Labor Games, Citizenship, and Control: Book Review Essay of Weststar & Legault and Wu Legault, M. and Weststar, J. (2024). <i>Not All Fun and Games: Videogame Labour, Project-based Workplaces, and the New Citizenship at Work</i> . Montreal: Concordia University Press. 464 pp. $49.69 (paper).Wu, T. (2024). <i>Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm</i> . Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 245 pp. $30.95 (paper).
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the game and tech industries face ongoing challenges, such as layoffs, employee overwork, and burnout, as well as responses, such as rising pushes for unionization, we have seen increasing amounts of scholarly work on these industries and their workers. Many existing studies, however, emerge from media studies, game studies, and cultural industries spaces, meaning they tend to theorize the game industry through these lenses, rather than engaging existing research in labor and occupation studies. The two books reviewed here begin the process of marrying these fields more closely, using theories of citizenship at work and labor games to explore worker agency and structural constraints in the game and tech industries. This review essay summarizes both titles and provides an overview of their strengths and weaknesses. It concludes that both books provide excellent additions to the field of game production studies, promoting new approaches to understanding what work does and could look like in these industries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it