Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm

By Tongu Wu

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1439922985
• ISBN13: 9781439922989
• Release Date: June 2024
• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"