ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 Behemoth’s games undermined and manipulated workers. They lost their work-life balance and the constant competition made labor organizing difficult. Nonetheless, many workers embraced management’s 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Tongyu Wu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University in China.

REVIEWS

"Through a series of vivid storytelling and theoretical interventions, Wu explores how gaming culture—especially the sociality of competitive online games—not only shapes worker interactions but also indirectly influences labor control and labor power extraction through various 'work games'.... Beyond its value as a robust and captivating ethnography, Play to Submission offers a historical lens on the accumulation and iteration of informational capitalism."—Social Forces

"Play to Submission's focus on a field of games extends traditional labor game research to new contexts and provides a useful perspective for investigating labor control in creative, immaterial industries.... Wu is attentive to workers’ forms of resistance throughout her book.... [Play to Submission] will therefore be important reading for scholars in game production studies and in broader studies of creative and immaterial labor."—Work and Occupations

“The book convincingly argues that through game-focused discourses...workers find agency that leads to overlooking exploitation and even drives them to self-surveillance and self-management.... Wu’s incisive study of the totalizing effect of these dozens of different games stands as one of the chief contributions of this project. There is much to be learned here about the people and the companies creating the platforms we now spend so much of our lives within.”—American Journal of Sociology

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Welcoming Gamers to the Wonderland—A Workplace Permeated with Games

3. Simulation Games and the Establishment of Gamified Governmentality

4. Hegemony or Not: A Comparison between the Collection and the Ticket Game

5. The Donut Email Game and the Construction of Chaotic Fun

6. Out of the Game: Peasant Coders’ Suffering under Behemoth’s Gamification

7. Conclusion

Appendix A: Overview of a Field of Games

Appendix B: Basic Information on Interviewees

Appendix C: Demographic Questionnaire

Notes

References

Index

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