Labor Games,Citizenship,and Control: Book Review Essay of Weststar & Legault and Wu

As the game and tech industries face significant turmoil, including mass layoffs (Corrall & Stringer, 2025; Elderkin, 2025), as well as rising interest in unionization and better work practices (Fried, 2023; Zaveri, 2023), we have also seen increased academic inquiries into these areas. The nascent field of “game production studies” (Sotamaa & Švelch, 2021) has risen over the past decade. It includes book-length ethnographic studies of individual studios such as those by O’Donnell (2014), Johnson (2014), and Bulut (2020), as well as comprehensive industry overviews, like Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter's (2009), Kerr's (2017), and Keogh's (2023) works, which investigate both large-scale, corporate production and smaller, artistic development cultures. Journal articles and edited collections have also covered many aspects of work in the game and tech industries, from patterns of overtime and crunch (Cote & Harris, 2021; Vanderhoef & Curtin, 2015), to the role of platforms (Chia et al., 2020), to the political economy of software publication (Nieborg et al., 2020).

While these studies address necessary questions about work practices in the game and tech industries, many of them—my own work included—originate more from game studies and cultural production perspectives than from labor studies. Similarly, as Legault and Weststar (2024) note in the book under review here, “Labour and employment scholars have shown little interest in VGDs [video game developers] and thus little is known about their actual working conditions and labour relations” (p. xiii). This divide risks unintentionally segmenting game and tech labor research from longer trajectories of investigation, whereas closer connections between game studies and labor studies promise to invigorate both areas.

Marie-Josee Legault and Johanna Weststar's Not All Fun and Games (Concordia University Press, 2024) and Tongyu Wu's Play to Submission (Temple University Press, 2024) thus provide exciting additions to the field. Both books are deeply rooted in labor theories, using them to address how labor control functions in creative and immaterial industries. Game and tech workers seem to exert significant agency over their work and hours, and they often express excitement about their roles. At the same time, their industries display problematic tendencies towards overwork, burnout, and exploitation. Legault, Weststar, and Wu therefore ask: How do the structures of game and tech studios limit worker agency and inculcate them into problematic systems? And where, if at all, do workers resist? The authors investigate these questions through the lenses of citizenship at work (Legault and Weststar) and labor games (Wu).

Not All Fun and Games

Beginning with Legault and Weststar, Not All Fun and Games emerges from the authors’ extensive survey- and interview-based research into the video game industry. Legault and Weststar have run the International Game Developers Association's Developer Satisfaction Survey for many years and draw on this longitudinal research throughout the book. Additionally, the authors have conducted interviews with over 140 Canadian game developers regarding their work. Not All Fun and Games therefore provides comprehensive insights into game development labor; although, the authors admit that their research is most representative of the North American industry.

Legault and Weststar divide their book into three sections: Theory, Context, and Applied Analysis. They begin with a detailed explanation of citizenship at work, or “a status that allows workers to take part in the regulation of their working conditions and environment, and not be subjected to a unilateral power relationship in the governance of their work or to an asymmetrical relationship with authority” (p. 3). In other words, workers have citizen status when they are guarded from insecurity and arbitrary decision-making and when they can participate in both local and wider social labor regulations. The authors further classify these factors into passive forms of citizenship, or those set by broader laws and legislation, and active forms of citizenship, where workers represent and advocate for their interests. Finally, they lay out three domains of citizenship: the subject of citizenship (the worker), the object of citizenship (work practices and regulations) and the domain of citizenship (the field in which citizenship is exercised). While the theory of citizenship at work emerges from industrial contexts, particularly from conversations about unionization, workers’ rights, and social welfare, Legault and Weststar proceed to outline how this concept applies to project-based, post-industrial businesses and how game development exemplifies these trends. The Theory and Context sections thus provide both a strong theoretical grounding and specific context for the resulting analysis.

The Applied Analysis chapters begin by addressing the four dimensions of citizenship at work: protection from 1) risk and 2) arbitrary treatment and the ability to participate in 3) local and 4) social work regulations. These chapters showcase the strengths of Legault and Weststar's dataset, which is both comprehensive and nuanced. They also consistently answer the question “Do game developers have access to this form of citizenship?” with a pretty resounding “no.” Game developers face a lack of workplace protections, such as parental or health benefits, inconsistent hiring and firing policies, and uncertain crediting or bonus pay rules, leading to both precarity and arbitrary decision-making. Additionally, workers often feel limited in their individual and collective responses to these workplace stresses; while they may exit a particular job or deliberately underperform in protest of mistreatment, these can be risky behaviors in an industry where employment is uncertain and often based on maintaining a good reputation. Legault and Weststar do, however, note rising interest in unionization and collective bargaining, particularly in the form of an industry-wide movement, rather than role- or company-based unionization. This could be a tool to help empower workers towards citizenship. Industry associations also remain a powerful force for social regulation, although these may support the interests of employers over workers.

Legault and Weststar spend the final chapters of the book focusing on two specific areas of concern: “crunch,” or the unpaid overtime commonly used in game production to expedite projects or extract more value from workers, and a lack of diversity and inclusion. Summarizing extensive existing work and drawing connections to their own survey and interview data, Legault and Weststar first explore the nuances of developers’ working hours, compensation, and normalization of “crunch.” They investigate how the structures of project-based work lend themselves to crunch, as well as how current legal and regulatory frameworks fail to stave off this issue. Finally, they apply a framework of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging from Westecott et al. (2019) to address how workers do not obtain citizenship at work evenly; within the game industry, where white male workers predominate, women and non-binary workers, as well as workers of color, can struggle to feel included, welcomed, and valued for their perspectives. They may also face both explicit and implicit stereotyping, with limited means to address this treatment. Legault and Weststar therefore conclude the existence of second-class citizenship in game development work, writing that the demand for greater democracy at work “cannot be universally met if some demographic groups are not subjects of citizenship in the same environment” (p. 289).

Overall, Not All Fun and Games provides extensive insight into the current state of labor and citizenship within video game production. Legault and Weststar use their findings to call for better citizenship in the games industry as well as a rethinking of the citizenship concept for industries where traditional unions may not suffice. The contract-based, precarious nature of game employment means that citizenship must occur in a wider domain than a traditional single-company or single-role union. Additionally, the question of who is able to be a citizen at work complicates previous models and necessitates additional attention to how one becomes a citizen-subject. Legault and Weststar thus contribute both to game production studies, through their detailed data and analysis, and to broader labor theories through their additions to the concept of citizenship at work.

Play to Submission

While Legault and Weststar present industry-wide data on game development, Tongyu Wu's Play to Submission presents a more targeted ethnographic study of labor in the tech industry. She draws on thirteen months of on-site research, as well as sixty-six interviews with workers, to investigate a single large tech company. “Behemoth” (a pseudonym for a large global firm along the lines of Microsoft, Google, or Amazon) provides insight into corporate software and internet services production.

Wu begins with the concept of labor games, writing,

Rather than focusing on a single labor game, however, Wu proposes a “field of games” to account for the widespread gamification that has occurred in tech and game industries. Specifically, she identifies four varieties of labor games—simulation games, racing games, crowdsourcing games, and pranking games—that permeate the workplace and incorporate employees into a productive gamer subjectivity. This “gamer subjectivity” emerges from software workers’ frequent interest in games and self-identification as gamers; it becomes productive as labor games activate gamer traits, such as competitiveness, and convert these into forms of work that benefit employers.

The main chapters of the book explain this process, exploring the four labor games Wu identifies, where they integrate into work processes, and how they express varying levels of managerial input, worker buy-in, and productive outcomes. For instance, she argues that simulation games, where workers and managers employ gaming discourses such as narratives and character classes to frame work tasks as “heroic quests,” incorporate engineers’ gamer subjectivity. By linking to workers’ existing hobbies and interests, simulation games garner enthusiastic investment, to the extent that workers will voluntarily work overtime, take projects home, or exert extra creativity to solve a problem. While managers “do nothing but promote the gaming discourse that workers are likely to internalize” (p. 88), the result is a form of exploitative self-governance that extracts additional value from workers’ creativity and gamer traits. Similarly, racing games, which gamify repetitive tasks like software maintenance by having teams compete to clear the most tickets, can effectively activate productive gamer subjectivity with appropriate discursive framing and managerial support. In comparison, crowdsourcing games that workers view as top-down and which focus too heavily on external rewards, such as badges, can fail to activate gamer subjectivity, leading to limited buy-in.

The last category, pranking games where engineers play tricks on one another, at first does not appear to be productive. Wu argues, however, that these games “have become a critical channel through which Behemoth's culture is constructed, communicated, and reinforced” (p. 120). These games work to establish the Behemoth workplace as “fun, casual, and young” (p. 120), highlighting engineers’ purported freedom and flexibility at work while minimizing resistance to the state of work practices. They thus serve as a form of peer-to-peer surveillance and discipline, inculcating workers into the cultural norms of the workplace.

Like Legault and Weststar, Wu concludes with a chapter addressing the racialized and gendered norms of the tech industry. She notes throughout the book that the “gamer subjectivity” labor games attempt to activate is a particular, embodied subjectivity rooted in white masculinity. Workers who do not match the characteristics of ideal gamer identity in the workplace therefore face friction and difficulty fitting in. In particular, she focuses on the distinctions between white male gamer-programmers and immigrant Asian workers, who view software engineering as a means to provide for their family rather than as a “fun” extension of gaming hobbies. Asian workers had distinctly different views about work compared to white gamer-programmers, and they sought to keep their work and private lives separate. These desires were at odds with the workplace cultures encouraged by simulation, racing, crowdsourcing, and pranking games. Asian engineers therefore became well practiced at putting on a temporary gamer subjectivity to fit in but often felt frustrated or excluded as cultural outsiders.

Play to Submission's focus on a field of games extends traditional labor game research to new contexts and provides a useful perspective for investigating labor control in creative, immaterial industries. Wu shows how these games inculcate supposedly powerful knowledge workers into problematic work practices by activating their gamer subjectivity. Additionally, she emphasizes software engineers’ gamer subjectivity as culturally specific, embodied, and constructed via repeated workplace practices. This perspective highlights not only how labor games function differently for hegemonic versus nonhegemonic workers, but also how these structures could be undermined via more thoughtful work practices and unionization. Wu is attentive to workers’ forms of resistance throughout her book but concludes that collective responses, rather than individual ones, are still needed to undermine the normalization of current labor practices.

Overall Assessment

Collectively, these books address the paradox that occurs when creative knowledge workers, who are perceived as having a great deal of control over their work practices, face precarious employment, poor work/life balance, extensive overtime, regular layoffs, and more. While “the complexity and difficulty of standardizing these workers’ knowledge and abilities makes it hard for capitalists to obtain control over them” (Wu, 2024, p. 169), forces like labor games and reputational hiring normalize particular forms of and beliefs about work. These factors, combined with a lack of meaningful response mechanisms, incorporate workers into problematic systems of self-governance and exploitation. The authors therefore call for more meaningful changes in the game and tech industries, such as industry-wide unionization, to improve workers’ representation and advocacy. Additionally, they address specific identity-based inequalities that permeate the games and tech industries, noting how improved labor practices necessitate further attention to who has access to agency and who does not.

The authors also begin linking disparate conversations by incorporating labor theories into studies of game and tech labor. These books will therefore be important reading for scholars in game production studies and in broader studies of creative and immaterial labor. As we continue to rethink what work means in project-based and passion-driven industries, these authors remind us that traditional labor studies remain a productive starting point. Extending existing theories to new contexts provides a throughline from industrial to post-industrial contexts, identifying how things change, as well as how they stay the same.

What weaknesses exist within these books emerge from their strengths. Both are comprehensive, well-evidenced, and deeply theoretical. For a new entrant to the conversation about games and labor, they may therefore be slightly overwhelming. Legault and Weststar, for instance, present both extensive charts and visualizations about their points, as well as many quotes from interview and survey participants. Newer scholars may find their past, article-length publications to be more digestible than their full book. Similarly, Wu's book deftly applies theories such as governmentality, hegemony, and subjectivity but spends comparatively less time on their definitions and backgrounds compared to her central focus on labor games. Scholars unfamiliar with these terms may need to pair chapters of her book with other readings that provide more explanation of these theories. Professors aiming to teach from these books should consider what introductions or overviews their students will need to get fully into the rich material presented in these two monographs. Finally, while Legault and Weststar's dataset covers both large-scale “AAA” game development and smaller-scale, independent, and/or solo perspectives, Wu's ethnographic study focused on a large tech company. It could therefore be productively paired with readings from Keogh (2023) or Fisher and Harvey (2013), which focus on smaller-scale and artistic development, for a comparative perspective.

In short, Not All Fun and Games and Play to Submission should be of interest to scholars in workplace, employment, and labor studies, new media studies, game studies, cultural studies, and more. The books employ rigorous surveys, interviews, and ethnographic analysis to generate nuanced data. They use this to address how labor currently functions in game and tech workplaces, as well as how it could be restructured for greater employee health and sustainability. Finally, they explain their findings with thoughtful theorization that connects across fields. As a games scholar focused on crunch and overtime, as well as game unionization, I found reading these books to be extremely generative, and I look forward to seeing how they drive my own work in new directions.