Today’s headlines drop the usual unrest in countless other countries, death, war, famine and the like, but let’s take a look at a true tragedy right here in our own country, folks:
Video game makers are gettin’ played for suckers.

Now some of you in the audience right now might be saying “look, Admiral Assface Buttstacheous, these people get to make video games for a living. I would kill to take their job and leave my data-entry sandwich-shop-making receptionist gig for that. Next, why don’t you ask me to feel bad for the guy who tastes ice cream all day?” While I could respond that he probably gets sick of ice cream after a while, and probably can’t appreciate the nostalgia of a good Hulk Hogan ice cream sandwich in the summer with his grandkid without noting the levels of glucose were too high in that particular batch, I get your point. These people do, to an extent, have a dream job. But from the sounds of this article, they are also losing their whole damn life to the process. And as a video game fan, I know we use that term: just last night, after a 13 hour work day, all I could think to do was play through the entirety of Guitar Hero on easy, just because I was drunk and it was my birthday (well, almost on both counts). But we’re not talking sleepless nights here: we’re talking sleepless weeks, we’re talking “meals, dry cleaning and ironing to those working late” - and that’s one of the better companies.

There’s a lot to consider here.

A balance always forms between a dream job and the competition for it: if you want to be a movie star (or in the computer equivalent, work at Google) you will have to fight through a huge field of equally enthused applicants, and represent the crème de la crème to actually land an interview. In the same manner, I’m sure every group has the super-gamer, the one whose love is so pure that he didn’t learn guitar or act in a few plays or teach himself how to code but rather spent days writing his NSGNSNCNONENNENBB Challenge Guide. This friend, whether he admitted it to the rest of the group or not, applied to work at EA Sports/Midway/Tiger Handheld Games(that friend is way old-school). Collectively, all those friends make one gigantic pool of applicants.
And like that ueber-hottie in high school, these companies can move beyond being simply selective - power corrupts, and sometimes their choices can become downright whimsical or even cruel.

EA is that hottie: not the kind that digs your heart of gold, but the one that hearts gold-diggin’. Miss EA is taking her various suitors, playin’ em like they were verses in a rap song, and then leaving them out to dry. And I’m sure they’ll gladly take it, because they’ve still got digital hearts thumping from their eyes at the big glorious videogame company they get to be in an abusive relationship with.

So is this any more complex than a situation of tempered greatness? Are the geeks simply paying the adjusted market price for a job that felt the flush of high demand? Maybe. But while gamers run all social categories these days, and even a fair amount of the fairer gender are behind the scenes, it’s still a man’s world, and it’s still a pretty geeky man’s world. I know some of the people over at Midway in Chicago, and I’ve seen interviews with a number of game creators now and then. Whimsical middle-aged Japanese guys aside, there is some proof in the pudding of the gamer elite stereotype - and those are by and far the people who devote themselves enough to actually work in the industry. We’re talking all the usual traits - maybe a little pudgy, maybe not the most socially acclimated people, maybe they’ve spent good chunks of their life in digital fantasy worlds because the real one was pretty god-awful to them. This can become a whole other debate, so I won’t wade too far into this pond, but suffice to say this: these are people who have much lower standards for “being treated nicely” than your average Dick or Jane. And when you put them into highly prized job, in a workforce that’s already treating new workers like they can be ordered in 100s from Quill office supplies, well…I bet they get downright brutalized, y’all. Maybe in the eighties, they found glorious utopias of tiny companies booming with sales and run solely by other like-minded folk, but in this day and era, the head-turning object of lust that was the video game industry isn’t as naive as it once was, and hand in hand not as kind either.

Hey! I know where I’m going with this!
“I mightve failed to mention that the sh*t was creative
But once the man got you well he altered the native
Told her if she got an energetic gimmick
That she could make money, and she did it like a dummy”

- Common, “I Used To Love H.E.R.”

Big business is big business, and its here to stay in video games and all fronts for a while - but let’s hope that the abusive byproducts of big business management meeting the newer and still lovestruck crop of videogame workers gets ironed out, and that the all the video game employees holding up their boombox hearts to video game companies get just as much love in return.