Overview

Games are often a fun perk of a tech company job, and employees can “play to win” in the competition to succeed. But in studying “Behemoth” (a pseudonym for a top American tech company), Tongyu Wu discovered that gaming work culture was far more insidious. Play to Submission shows how Behemoth’s games undermined and manipulated workers. They lost their work-life balance and the constant competition made labor organizing difficult. Nonetheless, many workers embraced management’s games as a chance to show off their “gamer” identities and create a workplace culture with privileged insiders and exiled outsiders, with female and migrant workers usually in the latter group. Moreover, Wu indicates this may be the future of work for high- and low-skilled and, creative workers in an environment where capitalists have heightened demands for technology and creativity. Drawing from 13 months of ethnographic work, Wu presents a persistent reality in which the company reaps the reward of surplus productivity, leaving employees themselves in a highly competitive and sometimes precarious work position.

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9781439922989

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Reviews

“In her fascinating book, Play to Submission, Tongyu Wu takes the theory and practice of the organization of games in the creative workplace to an entirely new level. She shows how the increasingly popular ‘gamification’ of work can have very different implications for manager-worker relations, relations among workers themselves, and worker commitment. A must-read for anyone interested in the future of work.”—Michael Burawoy, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Public Sociology: Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia “Rooted in rich ethnographic research, Play to Submission is an insightful critical investigation of the gamification of the labor process of software engineers at a corporate center of digital capitalism. Beyond detailing how tech work is comprehensively gamified in a bid to mobilize engineers’ commitment, cooperation, and competition, Wu’s study of the gamified workplace shows how capacities developed in consumption—video game play—are put to work as a labor-control strategy in production.”—Greig de Peuter, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and coauthor of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

Author Information

Tongyu Wu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University in China.

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