Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

Reviewed by: Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock Robert MacDougall Jamie Woodcock, Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket Books 2019) Video games, computer games, electronic games—whatever we decide to call them, these games may be the paradigmatic media of 21st-century capitalism. Born in the interstices of the Cold War military-industrial complex, video games have become a colossal, planet-spanning industry. They form a global commodity chain, built on both immaterial digital labour and the all-too-material exploitation of human bodies and natural resources. And they are a laboratory for training workers and consumers, monetizing deep psychological drives and colonizing hours of our attention. Jamie Woodcock's Marx at the Arcade is a short, readable book that aims to analyze video games from a Marxist point of view. A lifelong gamer, a digital labor organizer, and a sociologist of work, Woodcock is well qualified for this task. To write his first book, Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres, Woodcock worked undercover in a non-unionized telemarketing call centre, chronicling the isolation and alienation of its workers and their surveillance and control by the employer. In Marx at the Arcade, he draws on history, sociology, and Marxism to investigate video games as industry, commodity, and pastime. (He does not quite resolve the debate over what to call these games: opting for "videogames" in the text of his book but "video games" on the back cover.) Woodcock is active in efforts to unionize the game industry in the United Kingdom, and he is so clearly one of the good guys that it seems churlish to find fault with this well-meaning, enjoyable book. He makes a bit more to-do than is probably warranted about the incongruity of juxtaposing Marx and video games; applying a Marxist analysis to the game industry actually makes perfect sense. Indeed, the juxtaposition has been made before, and deeper analysis can be found in works like Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greig de Peuter's Games of Empire or Christian Fuchs' Digital Labour and Karl Marx. But Marx at the Arcade offers an accessible entry to the intersection of video games and Marxism, and Woodcock is an amiable guide to the territory. It is not a criticism to say that this is an entry-level book. But it must be asked: who is Marx at the Arcade for? Labour historians who read it won't learn much about Karl Marx that they didn't already know; dedicated gamers who read it won't learn much about video games. So is Marx at the Arcade an introduction to Marx for gamers, or an introduction to video games for Marxists? One might think there would be more to be gained by writing the former, both in book sales and political impact. But despite a few [End Page 218] moves in that direction, this book primarily concerns itself with the latter. The book's strongest section is what Marx would have called a "workers' inquiry" into the software side of the game industry: the exploitation of underpaid and precarious labor, the punishing practice of "crunch time" (the industry's term for long hours worked in game development), and the widespread use of nondisclosure agreements to prevent workers from talking about their work. Woodcock draws a damning portrait of an industry with an utter disregard for the well-being of its workers, one that pretends work is play and uses its own workers' love for video games to exploit them. The last chapter of this section, the "what is to be done?" discussion that is so often vague and disappointing in books of this kind, is refreshingly concrete. Woodcock describes the efforts of groups like Game Workers Unite and Tech Workers Coalition to unionize the game industry and sees reason for real optimism in their progress. The second half of Marx at the Arcade, which turns to analyzing video games themselves, is a little disappointing. Not that a Marxist analysis of video game play is not worthwhile—quite the contrary. It's just that the findings here will feel obvious to anyone familiar with...

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