It was January of 2009 when a trucker named Alphonse Maddin go stuck on the side of the road.
He was driving a route for his company and his brakes froze,
immediately he called for help,
but nobody came, and so he sat,
for hours, in the freezing winter.
He sat so long that his body went numb and his speech began to slur,
incredibly though, even though no help arrived, Maddin managed to escape
because, the thing was, he wasn't really stuck.
Maddin was driving for a company in Kansas and the brakes on his trailer froze,
not the cab, that's the drivable part of the truck, but the back
the part with all the stuff the company wanted him to ship.
Company policy: Never abandon the trailer.
So he sat in the cold, waiting for the company to send a rescue truck.
When it didn't come, Maddin drove away
he chose not to freeze to death, rather than sticking with the broken down trailer.
In response, his employer fired him.
That poem, by a blackbear named Selmers, expresses a deep anger, at the heart of 2017's Night in the Woods.
The game is about Mae, a 20-year-old college dropout who returns to her home town of Possum Springs.
But, it's also about the town itself
Mae feels smothered by life and expectations,
so does Possum Springs.
A mining company once employed most of the people living there,
then a glass factory took it's place, and now
not really anything.
Even the big grocery store outside of town closed down.
As a result, everyone still living in Possum Springs is stuck,
for many, leaving is just too intimidating, this town is the only place they've ever lived.
But even they wanted to go, the remaining retail jobs with low wages and bad hours make it next to impossible.
Possum Springs feels wrung-out by it former industry,
companies came, squeezed every last drop of profit out of the community
and then just left them to fend for themselves.
In Possum Springs, employment is frequently exploitative and always soul-crushing,
Mae's friends work in snack huts and video rental stores and constantly worry about upcoming bills,
her dad worked many jobs in the past few decades but has most recently landed in a grocery store,
he hates it.
Working on video games always comes with a catch,
and most frequently that catch is, crunch.
Crunch is an almost a cute term, the sound of stepping onto a leaf or biting into an apple,
but in the games industry, crunch means 80 hour work weeks, months of lost sleep.
Crunch is often represented by PR as the ultimate of love by the team,
they say the developers are so passionate about the game that these insane hours are an inevitability.
If an individual developer can't handle it, maybe they're just not cut out for the games industry.
Dozens of starving 20-year-olds would forgo sleep and benefits just for the chance to replace them.
Individual developers are frequently treated like short-term contractors by their employers.
Each year brings more horror stories of studios releasing a big game and immediately laying off half of it's staff.
These studios expect total commitment from their employees, but that road doesn't run both ways.
Making video games is a dream job for entire generations of kids entering the work force,
the more desirable the position, the less a company has to promise to attract workers.
Exploitation doesn't always look like a freezing truck.
Just a little while ago, Telltale Games laid off virtually all of its workforce.
The employees were given no prior warning and no severance package.
Situation, as described by @milktea on Twitter,
"My friends fiance left Microsoft to start at #TelltaleGames"
"His first day was Monday"
"Today he came in to a check and instructions on how to file for unemployment"
"Engaging retro-thrusters now"
In 2017's Tacoma, everyone is a contractor,
despite the fact that all the characters are living on a spaceship
and performing highly technical and demanding tasks,
none of them have any job security.
Venturis, the spaceships owner, doesn't need to fire the crew,
instead they can neglect to renew anyones contract.
The proceedings might be more polite, but the unemployment is the same.
In fact, Venturis would prefer to have no humans onboard the ship at all,
the fact that the crew is the result of hard fought victories by organized labour.
Early on, all the workers celebrate Obsolescence Day.
The ironically named holiday is a reminder of a decade earlier
when AI was supposed to replace all labour on the ships.
Instead, a union campaign resisted total automation.
Now the crew has the privilege of sharing the ship with an all seeing computer that records their every move.
"Gather round, gather round everyone, as per Obsolescence Day tradition"
"tonights festivities have been planned by our all-knowing, all-seeing computer companion ODIN."
"He provided specifications for the, uh, cake, uh, the decor."
"We humans only did the grunt work in his grand plan and so for your enjoyment tonight-"
"What the hell was that?"
"ODIN what was that?"
When an accident knocks out both oxygen and communications on the ship
Venturis encourages the crew to enter cryogenic slumber and preserve their remaining air.
Although, 72 hours in cryostasis could cause brain damage,
the company policy assures them that everyone will be rescued before then.
As it turns out though, no such rescue is coming
and the ships failing support systems were no accident.
In a forbidden part of the ship a character uncovers a previously recorded message,
a statement by the company, already prepared to announce the death of herself and the rest of the crew.
"It is with great sadness that I address you today, February 29, 2088"
"Mere hours ago, six loyal men and women, the crew of Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma"
"lost their lives serving Venturis, and all of us who rely on the Orbital Economy."
"Tragically, due to human error on the part of the crew,"
"Venturis rescue technicians were not made aware of the catastrophic oxygen loss"
"As we know, each minute that human workers spend stationed isolated in orbit"
"is another opportunity for heroes like the crew of Tacoma to lose their lives"
"We at Venturis say, no more"
"The partisan obstructionism that led to the failure of"
"the Orbital Worker Safety Bill has claimed its last victim"
"Today, we hereby renew our solemn pledge to fight for"
"the legalization of fully automated orbital facilities."
"We encourage- we humbly beg everyone listening to this message"
"to contact their OCEP representative and voice their support, in honor of the crew of Tacoma."
"There never need be another tragedy like this one."
"And now a moment of silence in their memory."
"...OK and then we just cut it there, silent for a minute and then what, Amazing Grace?"
"No I don't need another take, that was fine."
The ships system failures were no accident
Venturis' plan, from the start, was to literally freeze the workers out
using baseless accusations of human error to push through an anti-Union labour bill.
Fully AI-driven stations, without workers who needed food, pay or rest would soon follow.
If the crew had simply followed orders and entered cryogenic slumber,
just stayed in the cab and froze with the cargo
Venturis would never have needed to allow another Obsolescence Day celebration.
When it comes down to it though, Tacoma's corporate schemes are only as dystopian as the policies of a
trucking company in Kansas.
It actually implies an optimistic future,
Unions exist in Tacoma's 2088
and they're powerful enough that companies have to find sneaky ways to sway public opinion.
Meanwhile, in our 2018, efforts at labour organization are often at the mercy of upper management.
The internets favourite billionaire, Elon Musk, is infamous for thwarting unionization attempts at his Tesla facilities,
Amazon works it employees until they collapse from heat exhaustion
and then pay for ambulances instead of allowing for breaks.
And yet, the idealized sci-fi futurism these megacorporations are selling is intoxicating,
the wealthiest .01% have effectively captured the public imagination,
worker protests are seen as impeding progress, rather than ensuring it.
My home, North Carolina, is a right to work state, and what that means is that organized labour has been legislated out of existence.
What's more, any discussion of unionization is almost non-existant,
when I was a kid, I knew my teachers barely made enough to make ends meet.
But, I thought of it as one of those nebulous bads
that could maybe be righted if a smarter person got voted into office.
Completely absent from that conversation was any acknowledgement
that every state that treated teachers better featured strong unions,
and those unions demanded, not requested, a living wage.
I used to share shifts at a restaurant with a full-time teacher, who waited tables to make rent,
the same restaurant recently fired an employee who was not so subtly attempting to organize the staff.
Sure, Tacoma's corporation might've tried to kill its employees
but it did so because those employees held power.
The fact that workers haven't been totally overpowered in the far future
almost feels more fantastical than space cruises.
Early on in Night in the Woods you find the tooth of a mining boss in a long forgotten drawer,
in 1870 that boss was skimming pay from his workers and when they confronted him about it
he lashed out, berating them and punching one of them in the jaw.
In response, the workers held him down and pulled out all of his teeth
the teeth were passed out to miners as a signifier of their shared vow,
protect each other and never forget their common interest.
The tooth is a reminder that workers, not managers or CEOs,
should control the products of her labour,
but it's also a relic and it's lost most of the significance it once had.
Once, the workers were able to seize power through direct, physical means,
but now, not only is that act illegal,
no one can perform dental surgery on the changing economy that left Possum Springs behind.
Regardless though, it's clear that the characters in Night in the Woods can't make it through individually,
in order to survive, they'll need to harness the power of collective action.
Obviously, no one at Telltale wanted the studio to go under,
but there were people who knew it was coming.
The level of mismanagement and lack of concern for workers required to hire new people
days before going bankrupt is mindboggling.
Among many lessons to learn from Telltales bankruptcy, one stands tall:
You cannot rely on your boss to have your best interests at heart.
If you don't demand otherwise, you will be exploited.
Game developers and journalists are pushing for increased recognition of unhealthy working conditions in the industry
Waypoints interrogation of a dozen developers on crunch
shows a wide range of both acknowledgement and denial.
Game Workers Unite is a fresh attempt at horizontal organization across the field
stating that they will
empower the voices of workers and side with them in disputes with managers and business owners.
And because art is fundamentally a method of expression
these conversations can't help but manifest within games themselves.
Neither Tacoma nor Night in the Woods present as games about labour.
Sci-fi thrillers and platformers have existed for decades in gaming,
frequently happy to let players blast aliens or collect lost treasure without a care in the world.
But increased visibility and solidarity throughout the industry have made these issues unavoidable.
The games industry has found itself as a crossroads,
it can tackle them head-on, and hopefully reemerge with a sustainable healthy ecosystem
or it can just stay in the cab and let itself freeze with the cargo
