[Commlist] new book: A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry

I am happy to announce the publication of my book, which might be a 
useful resource for scholars studying the political economy and cultural 
politics of video games, critical media industry studies, digital labor, 
gender studies, and cultural theory. The price is reduced 30% if you use 
the code below.

*/A Precarious Game: /**/The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game 
Industry/*

By Ergin Bulut

Available from

Cornell University Press: 
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501746536/a-precarious-game/#bookTabs=1

*30% discount with code: 09FLYER*

Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Precarious-Game-Illusion-Dream-Industry/dp/1501746537/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18QP5KQOAIMBX&keywords=ergin+bulut&qid=1583768222&sprefix=ergin+bul%2Caps%2C609&sr=8-1

*About the book*

/A Precarious Game/ is an ethnographic examination of video game 
production. The developers that Ergin Bulut researched for almost three 
years in a medium-sized studio in the U.S. loved making video games that 
millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can 
be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a 
predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities 
involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work 
of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers 
in the Global South.

/A Precarious Game/ explores the politics of doing what one loves. In 
the context of work, passion and love imply freedom, participation, and 
choice, but in fact they accelerate self-exploitation and can impose 
emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless 
hours. Bulut argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry 
disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable 
transnational industry thrives.

Within capitalism, work is not just an economic matter, and the 
political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even 
when based on mutual consent. As Bulut demonstrates, rather than 
considering work simply as a matter of economics based on trade-offs in 
the workplace, we should consider the question of work and love as one 
of democracy rooted in politics.

*Contents*

Introduction: For Whom the Love Works in Video Game Production

1.The Unequal Ludopolitical Regime of Game Production: Who Can Play, Who 
Has to Work?

2.The End of the Garage Studio as a Technomasculine Space: Financial 
Security, Streamlined Creativity, and Signs of Friction

3.Gaming the City: How a Game Studio Revitalized a Downtown Space in the 
Silicon Praire

4.The Production of Communicative Developers in the Affective Game Studio

5.Reproducing Technomasculinity: Spouses’ Classed Femininities and 
Domestic Labor

6.Game Testers as Precarious Second-Class Citizens: Degradation of Fun, 
Instrumentalization of Play

7.Production Error: Layoffs Hit the Core Creatives

Conclusion: Reimagining Labor and Love in and beyond Game Production

Pages: 222

*
*

*Early praise for /A Precarious Game/*

*//*

"I know of no other work that chronicles the life cycle and death of a 
creative industry, and in doing so, potentially tempers the rhetoric 
celebrating the entrepreneur because it shows that failure is endemic to 
trying new things."

*Vicki Mayer, Tulane University, author of/ Almost Hollywood, Nearly New 
Orleans/*

**

"Since the crash of 2008, the power relations that structure digital 
capitalism have been further extended and systematized.  In this 
provocative, wide-ranging study, Bulut details how social inequalities 
and exploitative labor practices carry forward in today's digital 
workshops."

*Dan Schiller, Author of /Digital Depression: Information Technology and 
Economic Crisis/*

**

"/A Precarious Game/ is an original work that deftly combines a 
political economy critique of the inequities and hidden violence of the 
digital economy with critical Feminist analysis of labor and social 
reproduction."

*Paula Chakravartty, New York University, author of /Media Policy and 
Globalization/*

*About the author*

*Ergin Bulut*

Faculty Fellow at Annenberg School for Communication, University of 
Pennsylvania, and Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Media and 
Visual Arts Department at KoçUniversity, Istanbul.

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