Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm

Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm

Wu, Tongyu

Hardcover

Business GeneralLaborProgramming

ISBN10: 1439922977
ISBN13: 9781439922972
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: Jun 28 2024
Pages: 238
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.

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