Video Games Are a Labor Disaster: A Review of Jason Schreier’s “Press Reset”

Unfortunately, the skepticism might be warranted. At this moment, it is hard to envision a video game worker guild amassing the power and influence of the Hollywood guilds. If Hollywood had come into existence as an economic and cultural force at any other time in American history, it’s difficult to imagine writers, actors, and technical workers having the power and solidarity necessary to become such dominant players in it. As the historian Michael Denning argues in The Cultural Front, the growth of the guilds and successful collective bargaining agreements with the studios came about in the context of “the laboring of American culture”—it was an era in which a mass, nationwide left-wing anti-fascist political movement coincided with the industrialization of certain “creative” industries and the emergence of a new “plebeian” generation of artists. While IATSE dates…