Gameindustry.biz - Rockstar has been “working 100-hour weeks” on Red Dead Redemption 2

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Very much this, I get the desire to frame BF2 as proof that boycotts are effective collective direct action, but it’s an exception to the rule because EA turned a massive cultivated revenue stream on themselves, they basically fucked up in their own little popsicle-stick free market utopia. I mean, the big milestone for how successful it was is how an individual employee’s post was the most downvoted in reddit’s history, you know, reddit, the quasi-ch@nner hellscape everyone still ignores the historical heinous bullshit of? the one where right-wing populism leads to any mildly unpopular opinion getting hits put on people’s families, social and business reputation and lives? That one?

Boycotts tend to deny incentives to pursue novel revenue streams, unions tend to deny incentives to exploit labour in any way without repercussion. The only time they’re not generally mutually exclusive is if unions fuckin exist in the first place.

Hell, BF2 wasn’t even effective just because it caused a international political incident. Ghost Recon Wildlands almost disrupted international trade because of its violent imperialist propaganda bullshit, but that doesn’t inconvenience frustrated boys or any whale (ugh) seeking trends so it got like two articles even addressing it, and Clancy’s™ games ain’t going anywhere, eh?

Anyone grandstanding over either position on Whether You Should Buy It based on the labor exploitation alone is missing the forest for the trees. If the game does well, the top gets paid the most, then decides from their high throne whether it’s enough to bestow salary bonuses upon their oh-so-goddamn privileged-to-work-here peons; the game does poorly, the top is kept far beyond “afloat” and get the cathartic security of punishing their workers however they see fit and at worst have to account for a slight course change in a career they can basically afford treat as a hobby.

If you want to not buy it because you’re uncomfortable by what you know about it, that’s good and you’re a million miles away from wrong! I personally don’t want to because I’m yucked out by the labor practices and RDR being actively whitewashed colonial bullshit and Rockstar’s creative leads being historical scumbags who think rapists, torturers, and victims of rape and torture are hi-lar-ious, and used the platform of literally the most financially successful media product in the world to normalize those nightmarish views to young people and older validation-seeking scumbags alike. That’s far from the only narrative they’ve reinforced that’s made progress in this godforsaken medium a nightmare, either.

…but holding Rockstar’s feet to the fire like they damn well should is something large outlets won’t do beyond token mentions for any reason, because it heavily risks blacklisting that would likely affect their typically-already-unstable revenue streams, which leads to the heads of those sites probably encouraging writers not to bring it to too much attention, and it’s already been brought up how Metacritic is valued as a tool of the free market (ugggghh) while inevitably valuing multitudes of small rags that need to play to the most rabid validation gangs to keep safe and afloat, skewing the average anyway and reinforcing the whole damn cycle.

That’s not even getting into the personal aspects of security, considering that GTA V came out before GG and still had any minority voice who gave it below a tangible 9.5 getting death and career threats. R*‘s been in the cultivated identity game for a long time, they know how to manipulate an intersecting pressure that gets people from all angles to fall in line; it’s why even people they treated like absolute shit sometimes see it as a privilege and “ultimately good” that they were clearly exploited by such a prestigious fuckin’ entity.

Even if some individual or small group choices to not buy RDR2 did snowball into a trend by some incredible force of luck against every cultural incentive stacking the odds, it wouldn’t affect the labour aspect of the industry the way anyone’d likely want it to, that’s not historically how companies change their behavior toward employees. As long as the bosses of whole entities have unchecked power over their workers, the workers will be the only ones who suffer any perceived failure of the whole entity, but there’s also this bit that’s left out of veneered concern-marketing: Workers won’t not suffer if the entity “succeeds”, they’ll just be maybe treated slightly less shittily for a few paydays under pretense of being bestowed the very privilege to work.

I know it’s frustrating and sucks to just say “We need unionization” over and over when most anyone on this site isn’t in an industry position to really help that cause in AAA through direct action, and hell, anyone close enough to that couldn’t even say so for risk of losing their position entirely, because corporate pigs are always watching. We all want to believe our disempowered consumptive choices still make some small but tangible difference to make things better. I still have that desire and beliefs around it, I don’t want people to buy a thing that textually supports the grossest of gross garbage for just the smidge of a chance it’ll work a tiny bit against the normalization to whatever awful ideology it expresses, and I’ll openly rag on it every chance I get. Does it ever work in any case? Hell if I know! But it’s worth doing just for the chance.

In this case, though, for the labor cause specifically, non-consumption is fine, but the nature of how everything’s set up without unionization means even if it did do something, it wouldn’t be the cut-and-dry good thing you’d want. Even if you got more people to become non-consumers, it would not help this cause in particular, nor would it arguably hurt it, at most it would just shift the tactics bosses use for exploitation a bit away from the hot trend. It’s ultimately going to act as a choice for personal validation of principles, and that can be healthy on a personal basis, certainly healthier than any spiteful contrarian asshole buying it to own the libs, but it won’t make your actions in the moment inherently better or more useful than anyone else’s…

…Buuut again, I do just mean this for current labour causes. Like, seriously, fuck Rockstar forever anyway, their creative leads are angry regressive baby boomers who’ve made a whole reputation on coddling frustrated white teenage-to-20-something boys to become wannabe baby boomers, and probably had a considerable effect on the bullshit political climate with all that garbage.

I’m just woke posturing for all this post, really, just don’t fuckin buy this bullshit for a multitude of reasons instead of just the one.

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It takes a massive mainstream media debacle to impact a game’s sales figures on a level that can be actually measured. The real concern that people at the top have is stockholders expressing possible doubts in the long-term viability of their corporate brand when it’s mired in negative conversation.

This usually doesn’t happen for games because they don’t reach mainstream news attention outside of specific instances (Battlefront 2, Pokemon Go, Fortnite), and since stockholders typically glean their evaluations from media perceptions, the biggest entities within games as a business rarely have reason to be concerned.

Buying or not buying the game on an individual or even collective level just doesn’t have the impact we want it to have. The biggest impact comes from maintaining conversation over unethical practices, as it not only creates an uncertainty for stockholders that publisher owners can’t ignore, but it increases the likelihood that individual workers will be more confident to engage in collective labor action.

For those reasons, it’s especially frustrating for a site like Polygon to completely ice that ongoing conversation in order to reap the current hot SEO from consumers interested in the game. They are simply not on the workers side in this engagement.

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This is basically just splitting hairs and what you say here still applies but they are definitely not baby boomers, they’re gen x-ers and their attitudes and worldviews are EXTREMELY in line with other edgy idiot gen-xers like the south park guys and like, every other washed up white libertarian 40-something wannabe comedy writer who thinks being cynically hateful towards everyone “equally” somehow makes them objectively the most correct human beings alive

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That’s fair, I think that shorthand for “shitty old white dudes” popped in my head just because the specific filmmaking they really really really think they evoke is very old white dad shit to me, specifically every time they think they’re Michael Mann. Also one of the only parts of GTA V’s haze of nonsense i haven’t blanked out is an old white dad listening to Phil Collins by a pool.

Plus, the only people I personally know who would care about a straight-faced mopey white western at this point are actual boomers. Associations. :woman_shrugging:

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Right, an organized boycott can and should be a component of an overall movement towards workers rights in the industry. If and when a movement towards unionization starts really picking up steam, boycotts can be organized strategically to hit those companies that are fighting against it, for example. This kind of movement is very unlikely to be driven by consumer boycotts.

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That is highly understandable lmao and I think you’re 100% right that the housers do WISH they were boomers re: their constant emulation of boomer cinema

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It’s all extremely on-the-nose character writing with a winking notion of “aha, but you see, these seem like predictable character archetypes, but they’re actually extremely complex!” pervading through every line of dialogue.

There is either no thematic throughput to speak of (pretty much all of the GTA 3 sequels), or the central theme is something totally unoriginal and obvious (GTA IV’s “American Dream” angle, V’s idea of “people living a lie”). By any other storytelling medium’s standards, these would be very humdrum, forgettable works.

I know this isn’t the story discussion thread, but I’ve always found the Houser’s writing to be incredibly boring and not worth the incredible amounts of work put into the audiovisual craft of these games.

Here’s my extremely hot take: Kane & Lynch 2 is leaps and bounds more interestingly written and presented than GTA V could ever hope to be.

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Oh hey, it’s us, 2 of the 5 people who found Kane & Lynch 2 incredibly interesting, lol

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i contest that every protagonist excluding Nico and maybe CJ has been a nihilistic centrist who subscribes to the mentality “everybody sucks equally”

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make that three. I never finished that game because it actually gets pretty hard by the end and the controls ain’t great but Kane and Lynch 2 had ideas, dammit!

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It is not without it’s problems. There is definitely a othering of the Shanghai people in that game, and the rape/torture scene is… Well, it’s a lot.

But there’s something I admire about the Kane & Lynch series that nosedives into the idea that, “These two are evil criminals. Everything they do is horrible, ugly, and without redemption. You are controlling them.”

The Housers’ constantly struggle with making their bad guys sympathetic, while K&L is like, ‘fuck that.’

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Re: Kane & Lynch 2:

More games need to let me run my gross nude oily body through the streets with bad video artifacting to hide my shame.

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Heavy CW/TW for anyone who googles stuff with Kane & Lynch 2 (especially since it’s near the part with the aforementioned running around naked stuff): There’s extremely graphic audio production of rape you’re essentially forced to listen to over a loading screen.

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Correction: it’s not “good”, it’s just an example of another very gritty crime drama that exemplifies how comparatively toothless GTA V is in its narrative and social commentary. You probably shouldn’t play Kane & Lynch 2.

Even if Rockstar’s games were amazing transcendent art, I wouldn’t ever say it was worth the human toll that was required to finish it. But since it’s Rockstar we’re talking about here, it’s hard not to gripe about how gaming culture has held up their work as amazing transcendent art which validates every developer life it effectively ruined.

It’s a bad game. But that shouldn’t affect the argument about the unethical means that were taken to create it, positively or negatively.

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The Guardian staying on this particular topic with one of their comment pieces from Keza MacDonald:

For a long time, players rarely thought much about what it took to create the games they loved. Now they are becoming more sensitive to the welfare of developers. As a journalist I have seen how game development can chew people up and spit them out without even putting their name in the credits. It’s not just about overtime, it’s about the idea that people are owned by the companies they work for: that they should be smiling emissaries on social media, and sign agreements preventing them from ever talking about their employers. This needs to change, across the board.

I don’t believe that boycotting all games is necessary. (If I had worked for years on a game, nothing would make me sadder than the idea that people weren’t playing it.) But it is necessary to stand up for workers’ rights, and think about them when we play. Draw attention to them when they speak out, on social media and elsewhere. Demand that they are well-compensated. Support their push for unionisation. Sixty-hour weeks should not be applauded as a sign of dedication to players’ needs. I hope that in the near future, we can play even the most technically ambitious, demanding games knowing that not a single person had to sacrifice their happiness to make them.

I am still glad for (and will continue to try and keep a record of) pieces that continue to stir the pot on this discussion. If this is to be helpful, gotta show folks that there’s interest in this kind of discussion.

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So this

reminded me of the coverage of “It’s Mario time”.

Miyamoto would come to us at 11 PM, after he finished all of his board-member work, and say, “It’s Mario time.” At that point, we’d start a planning meeting that would run until 2 AM. At that point, Miyamoto would go home, leaving us with the words, “You should return home soon, for your health.” Over the next two or three hours, we’d write the game design documents and summarize the instructions for our artists and programmers.

It was the craziest crunch time that I’ve ever experienced in my development career. But if the God of Games was working so much, could we give up? Miyamoto had incredible stamina.

Haha, so quaint. The loveable senior executive from Nintendo making people work until 4-5am because he wanted to have meetings that ran until 2am. But he’s such an important and happy person so we just had to do it. Who wouldn’t be happy for such working conditions?

Not only do we need to expect more from coverage of this issue going forward, we need to be honest about the ways companies are going to try and change the messaging and look for how they have avoided splashback from the previous revelations that would presumably lead to calls to blacklist a company who engage in such labour exploitation.

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This is an incredibly important point and it speaks to the quite frankly alarming culture of cult of personality that surrounds some game execs. These are people that absolutely have it in their power to come out and take a stand against abhorrent behavior like this and they’re just as guilty of it as everybody else, if not more so.

Miyamoto, Kojima, the Housers, Cage (urgh), all of them are part of perpetuating the crunch culture and no amount of quirky charm or dignified silence will change that. The only thing that will change it is them coming out and taking a clear and loud stand against this shit.

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“It’s Mario Time.”

Never thought that phrase would sound so sinister…

There are a number of references to go back to when thinking about Japanese crunch. My go to is a video where the Giant Bomb crew are watching a collection of old behind-the-scenes videos of games, and I believe they are watching one for Gran Turismo 2… It had footage of people living under their desks basically, bragging about how they haven’t showered in weeks. I wish I could remember the name of the video, but I think they featured some clips in a best of compilation.

I met some people in Japan while I was there a few years back. One person I met specifically said she worked on Dragon Quest Builders, I believe. Anyway, I don’t remember if she said anything about crunch, but there’s also the constantly toxic Japanese work culture there to deal with. So, not only do you have crunch, but you are not expected to go on vacations at ANY TIME. It’s highly discouraged. She also talked about how, as a woman, she’s CONSTANTLY pressured by her male peers to get married and have kids, to be more a traditionalist. I think she said something like, “Well, that’s Japan…”

When I hear shit like this, part of me wonders about stories about Kojima’s studio, and maybe that he was fired for a fucking reason. The narrative there seems to be that people loved him, but MGSV was a huge game that took a lot of work and multiple years of development. Was that game just not sustainable? Was Kojima pushing people too hard, stretching the goals of this game way too far?

We have to acknowledge how far crunch reaches even outside of the U.S. America doesn’t really set a good example for anything world wide, but we can and should do games better. We should have studio culture that respects its employees, and that respect should reach out internationally to places like Nintendo and CDPR.

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I’ve definitely seen documentary interviews from stuff like the old days of Sega where working conditions like that (working as life - the extreme end of “salaryman” concept) were common. Of course, when I think about research life and some of the rules (if you are working in the office out of hours then work in pairs due to lack of security; try to avoid working between midnight and 6am), it’s far from a unique regional concept (that some offices are almost never “shut” and some people end up living the job).

It was good to see Sega’s recent reports about overtime, although there is still plenty of room for further improvement.

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The way Kojima left had a huge stench around it. Not just on how he left on rumors of going massively over-budget and constantly missing deadlines. But how he was evangelized for it really stunk. Turned out he left behind most of the old Kojima Productions behind and only brought a few onto his new team, then hired up separately. He branded his new venture sob story of how he was a visionary robbed of his dream was ruthlessly monetized by himself and Sony as a commodity. And the core gamers just ate it up without questioning because Japanese work culture is toxic and Konami did pretty much what most companies do in that situation to try get people to leave so it’s easy and lucrative to say “Fuck Konami”. Like, I ain’t taking Konami’s side cause lets face it, it sucks. But looking back on it, it was extremely awful and manipulative to take people’s work situation and use it as a weapon or a brand.

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