Red Dead Redemption 2 is out in the world. It’s another mammoth video game from the minds at Rockstar studios (all 3000+of them), putting you right in the middle of 1890’s America. You use a controller to move a digital entity that goes by the name of ‘Arthur Morgan’. He sure does sound and look a lot like an American man – gruff, weathered, existing the impression he was moulded by a growing nation, when instead, he was in fact manufactured by a small army of dedicated souls working overtime to bring his tale to life.
You may have read the reports about how the employees have worked long hours to get this game out in the world.
No, not that one, that’s from 2010.
No, not that one either, that’s about EA and from 2004.
No, definitely not this one.
It’s this one, from Kotaku, and this one from Eurogamer.
Understandably, these recent articles have gotten the games industry up in arms. Again. And they definitely should get people up in arms. After all, many of us would like to live as ethical a life as possible, and if the entertainment that we consume en masse (with the Australian Games Industry worth $3.23 billion alone) is made under troubling circumstances where employees are made to work excessive hours, then what are we to encourage change?
Before I go on, I urge you to take a read through the following articles which outline some of the known instances of ‘crunch’ in the video game industry:
The Guardian: Has the games industry really stopped exploiting its workforce?
Kotaku: 20 Years of Crunch Take Their Toll on a Game Developer
Kotaku: Crunch Time: Why Game Developers Work Such Insane Hours
Resetera: Alan Kertz talks about working conditions and crunch at EA DICE
Gamasutra: Crunch, work-life balance, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: A view from the top
Gingear: Why I Quit my Dream Job at Ubisoft
Kotaku: More and More Game Makers are Talking About Crunch
So, yeah, at a glance, the video games industry – as a whole – has an issue with crunch.
There’s been calls to unionise the video games industry from Eurogamer, The Verge, RockPaperShotgun, Kotaku, Vice, Venture Beat, alongside a website dedicated to the campaign for creating a video game union – Game Workers Unite. It’s clear that after this recent explosion of interest in the ethics of video game production that have plagued the industry this year (Rockstar isn’t free from the controversy, with Telltale games shuttering shop and in turn getting themselves in hot water over breaking labour laws). But the industry has rejected calls to initiate a union.
Arguably, there’s little reason why Rockstar employees were made to work exhaustive, extensive hours on Red Dead Redemption 2, especially given the fact that Rockstar’s previous game – Grand Theft Auto V – has made a cool $6 billion (that’s billion, with a B), making it ‘the most financially successful media title of all time’. But, they were, and here we are.
As a side note: it’s interesting to see the different stance that Rockstar has this time round in relation to the comments from employees about being overworked. Back in 2010 when the ‘Rockstar Spouse’ story first broke, Rockstar opted to respond by basically stating that the article was bunkum. This time round, they’ve embraced the controversy and allowed employees to talk on Twitter and to journalists about their experiences working with the company. It’s worthwhile noting (as in the articles linked above) that many employees were no keen on sharing their names in fear that there would still be some kind of blowback for voicing negative feelings about working for the company.
It’s worthwhile noting that there is no suggestion from these vocal employees that people should boycott the game to show Rockstar that the gaming community does not agree with these actions. They want the game to be a success – after all, if you had just poured countless hours of your life into a game, sacrificing time with your family just to help it reach completion, wouldn’t you want it to be a major success?
On top of the pride in their work is the question about a financial bonus that many employees will receive if their game hits a certain benchmark. This is not too dissimilar to the problem that Obsidian developers faced when Fallout: New Vegas missed out on a bonus after the game received an 84 rating on Metacritic. Financial bonuses shouldn’t be tied to critical benchmarks, that’s a given. A bonus for hitting a sales milestone is worthwhile, but again, it simply makes sense to pay employees the right amount, and to not keep them as hypothetical whipping boys working over the computer.
Look, I could go on about how the work practices at Rockstar aren’t all that different to the work practices in the film industry, or education, or the government, or how people are overworked and underpaid to the point of exhaustion, with job stability a major threat to society, and how under-employment is a major issue as well, because all of that is just capitalism at work. So, while the world is suffering at the hands of capitalism, and we continue to search for the most ethical way to live in the world, well, we simply have to move forward and be thankful that at least Rockstar isn’t like whatever company made your mobile phone.
A thought came to me as I dove into the Battlefield V Beta and engaged in another round of digital warfare. That thought was, how many hours have I spent engaged in this nonsensical, hyper-stylised versions of very real wars? Using the basic calculator I had in my mind, and the disturbing fact that I’d spent a good 350+ hours playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on the Playstation 3, I’d worked out that when I combined my play times of Bad Company 2, with Battlefield 3, 4, and 1 (don’t get me started on the naming of this series) together, I spat out a figure of about 750 hours across the games. This is simply me playing the multiplayer modes of the games and engaging in online battles with strangers.
You don’t have to grab your calculator out. I’ve done the math for you. 750 hours is just a little over a month. That’s a ridiculous amount of time to have been playing one game series. I’m thirty four years old, and it pains me to know that I’ve spent one month of my life playing a video game that has no tangible benefit to my life. Yeah, I had a lot of fun playing the game and it was a good way to relax and let off steam, but after eight years of playing the series, what memories do I have of my time with it?
I recently needed to clear up space on my Playstation 4, so I went through my digital archive of saved videos that I’d collected over the years. These videos were captured after a round that I’d thought (at the time) was worthwhile remembering. I flicked through the videos, watching mayhem occur at 2x speed as I was trying to figure out why exactly I had saved this video. At the end of each video, I hit delete, left none the wiser why I thought this was a worthwhile gaming memory to keep. At the end, I realised that there was nothing particularly memorable about the time I’d spent with the Battlefield series.
Now, that’s not to say that I don’t have fond memories of games that I have spent countless hours with – I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Lydia from Skyrim, and I’ll never forget destroying a town with a nuclear bomb in Fallout 3, both games I’d spent over 100 hours in -, it’s just that when you’ve spent a month with something, you usually walk away with something afterwards. When my only memory of Battlefield 1 is of the moment when Peter O’Brien appears as an Aussie soldier, well, the egg is well and truly on my face for having fallen for the guise that is online gaming.
This is not to say that great memories haven’t been created within the realm of online gaming - after all, people have gotten married to people they’ve met online -, it’s just that it’s in the field of online gaming that the ‘game’ (read: two sides compete, one wins, the other loses) aspect of gaming becomes more pronounced. Developers finely craft and hone the wealth of their technical prowess into a wholly manufactured experience that is designed to consume your time. After all, as Netflix has shown us, time is money. Netflix no longer gauges how many shows or movies people watch, but rather how many hours they consume, and how many days they consume those hours.
As video games evolve, they look to monopolise on that precious currency. Game series have no longer become annualised affairs that reach into the dedicated players pockets and retrieve their cool, freshly earned $100. Instead, they’ve gradually become services that request the player invest an endless amount of time, and for that player to invest said time, they will (ideally) become hooked onto whatever narrative the game is spinning.
(A brief sidenote: That $100 would take the average Australian just under four hours of work time to pay for, if we operate on the assumption that they’re earning $33.68an hour. It seems that people rarely discuss how much work time they have had to put in to be able to purchase the game, console, book, or movie, that they want to have entertain them. Ask yourself – if a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 offers over 60 hours of ‘entertainment’, is having worked four hours at your job worth the time to cost ratio?)
It could be the genre defying space western series that is Destiny that quietly nudges players towards buying the latest DLC content to get the most out of the game, managing to do so by just as quietly adjusting background stats for weapons. Or there’s the parent-worrying Fortnite, which is a game in itself that doesn’t have a narrative per say, but the continually morphing map encourages player interaction en masse, even though the actual gameplay doesn’t appear to change all that much.
Ubisoft have become a company that has managed to finesse the ‘games as service’ format. Take Rainbow Six Siege for example. A basic team based shooter when it began, utilising a familiar format. But, when ‘seasons’ were introduced into the game, and new characters were able to be purchased by the players, the longevity of the game became clear. Yes, the format stayed the same, but the map rotation was consistent (and most importantly, free for all players), and the new characters helped keep the gameplay fresh and inventive for all players. For those who wanted to purchase new characters, you had a whole new toolkit to play with and perfect. For those who wanted to purchase the base game and simply enjoy the stock standard characters that were offered, then they had the option of doing so, with the understanding that gameplay would change as new characters came onto the scene.
Rainbow Six Siege has been a major success, and has been carrying on with this format for three years. To bring it back to Rockstar, Grand Theft Auto V is, again, the highest grossing piece of entertainment ever. A cool $6,000,000,000 plus change. That’s what games as a service can do.
But, you could argue, for the mere price of $50 or so, you could pick yourself up a Dungeons and Dragons handbook, and have yourself over three hundred hours of entertainment. And, this is entertainment that you are likely to remember and recall actual moments from as you’re engaging with real, physical human beings. And, you’re not wrong. As the ‘games as service’ format has long been perfected by Dungeons and Dragons. New adventures become available every so often, bringing a burst of life to the game. Dungeons and Dragons is built with ingenuity and memorable moments in mind. It’s built with player creativity, encouraging you to live out a fantasy world and to never let anything hold you down.
Arguably, that’s also what Grand Theft Auto V online manages to do. It throws open a realistic world and allows you to wreak chaos and mania on the digital citizens who occupy the streets. Part of the joy of Grand Theft Auto V is being let loose into a digital world that looks not too dissimilar from the one we currently occupy, and being able to do pretty much whatever you want. It encourages player creativity, and encourages mayhem and chaos.
Destruction, chaos, violence, mayhem – it’s the currency of choice for many video games. And while that may be enough for some players to engage with as a way of blowing off steam, or as a digital sandbox for them to play with, there’s a dark, underlying current of monopolising on real world tragedies that has utilises this destruction as a way of creating entertainment. The ‘war’ genre of gaming has long been a major culprit of digging into the graves of soldiers and resurrecting battles that they lost their lives over.
Way back when, the second Call of Duty doubled down on the visceral, immersive, traumatic opening of Saving Private Ryan and brought the slaughter of the Battle of Normandy to digital life. The key intent was to immerse the player in the world of WWII and get them to fully experience what it was like to fight in such a battle. Of course, it’s a given that no video game can ever capture the feeling of being in the midst of a battle, fighting for your life, no matter how hard it tries.
Flash forward to Battlefield 1, a technically brilliant game that dragged players back to WWI and forced them into skirmishes which involved all manner of brutal ways of dying. To the developers, DICE, credit, they certainly tried their hardest to reinforce the reality of war by implementing a single player campaign titled ‘War Stories’. These motifs were designed to inform players about the realities of WWI, and getting a mild history lesson of what went on at the time. On the multiplayer front, there was a mode called ‘Operations’, which allowed players to take on allied or enemy forces, and wage war in a recreation of a notable battle. These rounds were long, drawn out affairs, with a voiceover at the end explaining what the true outcome was in the battle. If the enemy won, when in fact it was the allied forces who triumphed, then the voice over would explain what would have happened if the enemy won.
It’s a nice, cute addition but, it’s an entirely forgettable one. Come the end of the round, most players are looking to see what their kill/death ratio is while they wait for the next round to begin. While I initially applauded the addition of actual history to the Battlefield series, I realised pretty quickly that it was flimsy set dressing that did little to hide the fact that it was the same game, just a different skin. There were times where I’d be sucked into the ‘just one more’ vortex, only to find myself looking bleary eyed at a screen at 2am thinking, what have I just done for the past five hours? All those stories about battles long past blended in to one, and I was left with the only logical conclusion – we won, they lost.
It’s worthwhile noting that narrative focused games like Valiant Heartshave made a concerted effort to educate and entertain equally. Valiant Hearts is a pitch perfect game that aims to inform about the struggles that people from around the world went through when it came to World War One. Years after having played it, I can easily recall the game explaining the value of a dry pair of socks, and how they helped soldiers be protected against ‘trench foot’. The game is littered with simple, useful historical facts that are memorable in the way they inform players of what war was like, rather than attempting to digitally recreate the violent battles of war.
Video games are, right now, at a cross roads. The argument about them being art has long dissipated. It’s undeniable that games can be works of art, especially when games like Journey, Monument Valley, and Celeste exist. But, for those games that don’t ever aim to be a work of art, how do they manage to break the mould and elevate themselves above being a milquetoast affair that is no different than what has come before? For the shooter genre, it’s no longer enough to simply have a character mow down faceless goons, they need to provide context for the wanton murder that the player is engaging in.
For Wolfenstein, the anti-Nazi narrative was given a modern spin with The New Order, and in turn, the ‘hero’ William J. Blazkowicz became a fully realised resistance fighter. The violence was as gory as ever, and the thrill of executing Nazi’s was, well, thrilling. For Grand Theft Auto V, the idea of capitalism was writ-large in an acidic satire of modern America. Some may argue that the game is not smart enough to grapple with the themes it’s intending to explore, especially given the fact that it still offers up everything that the player base it’s satirising wants to eat up. Regardless of how you feel about the game, it’s clear that Rockstar at least tried to add some kind of context to the fictional world of Los Santos.
In turn, with Red Dead Redemption 2, they’ve attempted to infuse the world with as much historical significance as possible. So, while your horses testicles will shrink in the cold, you’re also likely to stumble upon a group of parading KKK members, all dressed up in their white garb and marching through the forest with burning crosses and torches. Now, in a bid to ridicule this caustic group, Rockstar have opted to show the KKK members trip, and set themselves on fire. It’s slapstick comedy only once removed from the absurd eye hole comedythat Quentin Tarantino applied to the KKK in Django Unchained.
While it appears easy enough to ridicule a horrific, racist group that changed America now, the harsh reality is that the KKK were no small joke back in the 1890’s. Under those white cloaks were people of influence – politicians, people of power. The truth is, the KKK still exists, and it’s still a weapon of influence in America alongside the spectre of Nazi’s under the banner of the ‘alt-right’.
Stumbling upon a group of KKK members in the dark is startling. As a player, you simply don’t expect that a game would present such a thing. However, as occurred with Mafia III, racism is something that demands to be explored within video games. Mafia III explores racism through the viewpoint of a black character in America, and in turn, the impact of racism was partially realised by the player. Red Dead Redemption 2 presents a world that would have had slavery and lynching’s, and instead presents the cause of this hatred as a joke.
So, hats off to the developers who worked endlessly on this game, working on such minute details as shrinking testicles and weathered gun handles, but surely, with a script that ran over 2000 pages could have afforded some historical accuracy in the mix? If a game is seeking authenticity, then historical fidelity would logically come part and parcel with that endeavour.
This moment is a memorable one that sticks out in a game full of memorable moments. But, it’s memorable for all the wrong reason. Yes, games are an escape for many people, and given the way of the world today, many would rather not have real world issues appear in their form of entertainment. But, Rockstar had the option to depict the depravity of the KKK in all its horrid glory, and opted for a cheap laugh instead.
If game developers are going to cannibalise history, then isn’t it only fair that they at least do so with some kind of factual truth? Now, sure, maybe two KKK members did trip and set themselves on fire, and sure, that would have been funny, but it’s not the history that has been written. The history that has been written is one that is all about Jim Crow and the ethnic cleansing that came with it. If players are investing so much of their time in something, then isn’t it fair that they’re delivered the truth?
HowLongToBeatputs Red Dead Redemption 2 at about 40 to 60 hours (or half a working Rockstar week), or alternatively, two and a half full days. It’s no short order to complete the campaign and explore the world a little bit. While gamers pay for the privilege of experiencing polished entertainment en masse, it is a privilege for game developers that they are allowed to capture days and weeks of a players life and essentially leave them with a handful of memories. No wonder players were furious at the tepid finale to the Mass Effect saga, having invested so much of their life with one character, only for that story to be given a shrug of an ending.
For me, my month long journey with the Battlefield games has been something of an affliction. I enjoyed my time with the series, even if I don’t recall anything of value from it. Yet, it’s a player driven experience, utilising a supplied set of tools to craft an experience that aims to entertain. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a narrative driven experience, one that has been meticulously crafted for player enjoyment. It has a purpose, and that purpose is to immerse the player in a world that no longer exists. It is, by design, manufactured for memories and experiences.
The reality of the world today is that there are many who are time poor, who eat dinner late, who barely get a wink of sleep, who struggle to find the energy to get through the day. Everybody is busy, everybody is on go mode. And, in turn, media companies wish to take every last free second you have and make it theirs. When those seconds are taken up by a something that essentially wastes your time, then your time becomes worthless.
(As a side note: Kotaku have an interesting article about How to Play Long Video Games When You Have No Time.)
For the game developers on Red Dead Redemption 2, they gave over their lives to a project that changed and morphed throughout the years. It demanded time from them, and didn’t always repay them fairly. Time with their families was sacrificed for a game that will go down in the history books as one of the biggest and best ever made. For some, that privilege of being able to say ‘I worked on Red Dead Redemption 2’ was enough.
As a consumer, we have to find peace with consuming media that was created in questionable conditions. If we want to live ethical lives, then we have to do so in a system that thrives on disregarding said ethics. As the world shifts away from these practices, one has to ask themselves what they are willing to discard on the path to that ethical life? Does it mean that they throw aside a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 because employees were made to work long hours? If so, then what about games like Fez, Super Meat Boy, and Owlboy, which were made with small teams who poured just as much time into their production as the thousands of employees at Rockstar? Do we discard those because people poured their heart and soul into them, and in turn, the most valuable element of their life – their time?
I can’t answer that for you, as it’s something that you will have to answer for yourself. All I can say is that if you look around, there is a world of people who are working long hours on things that you may take for granted. That film reviewer who watches ten movies a week and writes up a thousand words on all of them? They’re most certainly not doing that on a 9-5 work roster.
It’s easy for me to sit here and reflect on the eight years of engagement I had with the Battlefield series and think, why didn’t I do something productive with that month I had? Why didn’t I learn a skill? Why didn’t I finally read Infinite Jest? Why didn’t I watch Berlin Alexanderplatz? Why didn’t I exercise more? And arguably, for me at least, the reason is that most of those things feel like work. Most of those things don’t have an immediate observable value. They take effort and time to perfect and learn, asking you to give yourself over to them so that at the end, you are better off.
The feedback loop with a game like Battlefield is immediate. I know exactly when I’ve done something wrong, I know exactly where I went wrong, what I did right, and how I can improve. That’s part of the addiction cycle with games – they know how to utilise your time to the best of their advantage. With learning, exercising, reading, it's up to the user to be diligent and create their own 'addiction cycle' - for want of a better term. This is easier said than done, but it's certainly something that I intend to change for myself.
With all of those words said, I can only hope that you got something of value from this piece. If you did, then great, thank you for reading. If not, then you’ve just received a mini-version of how I feel after realising I’d wasted a month playing a digital war game.