The Precarious Labor of Queer Indie Game-Making

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Contested Formations of Digital Game Labor - Article

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Bonnie Ruberg1

Abstract This article looks at issues of precarious and exploited labor surrounding contemporary queer independent video game making. In recent years, there has been a marked rise in indie games made by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people. These games and their creators are commonly lauded for inspiring change in the mainstream game industry and making the medium of video games more diverse and therefore “better.” However, this cultural narrative obfuscates the socioeconomic challenges faced by many queer indie game-makers. Drawing from interviews conducted by the author, this article presents a counter- narrative about the work of developing video games by and about marginalized people. Although such games are often described as “easy” or “free” to make, they in fact entail considerable, and rarely fairly compensated, labor. Simultaneously, value is being extracted from this labor by companies who look to queer indie games for inspiration, which translates into profit.

Keywords video games, indie games, digital labor, precarious labor, queerness, LGBTQ

For players, scholars, and game-makers who have long wished for greater lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) representation in video games, the past five years have proven to be an exciting time in the history of the medium. In addition to the increased appearance of queer characters in widely popular AAA franchises such as Overwatch (Frank 2016) and League of Legends (Crecent 2017), the North American

1University of California, Irvine, CA, USA Corresponding Author: Bonnie Ruberg, University of California, Irvine, 5058 Donald Bren Hall, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. Email: [email protected] 2 Television & New Media 00(0) and European video game landscapes have seen an unprecedented increase in independent digital games directly inspired by the experiences of LGBTQ people (Shaw and Ruberg 2017, ii). Games such as those by creators Robert Yang, Christine Love, and Merritt Kopas have garnered widespread attention for themes like gay cruising, BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism), and transgender passing. These game-makers are part of what I term the “queer games avant-garde,” a vanguard of contemporary artists that began with the “queer games scene” (Keogh 2013), a small group of game-makers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and which has since expanded into a broader movement. As predicted by Anna Anthropy (2012) in Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, this wave of queer indie game-makers is pushing the medium in important new directions, inspiring marginalized creators of many identities to develop their own games and encouraging large-scale development companies to make their games more “diverse” and, by extension, better. However, if this description of the queer games avant-garde—an arguably neolib- eral tale of how queer subjects operating at the margins are bringing much-needed change to video games, with their long history of misogyny and homophobia—sounds hopeful, the reality is far more ambiguous. While this narrative can be empowering for some, it risks obfuscating both the challenges that many queer indie game-makers face and the tensions between marginalized game-makers and the mainstream game industry that the former are supposedly making “better.” In this article, I address one complicating factor that has remained largely absent from the discourse surrounding queer indie game-making: labor. What labor is required to produce queer indie video games? In what ways is that labor devalued by current cultural narratives and how can that labor be made visible and re-valued? Conversely, in what ways is labor being extracted from queer indie games by parties other than the game-makers themselves, both in the form of “diversity” as cultural capital and the real, monetary gains that game development companies garner from making their work more diverse? To address these questions, and to value the voices of marginalized creators, I turn to queer indie game-makers themselves. This article draws its findings from a selec- tion of in-depth interviews with contributors to the queer games avant-garde conducted in-person and via Skype in 2017 as part of a larger oral history project. While most of these game-makers live in North America, a handful are Western European or were working in Western Europe at the time of these interviews. Although the majority of the game-makers interviewed are white, a notable minority (roughly a third) are people of color. While the experiences and perspectives of each game-maker are unique, notable threads can be traced across their stories. In these interviews, game- makers speak about the labor of developing queer indie games, the precarity faced by even the best-known of these game-makers, and their frustrations when they see their work appropriated and instrumentalized by AAA development studios and more privileged indie developers. From among these interviews, five game-makers are featured here: Aevee Bee, Mo Cohen, Llaura McGee, Liz Ryerson, and Elizabeth Sampat. Their work is quite different but together they offer powerful insights into the labor and socioeconomic concerns of queer indie game-making. Addressing these concerns Ruberg 3 also requires identifying and interrogating the ways that queer indie games are talked about by those other than the game-makers themselves. This is what I refer to as the cultural narratives that surround the queer games avant-garde—a network of discourse produced and perpetuated by news media and conversations within the game industry, among other sources. As the quotes from interview participants presented here make clear, there are notable differences between how these cultural narratives portray the work of the queer games avant-garde and how creators understand their own labor. From these interviews emerges a crucial counter-narrative about making video games by and about marginalized people. The work of developing these games—far from being universally “accessible” and implicitly easy, as it is commonly described— entails considerable labor, including forms of labor, such as emotional labor, that often go unacknowledged. This labor is itself deeply precarious. It is rarely fairly compensated. Many contributors to the queer games avant-garde scrape together substandard livings through crowdfunding or support themselves on comparatively low academic salaries; a number of interviewees have experienced homelessness. This precarity is particularly acute given that marginalized creators are more likely to come from already precarious financial positions. Ironically, while the labor of queer indie game- makers is widely undervalued in these ways, value is extracted from this labor by developers and companies who look to the queer games avant-garde for inspiration, which translates (directly or indirectly) into profit. For this reason, the work of queer indie game-making can be understood as not only precarious but also exploited. However, this narrative of exploitation too is worth complicating. This article con- cludes with a consideration of the ambivalence of queer game-makers toward their role as the laborers tasked with making games more “diverse.” Addressing the labor politics of contemporary queer indie game-making brings a set of new considerations to the study of labor and game development. Among existing scholarship in this area, the topic of exploitative working conditions for AAA employ- ees has been a recurring focus (Bulut 2015; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2006; Huntemann 2010). While this research has laid crucial groundwork, there are a number of related topics that merit additional attention—for example, how labor relates to indie game-making. Another notable thread within existing scholarship on labor and video games centralizes the work of fans and the questions that arise about the financial benefits that unpaid fan labor brings to large-scale media producers (De Kosnik 2013; Postigo 2007). While contributors to the queer games avant-garde are professional game developers, they similarly operate in liminal spaces at the fringes of mass- media production. As other scholars have demonstrated, the exploitation of free and underpaid labor in digital economies is linked to identity factors such as gender (Jarret 2014; Menking and Erickson 2015) and race (Nakamura 2015). Drawing inspiration from this work, a consideration of the labor politics of the queer games avant-garde serves as a call for increased engagement with identity, marginalization, and discrimination as factors shaping the labor of game development. It highlights the socioeconomic disparity between game developers and underscores why issues of class must permeate discussions of “diversity” and video games. 4 Television & New Media 00(0)

Queer Indie Game-making and Its Cultural Narratives Starting roughly in 2012 with the release of games like Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia and Mattie Brice’s Mainichi, zine-like indie games created by and about LGBTQ people have become a notable presence in the contemporary video games landscape. Although much of the earliest queer indie game-making emerged from Oakland, California, this work has spread considerably since the beginning of the 2010s. Today, small-scale and often experimental video games that engage with queer experiences are being developed by individuals or collaborators across North America and Western Europe. There is no one way to describe the game-makers who perform this work or their approach to game-making. However, some similarities do emerge across the interviews that were conducted for this research. A notable portion of the contributors to the queer games avant-garde are trans women. Many contributors are multitalented artists with nontraditional educational backgrounds. Almost all of the game-makers interviewed were deeply invested in the politics of their work. There is also no one way to describe the games that these creators develop. Some are narrative in form; others are impres- sionistic. Some make their engagement with queerness explicit; others express this engagement through abstraction. In addition to the personal, creative, and community ties that connect many queer game-makers, what unites this work is an investment in simultaneously using and challenging the medium of video games as a platform for queer expression. Queer game-makers are far from the only marginalized subjects expressing themselves through indie video games today. However, the queer games avant-garde has been at the forefront of this larger sea change. Accordingly, a number of its contributors have received a comparatively high level of attention from both games and non- games news media and the broader game industry. Christine Love’s 2016 erotic visual novel about “girls tying up other girls,” Ladykiller in a Bind, for example, was given the Excellence in Narrative Award at the 2017 Independent Games Festival. With this increased visibility has come a number of cultural narratives that have formed around queer indie game-making—some of which queer indie game-makers themselves have publicly refuted. The most notable example is the narrative of “empathy.” Queer indie games have commonly been described as empathy games, that is, games that allow nonqueer players to “step into the shoes” of queer and trans subjects. Many of the very same creators whose games have been labeled in this way have spoken out against the notion of empathy, critiquing it as appropriation of queer experience. As Robert Yang (2017) writes, calling back to Wendy Chun, “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes.” Yet there are other narratives that circulate around queer indie game-making that likewise demand critique. One such narrative is the story of how the queer games avant-garde is making the video game industry more “diverse” and, by extension, better. Often, this narrative is perpetuated by well-intentioned reporters and industry members who sincerely appreciate queer indie game-making and are excited about its impact. Other times, large corporations and organizations have used this rhetoric to signal their commitment to diversity as a selling point to consumers or to placate Ruberg 5 critics who accuse them of discrimination (Romano 2013). “We all love video games, but they can be better,” opens a Polygon article, “Tackling Video Games’ Diversity and Inclusivity Problems,” which points to work by queer indie game- makers like Mattie Brice for guidance in generating greater diversity in video games (Sarkar 2013). A second, equally problematic cultural narrative about the work of the queer games avant-garde is that it is exceptionally “accessible.” This focus on accessibility is often tied to the development engine Twine, as exemplified by the title of a 2014 New York Times article, “Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All” (Hudson 2014). Twine is indeed free and has been used to make many important queer indie games. However, it is untrue that Twine “requires no programming knowledge” (Sarkar 2013), espe- cially for creators who make games that do not follow the standard Twine templates. Twine is also only one of many tools used by contributors to the queer games avant- garde. Of the game-makers interviewed, almost all had some (or extensive) expertise in the technical elements of development, including programming. Although the notion that making queer indie games requires no financial investment or prior experience may sound heartening, or even utopian, it obscures the material resources and skilled labor that go into developing such games.

Queer Indie Game-making as Labor Although queer indie game-making is often portrayed as “accessible,” comparatively unskilled, and free, developing video games of this sort in fact involves considerable labor. This labor takes many forms. The majority of queer indie developers interviewed saw game-making as their primary form of work, or they held full-time positions elsewhere to support their after-hours work developing games. While it is true that lightweight versions of indie games can be and indeed have been developed in short stretches of time, such as at game jams, most of the digital games created by the contributors to the queer games avant-garde took weeks, months, or years to develop. Even a game that appears relatively simple to a player habituated to AAA games, such as a game made using the development engine Twine, may have required work in a variety of specialized areas, including design, writing, art, sound design, programming, and funding, as well as “soft skills” such as publicity and professional networking. Similar to the beliefs that surround playtesting and fan production, indie game-making is seen by many as “glamorous” work (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2006) that creators are lucky to “get” to do (De Kosnik 2013), which contributes to the devaluing of the real labor and associated costs that go into developing queer indie games. In addition, some of the labor required to develop indie video games by and/or about marginalized people remains largely invisible, as in the case of emotional labor and the related work of self-care. Mo Cohen, for example, describes the emotional “cost” of developing their point-and-click adventure game, Queer Quest, in the face of online hostility: 6 Television & New Media 00(0)

A big part of the cost of making an indie video game is emotional. If you are making queer games, then you’re putting yourself out there on the internet, and the internet can be really harsh. Sometimes it’s vital to just walk away—to be like, “Okay, I’m pouring my heart into this thing in my computer, but also, if I close my eyes and breathe, there is my heart. It’s right there in my chest.” When I knew my Kickstarter [for Queer Quest] was going to fail, I went to a hippie retreat in the woods for a few days with no internet or cell reception. I really needed it.

The emotional cost of making video games is considerably higher for those creators who find themselves the targets of homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism, and ableism, among other forms of discrimination—both in online and offline spaces. Simply existing as a queer game-maker in the cultural landscape of today’s game industry requires emotional labor, as Liz Ryerson’s experiences attest. The designer of Problem Attic, Ryerson, is also a musician who has contributed sound design to many queer indie games. Of her early days in game development, at the start of the 2010s, Ryerson reports,

It was really hard to be a queer person making games. The games industry . . . felt like a hostile environment . . . As a trans person or a queer person, you face so much hostility towards you in general in society, and then add the fact that it’s worse in games.

While all video games require labor to produce, queer and otherwise marginalized game-makers take on additional work, whether in the form of navigating vitriol in response to their games or managing the emotional labor of working in an industry that feels, in Ryerson’s words, like a “hostile environment.” In addition to requiring labor, queer indie game-making takes money. It is true that game-making tools like Twine, or even more robust engines like Unity, can be used for free. However, the cost of software is only one of the many expenses of developing indie games. Some such games are created entirely by one, multitalented developer, but it is equally common for a developer to reach out to fellow creators to contribute art assets, music, and programming skills. Ideally, these contributors are paid for their work. However, the biggest cost of developing queer indie games is the cost of life itself. Many of the game-makers who were interviewed rely on game sales to support themselves financially. Unfortunately, the misconception that queer indie game-making is “accessible” and “free” directly impedes the ability of these creators to fund their work. When they first set out to make Queer Quest, for example, Cohen esti- mated that developing the game would take one year of full-time work, plus other game-related expenses. They created a crowdfunding campaign for the game and set their goal accordingly. After considerable time spent promoting the campaign though, Cohen’s Kickstarter failed. Looking back, they reflect, “I struggled with people’s perceptions of how much money it should take to make a video game. The goal for the Kickstarter was around $40,000. People would always say, ‘Oh gosh, you’re asking for so much money.’” While multimillion dollar budgets for AAA video games have become normalized, Cohen’s detractors saw them as “greedy” for attempting to pay themselves a living wage. Ruberg 7

Queer Indie Game-making as Precarious Labor Misconceptions about the labor and expense it takes to develop queer indie video games make this work precarious. In addition to relatively small profits from the sale of games themselves (most of which sell for under $10), a significant portion of the game-makers interviewed rely on sites like Patreon, where supporters can offer financial contributions on an ongoing basis. Yet, the monthly revenues from a Patreon account for even the most “successful” of these creators rarely exceed $1,000—cer- tainly not enough to cover living expenses in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, still widely considered the center of the U.S. game industry. In the face of this precarity, many queer indie game-makers have sought financial stability through day jobs or positions in academia, multiplying their labor. It could be said that the labor of most, if not all, indie game developers is precarious. However, queer creators and other marginalized subjects often operate without the monetary safety nets available to their more privileged peers. Socioeconomic disparity and often outright poverty were common themes in the interviews with queer indie game-makers. Ryerson describes how she spent her years making games in the Bay Area jumping from spare couch to spare couch. “Being able to survive and not being homeless is actually a fairly recent thing for me,” she says. Elizabeth Sampat, who has worked for large-scale mobile and social development studios but also creates her own independent games, describes how she began design- ing games as a way to support her family. She recalls,

Our utilities were getting shut off every other month. We were on food stamps . . . With the little bit of time I had left at the end of the day, I would design games and publish them online . . . Game design is the only thing that has allowed me to give my kids a home.

When asked whether she thought her experiences with money had shaped her perspec- tive on the game industry, Sampat responded,

Definitely. I mean, we talk about how people go broke making indie games, but there’s broke and then there’s broke, right? There’s the indie rock star who bites his nails and goes, “Oh my god, my parents gave me $100,000 from their retirement fund to build this puzzle platformer. I hope I don’t mess this up.” Then there’s me, being like, “Hey, somebody just bought my game for $14. We can go buy milk!”

Sampat highlights how the financial stakes of indie game-making can differ wildly for marginalized versus privileged subjects. Not all queer indie game-makers share Ryerson or Sampat’s experiences, but their stories do demonstrate how queer creators often come to the work of indie game-making from places of financial precarity and how the undercompensation of their labor has real and immediate impacts on their lives. The precarity of queer indie game-making is also tied to perceptions of “risk.” It is common, in both popular and academic spheres, to talk about how indie game-makers are more willing to innovate because they can “afford” to take risks. They have smaller budgets and are therefore less “risk-averse” than the AAA studios that stand to lose 8 Television & New Media 00(0) millions of dollars on unsuccessful releases (Fron et al. 2007, 7). In the case of queer indie game-makers, however, the risk associated with developing games is anything but low. These creators, commonly operating from already precarious positions and often the targets of online harassment, risk financial instability and emotional well- being. In this way, the labor politics of queer indie game-making challenge a larger narrative about indie development. This work is far from low-risk: queer indie games are made despite the disadvantages and dangers faced by their creators.

Queer Indie Game-making as Exploited Labor? The labor of queer indie game-making and the cost of this work are largely underesti- mated by the cultural reception of these games. Yet, as demonstrated above, the same discourse that has devalued queer indie game-making has imbued it with value of another sort. Queer indie games are seen as adding value to video games—as a medium, an industry, and a culture—by making them more “diverse.” This, in turn, brings financial rewards to stakeholders other than queer indie game-makers. While these financial gains can be circuitous, at times the extraction of value from the under- compensated labor of queer indie game-makers is surprisingly direct. Llaura McGee, the designer of works like the 2014 Curtain, a game about an abusive relationship between two women, illustrates this with an anecdote from a game development event she attended in Dublin:

A few years ago, I went to a talk where a couple of successful games writers were name- dropping all these super marginalized developers, like Porpentine and Christine Love, as their influences. It was pretty gross, because here were two white, cis, straight men with well-paying jobs talking about getting inspiration from trans women who are financially insecure. These men are profiting and marginalized developers don’t see any of that. It’s not just those two guys. The whole industry is like that. I wish there was more of a culture of financially successful folks giving back, because the people who are doing the really experimental stuff are definitely not making a living wage.

These comments articulate many of the core arguments presented in this article. McGee rightly points out what she has observed as a pervasive problem in the game industry of “financially successful . . . white, cis, straight men” profiting from the inspiration they draw from marginalized developers. Stories like this one raise the question: in addition to being precarious, is the labor of queer indie game-making exploited? In a sense, the answer is “yes,” in that it is cycled into profit that does not benefit marginalized developers themselves—and, to add insult to injury, all in the name of valuing “diversity.” Yet a number of the game- makers interviewed complicated this narrative. Rather than seeing themselves as either empowered to make the medium of video games more diverse, or exploited by more privileged individuals, they resist the presumption that the mainstream game industry, with its handwringing about becoming “better,” should be the intended audience for their games in the first place. When asked whether she wants her work to inspire Ruberg 9 greater inclusivity in the mainstream game industry, game-maker Aevee Bee, designer of We Know the Devil (2015), responds,

In some ways, I’m like, “I don’t care. That’s their problem.” When I’m working as a journalist, I’m one of those people who says, “Queer people are going to make video games incredible!” As a creator though, I wonder, should I really be putting my energy towards fighting for [the AAA game studio] Bioware to include a trans character? That character is still going to be a Bioware character. Instead, shouldn’t I be fighting to create something that’s really meaningful for the queer people I want to speak to? . . . I’m not trying to make games for straight people.

This quote speaks to the ambivalence that a creator like Bee might feel, in different roles and at different times, about the narrative that queer indie game-making is making the broader landscape of contemporary video games “incredible.” As a journalist, Bee celebrates the changes that the queer games avant-garde are bringing to the medium. As a queer indie game-maker herself, she rejects the expectation that her goal should be to change the hearts and minds of straight players. In this way, Bee’s statement reflects the contradictions inherent in confronting the cultural narratives about labor and value that surround the queer games avant-garde. These narratives need to be challenged, yet they also offer a form of legibility and power to marginalized creators. As the current wave of queer indie game-making continues to grow, and as more marginalized subjects develop their own independent games, it is crucial to turn attention to socioeconomic disparity and the material realities of queer game-makers, game-makers of color, game-makers with disabilities, and others. It is also crucial to continue asking questions about the work that fuels these exciting shifts: on whose backs does the labor of making video games more “diverse” fall? For scholars, players, and creators, what is the balance between celebrating indie game-making by and about marginalized people and speaking out against the systemic devaluing and exploitation of this work? Who benefits when video games become “better” and who gets to tell the story of this transformation?

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD Bonnie Ruberg https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2759-7233 10 Television & New Media 00(0)

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Author Biography Bonnie Ruberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. They are the author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York University Press, 2019) and the co-editor of Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Ruberg received their PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and served as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Southern California.