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Passion Traps: Cruel Optimism in Videogame Production.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Passion Traps: Cruel Optimism in Videogame Production./
Author:	Jackson, Joshua.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2020,
Description:	167 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-02, Section: B.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International82-02B.
Subject:	Mass communications. -
Online resource:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=28038379
ISBN:	9798641446806

Passion Traps: Cruel Optimism in Videogame Production.
Jackson, Joshua.

Passion Traps: Cruel Optimism in Videogame Production. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2020 - 167 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-02, Section: B.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--North Carolina State University, 2020.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

Working conditions are precarious in videogame production. Issues like crunch, or extended periods of 60+ hour work weeks, opaque meritocratic advancement that favors certain bodies over others, and workplace culture fits that act as self-policing measures all characterize the types of precarity that videogame production workers face. Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, from the book by the same name, provides a framework by which we can examine attachment, precarity, and most importantly how passion is operationalized in the pursuit of capital generation.Cruel optimism alone is not a productive way of talking about precarity. Without an understanding of how individuals within videogame production experience precarity, define what precarity is and is not, think about passion, and understand their role in perpetuating and usurping the current state of production, movement towards industry-wide reform cannot happen in a sustainable way. I used tools from feminist ethnography and institutional ethnography to approach this project. Kamila Visweswaran's work from Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Alison Griffith and Dorothy Smith's Mothering for Schooling, and Dorothy Smith's Institutional Ethnography constitute the main texts from which I drew methodological elements as a way of establishing how I approached interviews and knowledge collection, and why a case study was important for exploring the contours of my informants' experiences.My informants spoke about their experiences with unions, and how, for some, not seeing themselves represented in union discourse made them question the necessity for collective action. Each informant has their own attachments and thoughts about crunch, but all agree that it must stop if videogame production is to become sustainable. Informants also spoke about workplace interactions and cultures and how largely positive their experiences with coworkers were, while they all had stories of power clashes with management that seemed distant and out of the loop. Finally, informants spoke about they defined precarity for themselves. The word 'precarity' became understood as a noun, a verb, and an adjective for my informants.Within each of my informants' experiences, I was able to employ feminist and institutional ethnography to understand and explain how power flowed through those institutions, where it coagulated, and what bodies it favored over others. Issues such as sexism, transphobia, minimizing workers' affective states because the product was more important, and blatant use of privilege to minimize other bodies were revealed through feminist ethnographic readings of situations. Issues such as how institutional discourse, circuity, and power-play allow for power within organizations to coalesce out of the reach of certain bodies, and coalesce in ways that seek to first code and then isolate certain behavior as harmful to production were revealed through institutional ethnographic readings of situations.This project relies on both theoretical work and qualitative work to help contour what precarities are manifesting in videogame production for my informants and what those precarities look like. By starting out with an understanding of the relationship between cruel optimism, passion, and precarity, I open the floor for ethnographic work to be done with informants that help me to outline and more responsible contour what types of situations they are facing that they define as precarity. Within those ethnographic details, I can then piece together core parts of precarity to move towards a theorization of multiple component parts of precarity. This move allows for a fuller vocabulary and more specificity when discussing issues of precarity such as trauma, vulnerability, and risk (re)distribution.In lieu of providing a path forward that is readily applicable to videogame production in its current state, I produced a physical critical-making project which has three iterations called Passion Traps. Each iteration offers a physical, embodied, and interactable way of displaying the knowledges and experiences of my informants.Before a plan of action can be put forth that institutions like Communication Workers of America and Game Workers Unite are keen to push, it is important to acknowledge that, without granular understandings of workplaces and the bodies within them, unionization and collective action on a large scale cannot happen. I have created the groundwork for further exploration, definitional work, and formative steps to be taken towards a radically soft ethic of care within work talking about videogame production, and the next steps are to keep chipping away at the inherent service to capital that videogame production favors instead of the bodies that are working in it.

ISBN: 9798641446806Subjects--Topical Terms:

3422380
Mass communications.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Workplace culture

Passion Traps: Cruel Optimism in Videogame Production.
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