Play to Submission

Games are often a fun perk of a tech company job, and employees can play to win in the competition to succeed. But in studying Behemoth (a pseudonym for a top American tech company), Tongyu Wu discovered that gaming work culture was far more insidious. Play to Submission shows how Behemoths games undermined and manipulated workers. They lost their work-life balance and the constant competition made labor organizing difficult. Nonetheless, many workers embraced managements games as a chance to show off their gamer identities and create a workplace culture with privileged insiders and exiled outsiders, with female and migrant workers usually in the latter group. Moreover, Wu indicates this may be the future of work for high- and low-skilled and, creative workers in an environment where capitalists have heightened demands for technology and creativity. Drawing from 13 months of ethnographic work, Wu presents a persistent reality in which the company reaps the reward of surplus productivity, leaving employees themselves in a highly competitive and sometimes precarious work position.