurück genommen und gesagt, dass es nur er und ein paar Writer waren. Aber ich habe mit vielen Rockstar-Mitarbeitern gesprochen und ich weiß, dass sie sehr viele Überstunden machen. Aber das sind normale Probleme in der Triple-A-Industrie. Diesmal sind sie halt aufgrund der Größe des Unternehmens an die Öffentlichkeit geraten. Also würdest du sagen, dass das normale Probleme in der Games-Industrie sind? Die gab es schon immer. Aber immer mehr Leute in der Industrie kritisieren diese Verhältnisse. Beim Dan Houser-Tweet war so interessant, dass dann Josh Sawyer, Designer von "Fallout: New Vegas" gesagt hat, dass so etwas nicht okay ist. Welche anderen Probleme gibt es noch in der Games-Industrie? Das was bei Rockstar passiert, ist bei anderen Firmen nicht wirklich anders. Es gibt da Crunch-Time, kurze instabile Verträge - nicht nur für Qualitätssicherer sondern auch für Entwickler. Es gibt schlimme Arbeitskulturen nicht nur gegen Frauen und People of Color. Ja, das gibt es alles häufig. Man hört von Crunch, schlimmen Verträgen und Gehältern bei Rockstar, bei Ubisoft, bei Sega, bei jeder großen Firma. Rockstar ist überhaupt nicht besonders. Aber es hat sich etwas geändert, weil jetzt die Öffentlichkeit drüber redet. Ja klar, dass wir jetzt drüber reden und dass Dan Housers Kommentare so einen Backlash hatten, ist ein richtig gutes Zeichen. Ich glaube vor anderthalb Jahren hätte das niemanden interessiert. Was macht ihr gerade, um Spieleentwicklern zu helfen, sich zu organisieren? Wir versuchen, selbst eine Gewerkschaft zu werden. Wir schließen uns einer großen Gewerkschaft an und wollen in der ganzen Industrie im Vereinigten Königreich agieren können. Und dann? Ich will versuchen, mehr Mitglieder zu rekrutieren. Und wir wollen herausfinden, was wir wirklich für Entwickler tun können. Zum Beispiel in Bezug auf Crunch. Wollen wir Studios dafür belohnen, wenn sie keinen Crunch haben? Oder wollen wir mit Studios verhandeln, die für Crunch stehen? Wir wollen das in einem langen Prozess herausfinden. Wenn alles ratifiziert ist, fängt die richtige Arbeit an. Was können die Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten denn tun, um die Entwickler zu unterstützen? Wenn sie nicht boykottieren, dann sollten sie Entwicklern sagen, was sie von diesen Dingen halten. Sagt den Entwicklern: Ich will euer Spiel nicht spielen, weil ich weiß, wie ihr eure Entwickler behandelt. Als Entwickler weiß ich, dass wir sehr genau hinhören, wenn die Spieler mit uns reden. Wenn Entwickler merken, dass die Spiele sich für diese Dinge interessieren, dann würden sie vielleicht umdenken. Ich glaube ein Boykott würde nicht funktionieren, aber man kann immer andere über die Gewerkschaftsbewegung informieren. Der Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/kultur/rush-red-dead-redemption-2
This week on Nice Games Club we talk all about the labor of love that is making games for a living: how it can be great, how it can be not-so-great and how it could get better. Mark reports back from a conference, Martha gets on her soap box and Stephen realizes this podcast has been about documenting his career journey this entire time.Joggernauts by local developer Space Mace is on Steam and Switch!Joggernauts soundtrack by Robert Frost IIIAdobe MAX Game Dev as a Day Job 0:11:44 Stephen McGregorIRLStephen works at Gamesmart!Glitch Jobs BoardGamasutra Jobs Board - Game Developer Unions 0:38:53 Martha MegarryIRLTwin Cities Labor ChorusTelltale hit with class-action lawsuit for breaking labor laws - Samit Sarkar, PolygonInside Rockstar Games' Culture Of Crunch - Jason Schreier, KotakuVox UnionGame Workers UniteIt's Time For Game Developers To Unionize - Jason Schreier, KotakuOpinion: Now is the time to unionize the game industry - Katherine Cross, Game DeveloperMyles Horton - 20th Century Union Organizer - WikipediaUnions Must Address Racism - Ian Haney Lopez, AFL-CIO Blog
This week on Nice Games Club we talk all about the labor of love that is making games for a living: how it can be great, how it can be not-so-great and how it could get better. Mark reports back from a conference, Martha gets on her soap box and Stephen realizes this podcast has been about documenting his career journey this entire time. Joggernauts by local developer Space Mace is on Steam and Switch! Joggernauts soundtrack by Robert Frost III Adobe MAX Game Dev as a Day Job 0:11:44 Stephen McGregor Category IRL Stephen works at Gamesmart! Glitch Jobs Board Gamasutra Jobs Board - Gamasutra
We continue to investigate what went wrong at Telltale Games leading up to the layoff of 275 game developers. Our panel includes previous developers from Telltale Games, Emily Grace Buck and Travis Goodwin. We also welcome back our friend Emma Kinema from Game Workers Unite to explain how Unionization could have helped and what we could do as game developers to be safe in the workplace again.
On this bonus episode of the OK Beast Podcast, Emma of Game Workers Unite joins Blessing to discuss development crunch, labor practices, and unionization. Talk to us on Twitter: Alex; Blessing; Brandon; Ian; OK Beast; The OK Beast Podcast is OKBeast.com’s weekly show dedicated to the biggest topics in video games and culture. If you enjoyed the show and would like […] The post Unionization and Creating Better Labor Practices (Feat. Emma of Game Workers Unite) – OK Beast Podcast Bonus Episode appeared first on OK Beast.
Tim Colwill of Point & Clickbait infamy joins us this week to chat about Game Workers Unite and mobilising to support and empower games workers in an often unforgiving industry. We also muse on the highs and lows of competitive Overwatch, the evolution of Assassin’s Creed, Destiny 2’s Festival of ... Read more
![A Podcast [ , ] For All Intents and Purposes](https://ivyfm.s3.amazonaws.com/i320/918597.jpg)
WEEK IN GEEK: This week, it's a dive into the Fall tv shows that both our hosts were excited to see as Andrew watches the first episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats: Reloaded while D. Bethel reacts to the first three episodes of the second season of The Gifted. GAMES WORKERS UNITE: In the wake of massive layoffs by developers like Telltale Games and Riot Games, The Vulture published an article under the auspice of being a "behind the scenes" look at Red Dead Redemption 2's development at Rockstar Games. The article sparked a lot of controversy, specifically around the (walked back) claim of the team working 100-hour weeks multiple times during 2018 to make sure this game is top of the line in terms of quality. These incidents bring again a highlight to the labor practices of game development, through which D. and Andrew try to wade. RELEVANT EPISODES: Episode 55 - Ga-Don't-Ken: Where Andrew first discusses Alton Brown's Good Eats. Episode 128 - His Curry Name: Where Andrew reminisces about seeing the Alton Brown live show, Eat Your Science. Episode 147 - Whatever We Bring, We Bring It: Where D. discusses the first season premiere of Fox's The Gifted. Shortcast 40 - Shortcast Your Mom: Where D. Bethel gives his impressions after the first season finale of The Gifted. Shortcast 70 - Mr. Moustache: Where Andrew and D. discuss their hopes for upcoming fall tv. LINKS: "Alterna Comics Publisher Issues Statement About Social Media Policy." Comic Book Resources. CBR, 11 Sep. 2018. Batchelor, James. "Rockstar has been 'working 100-hour weeks' on Red Dead Redemption 2." GamesIndustry.Biz. Gamer Network, 15 Oct. 2018. Cross, Katherine. "What Will Be Left of the People Who Make Our Games?" Polygon. Vox Media, 17 Oct. 2018. Game Workers Unite!" GamesWorkersUnite. Goldberg, Harold. "How the West was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2." Vulture. New York Media, LLC, 14 Oct. 2018. Klepek, Patrick. "The Industry Won't Change if Reporters Let the Powerful Off the Hook." Waypoint. Vice Media, 15 Oct. 2018. Matadeen, Renaldo. "Creator Claims He Was 'Forced Off' Alterna Book Over Block Chain Ban." Comic Book Resources. CBR, 02 Sep. 2018. INFO: Visit our website at forallintents.net and leave your thoughts as comments on the page for this episode. Join our Facebook page E-mail: Andrew - andrew@forallintents.net, D. Bethel - dbethel@forallintents.net Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Subscribe to and review the show on the iTunes store. For all intents and purposes, that was an episode recap. FEATURED MUSIC: -"Disco Medusae" by Kevin McLeod (incompetech.com)* -"District Four" by Kevin McLeod (incompetech.com)* *Tracks are licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by game developer and cofounder of Game Workers Unite Emma Kinema and journalist and game designer Ian Williams for an in-depth discussion of the context and challenges of unionizing workers in the video games industry. The gang begins with Ian’s 2016 article laying out the case for game developers organizing. Ian and Emma describe the exploitative labor practices of major companies and how the uniqueness of the industry compounds the difficulty of organizing. Emma describes the current efforts of Game Workers Unite to create an international network of solidarity and guidance and build a unionized games industry. Emma and Ian talk about the history of unionization efforts by game workers, refute some common arguments used to dismiss game workers' fights to win power in the workplace, and explain how the conservative leanings of the industry impact organizing campaigns. Follow Emma on Twitter @EmmaKinema and Ian @brock_toon. You can also follow Game Workers Unite @GameWorkers, and find out how to get involved on their website. A transcript for this episode will be provided upon request. Please send an email to deleteuracct @ gmail to get a copy sent to you when it is completed.If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon page for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes. We can't do this show without your support!!!
Auf der letztjährigen Games Developer Conference (GDC) machte erstmals eine Organisation von sich reden: Game Workers Unite verteilte Handzettel und lud alle Interessierten ein, sich gewerkschaftlich zu organisieren.
In the midst of the ArenaNet debacle, we bring on Emma from Game Workers Unite to discuss how labor practices within the gaming industry need reform and how unionization can help fix the problem.
Our special 100th episode guest is Tim Colwill, creator of Point & Clickbait and union organiser of the Australian chapter of Game Workers Unite. Point & Clickbait is a satirical gaming news site, described as The Onion but for games journalism, that aims to call attention to all the things that gamers and the games industry take too seriously, or doesn't take seriously enough. With a recent successful Kickstarter campaign under his belt for a print magazine version, Tim shared his thoughts on games journalism and what writing good satire should achieve. Game Workers Unite is a budding unionisation effort that formed around the 2018 Game Developers Conference, and part of a broader effort to stop workers in the games industry getting exploited for their passion. Tim is part of the organisation efforts to start Game Workers Unite Australia and draws on his work in an Australian union. Tim shares his thoughts on why unionisation is an important step for developers, journalists, streamers and anyone working in games and how pulling together makes everything better for everyone. Pixel Sift is produced by Scott Quigg, Sarah Ireland, Fiona Bartholomaeus & Mitch Loh. Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer. .Thanks to Salty Dog Sounds for some of our promo music this week. SPONSOR: Thank you to Murdoch University School of Arts for their support over every single episode of Pixel Sift. We couldn't have done it without you. If you want to bolster your skills in media, journalism or game development, check out the Murdoch University School of Arts website for more information! You can find us on social media, Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, YouTube and Steam. Just search for "pixelsift"
Brendan is joined by the new co-host of You Game Bro?, Mr. Nato J & filling in for a very sick Ally is her brother Alexander! On this episode the trio dive into: - Australian point and click classic, Paradigm - Brendan living his best life courtesy of Jurassic World Evolution - Game Workers Unite chime in on the Arenanet controversies - The latest news around the Mortal Kombat movie reboot - ESPN & Disney partnering up for the Overwatch League Plus lots more gaming related banter & nonsense!
Welcome to Soundbyte, an audio mini-series that explores topics in the games industry. In our first episode, Astrid Johnson talks us through unionisation in the games industry. She speaks to Doug Cockle, aka Geralt of Rivia, about his negative experiences in the recording booth, and ‘Emma’ from Game Workers Unite, who explains the challenges of unionising. On top of that, we hear from two worker-owned studios, including the creators of Dead Cells. Links: The voice actor strike started in 2016: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/10/17/voice-actor-strike/ And was later suspended after a tentative agreement: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/09/26/voice-actor-strike-suspended-as-tentative-agreement-reached/ Adam’s coverage of the GDC unionisation debacle: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/23/the-game-industry-needs-to-change-and-it-begins-now/ Game Workers Unite website: https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ Pixel Pusher's website: http://www.pixelpushersunion-512.com/ Dead Cells is a good game: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/dead-cells/ Motion Twin's website: http://motion-twin.com/en/
Emma from Game Workers Unite gives us the roadmap for seeing a unionized game industry come to fruition. We find out what the importance of unions are, and what benefits and rights us developers should look forward to. Also, from the perspective of employers and companies we discuss what unionizing could mean in FAVOR of a company and how companies and corporations can co-exist with unionized game developers! Follow on Twitter: @EmmaKinema @GameWorkers https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ Goto megascans.se and enter code GDU for 30% off for the first three months! Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/gamedevunchained Check us out on our website www.gamedevunchained.com/ Join our community on Discord discord.gg/sJtGmpV Give us a rating on iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/game-…d1043547750?mt=
We welcome Liz Ryerson (@ellaguro) to the show to talk about the recent and powerful unionization effort at GDC, as well as her role in and evaluation of the nascent Game Workers Unite collective!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/no-cartridge-audio/donationsWant to advertise on this podcast? Go to https://redcircle.com/brands and sign up.
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