A Player’s Guide to Supporting the Labor Movement in Games
So, you’re a video game player! You enjoy titles from Activision-Blizzard, ArenaNet, Riot, or whichever other company is in the awful-working-conditions spotlight of the day. Maybe it’s excessive overtime, maybe it’s starvation wages for QA testers, or maybe it’s a culture of discrimination, harassment, and even assault.
You see the people who make your games hurting, and you want to help. And thank you for that — there are so many ways that players and fans can contribute to the labor movement in games! But there are also a lot of well-intentioned behaviors that can hurt the very people you’re trying to help, and knowing the difference is crucial.
If you’d like to learn how to support game makers in their organizing, you’ve come to the right place. I’m a game worker and organizer with Game Workers of Southern California, and today I’m here to talk about the do’s and don’ts of fan support for progressive movements in the industry!
The Golden Rule: Follow The Workers’ Lead
When you want to help someone but you don’t know how, the most effective thing you can do is let them tell you.
Start by searching for official communications from the workers behind organizing efforts at the company. These might be statements to the press from workers, which you can find quoted in articles from publications like Polygon or IGN. Or maybe their movement has a social media account like @ABetterABK, @ABetterUbisoft, @Rioters4Change, @PaizoWorkers, @VodeoWorkers, or the VOW Tumblr
In the absence of an official communications platform (often true in a movement’s early days), look for posts from social media accounts of workers at the company. Don’t stop at one data point, scroll around and see if there is a consensus of message.
The next step: if a specific request is made of fans, gamers, and players, do that thing! To this point, let’s take a contemporary case study:
A Strike and a Union at Raven
In December 2021, twelve quality assurance (QA) professionals at Raven Software — known for Call of Duty: Warzone — were suddenly told that they would be laid off. Several of these workers had relocated to take the job. No performance-related reasons were given — their livelihoods were simply snatched away by executives with no idea how games are made. For almost two months, dozens of workers at Activision-Blizzard-King (ABK) went on strike demanding their reinstatement.
In the tweet announcing the strike, the ABK Workers Alliance started collecting donations for a strike fund. Workers lose their primary income during a strike, and these funds help them keep the lights on while they fight for dignity and a better future. The deeper the strike fund the longer workers can maintain the work stoppage, and the better chance they have of winning.
While the strike at Raven has ended, Raven QA have now formed a union and have filed for an NLRB election. In the meantime, the fund remains open to donations to prepare for the next time workers walk out. If you’d like to help, you can contribute here and share the link in your communities. For more ways to support the movement as a whole, keep reading!
Social Media Tips & Tricks
Standing up against the boss is scary, but supportive messages from fans can keep organizers going. And companies are more inclined to grant concessions to their workers if they have visible support from the community. Upset workers are already a problem, and upset customers can turn up the heat.
Positive Social Media Strategies:
Highlight specific demands:
When faced with worker revolt, bosses try to shut us up by making some trivial concessions. They think that if they offer a few crumbs, workers will see that “management is doing something” and become placated.
Well-organized workers anticipate this by making specific demands designed to actually mend the injustices. Spelling these out helps other workers reject cosmetic policy adjustments. And when players like yourself become familiar with specific demands, you can discern between management’s trickery and meaningful change.
When there are specific demands, draw attention to those in your posts on social media and in community spaces. In the case of ABK, organizers have called upon executives to:
- End the practice of forced arbitration that silences harassment survivors
- Make diversity a priority in hiring processes
- Implement pay transparency and end pay discrimination
- Commission an equity investigation from a third party auditor chosen by the workers, not the bosses
- The most recent demand — recognize the union at Raven software!
These are extremely reasonable and effective steps that will actually help address issues at ABK. Already, demand #1 has been achieved and progress has been made on #2 and #3. And the more players like you can spread knowledge of these worker demands, the better the chance is that the rest will be addressed!
Amplify Real Workers and Organizers
Walkouts and other labor actions are splashy news events that inspire a lot of chatter. As you probably saw in the days before and after the first ABK walkout of July, Twitter and gaming news websites were crammed with reactions.
This level of attention is great. But with so many personalities and pundits throwing out their take, the voices of actual workers can get lost in the noise. And when workers aren’t listened to, misinformation blooms easily.
As a supporter, you can help by signal-boosting official communications from worker-organizers. Retweet their announcements, and direct your peers to the movement’s official social media accounts. It also helps to amplify individual workers who speak out about their experiences!
Share Positive Energy:
Organizing is exhausting. When the injustices are dark and there’s so much work ahead of you, it can be tough to wake up every morning and make the decision to keep fighting.
This fatigue can be really rough — I’ve been there myself, and it’s not fun. But when things felt their bleakest, hearing that my actions were meaningful to somebody would pick me right back up.
If the games that protesting workers make have been personally meaningful to you, tell them. If seeing workers put everything on the line for their peers inspires you, tell them. If their movement gives you hope as a marginalized person, tell them. You’ll probably make someone’s day, and you might just be the difference that gives them the strength to see this through.
Unhelpful methods of support:
There’s so much you can do to help — but if you’re not careful, your good intentions could actually hurt workers or the movement as a whole. Here are some patterns and actions to avoid!
Spreading misinformation
On the day of the ABK July walkout there were about a dozen different “how can I support?” images going around on Twitter, many made by well-intentioned players.
Most promoted the appropriate hashtags and listed the charities workers were promoting. But many also warned players to not “cross the picket line” by playing Activision-Blizzard games on the day of the walkout. Which would be great, except that workers behind the walkout never called a boycott!
This may seem like an innocuous detail, but spreading misinformation can do real damage. Fans who read these graphics might harass streamers or their peers for playing ABK games, which then creates unnecessary drama and distracts from the organizers’ message.
Make sure that information you share comes from a primary source. If you aren’t sure of a message or graphic’s origin, search for it in organizers’ social media accounts or press statements. With a few minutes of looking around, you can make sure you’re promoting the correct information.
Misunderstanding Boycotts
To the previous point, there’s a misconception that all labor actions come with consumer boycotts. While understandable, this is not true.
Boycotts are a powerful weapon, but there are strategic reasons why organizers might decide not to hold one. Maybe the organizers are trying to avoid alienating their coworkers, maybe there are legal concerns, or maybe they want to save the boycott as an ace in their sleeve for a follow-up action. Whatever the reason, our job as supporters is to confirm whether a boycott has been called from official sources and act accordingly.
And of course, if there is a boycott? Honor it to a T and ask your peers to do the same.
Intruding on personal conversations:
News stories about abuse in the industry usually inspire individual game workers to share their own stories. Workers with similar experiences may then see these posts and start a conversation.
A well-intentioned supporter might want to chime in on the dialogue as well, but in some contexts this can be intrusive. When people are discussing shared personal experiences, it may be off-putting to see a stranger who doesn’t share those experiences jump in.
It can be confusing what is and isn’t considered a personal conversation on websites like Twitter, but here are a few questions to ask yourself before joining a dialogue:
- Are all the participants of this conversation all coworkers or personal friends?
- Are the conversants comparing vulnerable personal experiences that I haven’t gone through myself?
- Are the conversants engaging with third party commenters, or just with each other?
- Is there a more publicly directed post I could comment on instead?
With a bit of tact and deliberation, you can make sure that your message is going somewhere where it will be appreciated.
Harassing customer support:
When you send a message through a company’s official “contact us” portal, it goes to a customer service representative. Customer service reps are right up there with QA as some of the most abused and mistreated workers in the industry, and the last thing they need to see is an email cursing them out.
I understand the intent, and trust me — I’d love to give a piece of my mind to Bobby Kotick. But the reality is that we don’t have a direct line to him, and the workers who filter his mail are also deserving of our care. Showing support for the movement is great, but be considerate.
Customer service reps are also often the ones charged with sifting through the replies on a company’s social media. Filling the comments of company posts with pro-worker messages is a great way to add visibility to the cause, but make sure you’re not writing anything that could ruin somebody’s day. Instead of “Fuck you, eat shit and choke on it,” try the simple and direct “Re-hire all 12 Raven QA testers now!”
Fueling Personal Drama:
Labor actions are emotional, and neutrality isn’t always an option. But organizers are strategic about picking their battles. As an outside supporter, you need to be savvy about where you direct harsh words. While directing anger at management and serial abusers is more than appropriate, there are also fights not worth fighting.
If a popular streamer hasn’t discussed a protest movement at a company, it’s appropriate to bring up the issue politely. But if they aren’t supportive, escalating past a certain point won’t help anyone — it might even provoke an influential enemy for the organizers.
And be careful about interacting with workers at the company who aren’t fully supportive online. The organizers will have their own strategy for building support among their peers, and rogue players antagonizing a swayable coworker usually doesn’t help.
I’ve even seen some players telling off Blizzard devs for tweeting about their games in the weeks after the July ABK walkout. This is rude and unhelpful — workers can be simultaneously angry at management and proud of their work. Again, players must be aware of their perspective as non-employees and leave the internal outreach work to the organizers.
Commenting on unrelated game content
On news articles about working conditions in the games industry, you’ll often see a pattern like this:
- Headline: Translator at Scabby Studios Assaulted by her Manager
- Reply: They haven’t made a good game since 2008
- Reply: I still can’t believe the price hike on our subscriptions
- Reply: And the loot drop balance on the Tomb of the Rat King patch is all fucked up! How am I supposed to get the mythic inflatable?
These comments are clearly off-color. There’s a time and a place to talk about game content — and exploitative monetization schemes should be called out — but when the topic is working conditions, understand that these are the livelihoods and pain of real human beings. Stay on message and support the workers.
The only exception is when game quality is directly related to an ongoing labor action. In the context of the quality assurance strike at Raven software, connecting the wave of bugs in Call of Duty: Warzone to management’s undervaluing of the QA professionals is helpful and appropriate!
Power in Numbers
Now that you’ve refined your etiquette as an online supporter, it’s time to talk about the next step: organizing your community!
A single person has negligible power, but an organized community can change the world. Fan communities can take many forms — Discord servers, fan forums, in-game guilds, streamer followers, cosplay groups, etc. The larger the group of players, the more their opinions matter to the companies they support financially.
If you’re a fan looking to make an impact, involving your community in supporting worker organizing efforts is a great way to help. When one player raises their voice, the executives shrug. But when 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 1,000, or 10,000 customers speak up, the suits start to sweat a little.
In this case of the July ABK walkout, we saw groups of streamers run coordinated pro-worker streams on the day of an investor call. The Fence Macabre guild in World of Warcraft kicked off a series of in-game protests that spread across servers and were attended by players in the hundreds. This is power in numbers in its most basic form, and it makes management listen!
Bringing up sensitive topics in a group is a learnable skill, and there are time-tested tactics that get results. If you’d like to organize your own fan community around labor issues, here are some tips and tricks!
- Identify supporters: The best way to start a movement is to hold small conversations with the community members you expect to be most supportive. This builds a strong starting group so that when you take the issue to the larger community, you already have more voices than can be easily ignored.
- Talk in small settings: It’s hard to have a level-headed discussion when issues are brought up in big group settings. The loudest voices in the room will dominate the conversation, and sides will be chosen before you even have the chance to make your case. But if you bring up labor issues with a single friend, in a DM with a leader in the community, or in a small groupchat, you give your peers the time they need to consider the issue.
- Meet people where they are: Not everyone will start off feeling as strongly as you do, and that’s okay! Everyone comes from a different place, and our job is to consider the perspective of the other person. Ground what you say in what you know they care about. And instead of antagonizing them for not feeling the issue intuitively, be patient and come to them in good faith as a peer.
- Pick your battles: Understand that you can’t change everyone’s mind. While I believe in the power of all people to grow, in the short term some folks are just a dead end when it comes to labor issues. If you see that somebody’s mind isn’t going to be changed, and there’s a worry that provoking them could lead to backlash, your best bet is to disengage and redirect your efforts to someone else.
Remember, a community is just a group of people who care about each other. That empathy is powerful! By tapping into that care and expanding it to include the workers who made the games that brought you together, we all win.
Now You’re Playing With Power
I hope this article has helped you better understand how you can be part of the labor movement in games. Players have a crucial role to play in this movement! As a game developer and a labor organizer in the industry, I want to thank you again for your support — it means the world to see players stand with us for a better future for this industry.
With our abilities combined and our party unified, we can take on any boss!
In Solidarity,
Robin Trach, Steering Committeeperson for Game Workers of Southern California
