Nobody stayed in comics. And it was just because comics are known to be a big ripoff. Cartooning is the only business I know of where the winners all starve. So you’re not like, “Yay, I’m gonna I’m gonna be like Jack Kirby! I’m gonna die broke!” Nobody is looking at comics that way ever.
Somehow, I’m a month late to Jason Bergman’s far-ranging interview with comics, artist, illustrator, animator, and all-around Renaissance man Kyle Baker over on The The Comics Journal. And hot damn, if it isn’t a fine companion to the Hollywood Reporter’s all-too-brief chat with Spike Lee — in that both are conversations with deeply intelligent Black folks we don’t appreciate nearly enough.
Both conversations also underline my own frustrations with game development and the collection of labor-leeching grifts that constitute the “global games industry.” It’s here I’d say something like, “It’s been a tough couple of years for games” between studio closures, game cancellations, layoffs, return to office initiatives, and the razing of the games press by content aggregators. That’s the 101 take, I guess.
The intermediate take is, it’s an industry that’s always been rotten to its foundations. What is the business of games if not a bunch of booms and busts where no one learns anything? The 1983 crash occurred when the nascent games industry was around 10 years old, largely within the context of some of the same factors facing the industry now (“numbers go up real fast and everyone loses their mind”). And it keeps happening!
It’s as an obscenely profitable (yet cartoonishly underpaid, under-credited, and underappreciated) field whose managerial and executive class seem intent on speedrunning their way through an especially dumb version of the Hollywood film and television industries. The budgets are huge, the major players are chasing the same dollars, and no one’s figured out how to navigate the splintering of (pop) culture.
And god help you if you’re a person who makes games looking for work right now. It’s dire, folks. Anecdotally, it feels like no one is making anything and the places that are in production are working with smaller teams (doing more work). Spike talks about a similar shift in film and television production he’s observed:
How will you figure out what project is first in line after Highest 2 Lowest?
The studio. Who’s in it, who’s available? And also, I guess I should have said this first: What’s the budget? I have a lot of friends here in L.A. that work within the industry, and no one’s working. In New York too. Might be a couple TV shows. People are hurting. Like I said, this is the year of living dangerously. Shout-out to Peter Weir [director of the 1983 movie The Year of Living Dangerously]!
At this point, as a card-carrying member of the Game Workers Branch of the IWGB, I want to point out that the games industry may be rotten but the people who make games shouldn’t be the ones to suffer. Reflecting on some of the aims of game unionization (reduced crunch, better pay, remote work), I think folks in creative industries owe it to themselves to fight for a bigger piece of the work they create.
I may be a simple writer who’s bad at math, but if I’m one of hundreds of people working on a game that brings in hundreds of millions for [insert your favorite rapacious game company here], there’s no reason I should have to worry about what my money looks like for the next couple of years. If that company should happen to expand because interest rates are low, then suffer a downtown, I shouldn’t lose my job — the executives with little to no foresight and no business plan beyond “fire the people who make us money” should be the one out the door.
As individuals, we’re powerless against this shit. These companies are lawyered up, slow to move, and only pay attention if you mess with their money. As workers — together — we can do something. I can’t end this without some kind of call to action. So I’m offering a couple:
- Join your damn union…
- Alongside your fellow workers, figure out what you want…
- …and decide what it’s going to take to make your corner of the industry sustainable…
- …then fight like hell.