Left should be on the gaming battlefield, says Marxist researcher

“Workers will only get the reforms they deserve when they can rally freely and forcefully,” says a pixelated Karl Marx, before giving the player a mission on the other side of the screen: to get reports that are inside a factory.

The scene from the game Assassin’s Creed Syndicate was the inspiration for the British sociologist Jamie Woodcock to link his two worlds, until then separated: Marxism and games.

“It’s a discussion between two people, the one who is interested in video games but knows nothing about Marx, and the one who knows Marx but knows nothing about video games. They can learn from each other,” he says in a video call interview. The Sheet.

The result of this meeting is the book “Marx no Arcade: videogames and class struggle”, released in 2020 in Brazil by the publisher Autonomia Literária. The text is an analysis of the gaming industry and also a call to Marxists to a field in which the right has won the battles.

“We saw how the right was able to organize itself effectively not only in the gaming world, but also in online culture in general,” he says. “The right has developed a set of tactics and strategies for using popular culture that will take a long time for the left to catch up to.”

Is the perception that the gaming environment is conservative correct? People often say that gamer culture is conservative and reactionary. We would never say that about movies, for example. We would say that there are communities with a better culture and others with a worse culture.

The same happens in games. There are progressive communities around some games, there are others not so progressive. And there are far-right communities.

Most people will play video games at some point. I think it’s more a matter of thinking about the differences: there are groups with more reactionary elements, as there are in society more broadly.

You wrote in your book that “Marxists should be more interested in video games”. Why? For two reasons. First, if you want, as a Marxist, to understand the production system, the games industry is an important industry.

The combination of work in the North and the South, the role of logistics, software, in short, is an important case study to understand capitalism.

On the other hand, I think that Marxists should be interested in video games in the same way that they should be interested in other popular cultural manifestations, in which ideas are debated and criticized.

We must have something to say about culture in the same way that Marx had something to say about theater and popular novels. It is in these spaces that people understand the world.

Is the left battling in this field? I think that, in general, the left is not effectively fighting in this field. We saw how the right was able to organize itself effectively not only in the gaming world, but also in online culture in general.

The right has developed a set of tactics and strategies for using popular culture that will take a long time for the left to catch up to. And there is nothing inherent in the right for it to be better in these matters, but it is a challenge for the left.

The challenge is to think about popular politics today. And part of that could be engaging with video games, with social media. The right is many steps ahead.

How did the Cold War impact the early game industry? The video game industry is linked to the development of the military industrial complex.

Many of the early video games were made by people who were supposed to be using these new computers to plot missile trajectories or plan some kind of bombing. Instead, they found a way to use them in another, more fun way.

Many of the early games were attempts to figure out what else you could do with such a machine.

The story develops and the military sees that video games could be a training tool and an avenue for propaganda. We can see this in many games. The Call of Duty series and these types of military games have become a big part of the industry.

It is the story of both connection with the military and resistance to ways of doing things. There’s a kind of tension at the beginning of video games.

Does the Cold War still impact the sector? For a long time, the typical enemy in the games was the Russian army. The heroes were with the Americans, much like movies and TV shows, a pattern that was both reflecting the conflict and influencing it.

Today we see that there have been many changes in the cultural part of games. It’s been a long time since 9/11 that the Russians are no longer the default enemy, but the Middle East. Today global conflicts are not so direct, one side of the iron curtain against the other, although there are still attempts to bring ideological confrontations to the culture.

Are there work standards in different regions of the world? When we think of video games we usually think of studios. A job that should appeal to people who like to play games, as they can live off their passion.

But that depends on what happens outside the studio: the making of the physical video game, which often takes place under conditions that would have been much more familiar to Marx. Industrial work, factories in China, mines in Sub-Saharan Africa, in other words, work to have the hardware.

In general, this work takes place in the global South, while software development takes place in the global North.

In recent years, part of the game’s creation process has been outsourced to the global South. Following the tradition of outsourcing, it is cheaper to pay workers in Brazil, China, Vietnam than in Japan, the UK or the US.

Interestingly, as a commodity, video games are necessarily global. There are few entirely made in one place.

​Are there unions in the sector? There are already some unions. In a way, this sector is very similar to software and technology development, which had no union for a long time. In the last three years, people have started talking about what a union could mean.

Two major topics emerged. The first is that many employees have to work for long periods and work overtime, 70, 80, 90 hours a week in the final stretch of the production of a game, for example. This is often not paid.

And the second is a broader set of concerns around industry diversity. There are many more men, white, heterosexual. Diversity is lacking, and in a way these two issues are linked. If you are a white male, you are much less likely to have care responsibilities and may work longer hours.

Game companies make a lot of money. It is an industry in which workers have little control.

I think it’s still early days for unions in the video game industry. But there are incredibly exciting things happening.

Are you a gamer? I like to play. If I could, I would play more, but unfortunately lately I’ve written more about games than I’ve played.

What is your first experience with a video game? My father was a software engineer. And the first game… This will reveal my age, but they came on floppy disks. You had to learn the command to indicate to the computer and play. One of the first ones I remember is Lemmings. They were very basic, but I have fond memories.

Tell us about your experience with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and how it has influenced your work. This game influenced my thinking about video games. Many games take place in the United States, in New York or Los Angeles. Victorian London is not usually a typical setting, and it was interesting to see the neighborhood I grew up in recreated in the Victorian Era. But what really influenced me and became a hook for “Marx in the Arcade” is that you find Marx in the game.

The kind of Marxism that interests me is one that appears later in his life, when he starts talking about the importance of talking to workers to understand their experiences.

And, almost unbelievably, this is what the virtual Marx asks the player to do in the game. He asks you to pick up reports from a factory.

It’s an unusual part of Marx, even more unusual in Assassin’s Creed. And I like this way of talking about Marx, which doesn’t involve having to read “Capital”.

Were you already a Marxist at that time? My relationship with Marxism begins when I was in school, during the US invasion of Iraq. I was involved in student protests, and later I became involved in protests about Palestine, about the strikes in the UK.

For me, Marxism was a way of making sense of the world I was in, not just a world that could be created.

For most of my life, interest in video games and interest in Marxism were separate. And I always thought, before writing the book, what it would be like to try to put the two together. “Marx in the Arcade” is an attempt. It is an argument between two people, the one who is interested in video games but knows nothing about Marx, and the one who knows Marx but knows nothing about video games.

They can learn from each other.

What is your favorite game? That’s a tough question. My favorite game at the moment is one called City Skylines, about city building, similar to SimCity. I like to think that cities could be different and this is a game that lets you imagine them in a different way.

Jamie Woodcock, 34

With stints at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, the British sociologist is now a professor at the Open University. Woodcock is the author of “Marx no Arcade”, released in 2020 in Brazil by Autonomia Literária, “The Gig Economy” (Polity Press, 2020) and “Working the Phones” (Pluto Press, 2016).