From the Ashes of Empires – GDC, AI, and Unions

I flew into San Francisco over the last week to visit Game Developer Conference. A yearly conference that can be considered to be representation of the games industry at large.

San Francisco itself exists in the shadow of the tech industry now, and coming out of Harvey Milk Terminal 1, I got into a taxi that hurtled into the city. Littering the roads are blockchain billboards. AI advertisements were also plentiful, with each one selling itself as being another AI service but better.

“Like if ChatGPT worked more often!” (ChatGPT confidently failed 37% of the questions it was given but if you google halucination rates, it will tell you it is 3%)

“basically Deepseek but we made it secure ” (read: decoupled from Chinese interests)

The bright light and noise of the downtown area is like most North American cities – full of bluster and glittering skyscrapers.

However, here there are two things that contrast this. One is a distinctly European bent with malls being less prevalent and instead local shops and restaurants line the streets. There are obscure diners with memorabilia from bygone times, and mom and pop pizzerias. There are quaint trams that climb the steep hills and the public transport seems shockingly functional. The second juxtaposition is all American – the homeless population.

I wandered through the Tenderloin district at night. Tenderloin is one of the most impoverished areas in San Francisco and exists nestled up against where GDC is held. So many of the convention goers speak of it in hushed tones like it is some kind of Demilitarised Zone. One person mentioned seeing a guy whipping himself with chains, and they all fear a criminal element.

The reality seems to be both worse and sadder.

Tenderloin at night feels like it is haunted. The homeless sleep with whatever they can cover their faces with inside the corpses of Art Deco buildings. That, or they shuffle like extras in The Walking Dead. It isn’t really dangerous, people keep to themselves – and those that don’t need help not contempt. I think it is just disconcerting for the more affluent that these people can no longer be easily ignored. Given how spectacularly the state has failed to provide for these people, they can no longer effectively move these people into a place out of sight.

Instead, security guards line properties to protect private interests and gating basic functions like going into supermarkets. This feels like it is taken almost directly from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower –  a book that plays out the slow collapse of society where the haves lock away their goods until the Have Nots become so desperate…

The area around the convention itself bleeds into this district with many of the hotels being nearby. Many of the people heading to the convention are dishevelled and unwashed geeks and I had trouble telling them apart from Tenderloin’s population. Multiple times I sidestepped someone thinking they were unhoused only to see the tell-tale lanyard of a summit pass.

The real distinction comes from the number of Waymos that are immediately visible once you aren’t in Tenderloin. Waymos are driverless cars with 100 thousand dollars worth of camera tech strapped to it. These have been introduced to innovate wages out of the pockets of those at the bottom and into the same 6-7 people’s bank accounts most of the money now exists in.

Once inside the convention buildings, the show floor was just as egregious as the drive into The City. People are still trying to couple their carriage to AI (the more savvy are reverting to calling it a Large Language Model, or LLM). Some CEOs talk about ‘democratising game development’, which is about as empty a statement that has existed since the last time it was used with crypto currency (democratising banking, apparently). Vendors are a little more sober now that the balloon is starting to deflate. I think people are starting to realise what Ed Zitron has been pointing out – it is a billion dollar solution that doesn’t have a problem to solve. It is just that a lot of people keep adding the suffix ‘yet’ to that statement.

On the second day I shared a beer with an old associate and they told me that their company had mandated the use of AI to decide how to hand out promotions. The results were less than stellar and it had resulted in a lot of unhappy people. As they were talking I logged into LinkedIn, a site that is becoming the new Facebook, and continued an amusingly fruitless argument with someone I don’t know. He had recently admitted he was using AI to formulate his answers. He seemed particularly smug about the fact that I hadn’t noticed but the truth was that I barely read most of their posts because they were written like a 4Chan debate bro who just learned how to use a thesaurus. It wasn’t efficiently making him sound smarter, it was making him sound stupider, quickly.

I think it is fair to say that this is all led to me feeling uncomfortable about the state of the games industry. So, learning that Jason Schreier (author of Play Nice, and Bloomberg reporter) was hosting a talk with Tom Smith (Director of Organizing, Communication Workers of America) about the recent success of CWA in organising disparate unionisation attempts I was immediately interested.

I think the talk did a pretty good job of conveying the history of the movement, while attempting to address some of its shortcomings. Even if there was an air of a victory lap in some of the talk with Smith even uttering ‘become ungovernable’ (to cheers and clapping from the young crowd) – they managed to contain some of that by admitting that this was only one small part of a very long and painful process.

Most of the current movement was catalysed by the fallout from Activision controversies that led to reporting on sexual harassment allegations, bullying and a resulting suicide. When Microsoft then attempted to buy Activision, part of their negotiation tactic was to allow for union involvement.

After 5 years of fighting the corporations that continue to ignore basic human rights in America, it is clear that most of the cards are held by these behemoths. Something I can imagine is only going to get worse with the current administration deciding that people don’t need to be educated. 

While I appreciated that Smith refrained from presenting a strategy that was going to win – too often large movements try and find a ‘one size fits all approach’ and flattens local movements (I strongly recommend Peter Gelderloos’s “How Nonviolence Protects the State” as an example of this) that are more familiar with the smaller struggle – I did walk away feeling a little disheartened that he did not provide more specific examples of what unions could do to help their members and non-members alike.

A friend of mine in the UK, works in a video game union, and they have frequently stood in with employees on disciplinaries and ensured that people get a fair deal, they had a number of victories and now companies are having to be way more careful about what they say and do.

As Smith failed to highlight this as a possibility of what a union might be able to provide, it dawned on me that this might not actually be a real option in the US. Given the fact that most corporations do not acknowledge the right to form a union, and go out of their way with ever more (and often illegal) extreme union busting tactics.

In a recent stand up by Josh Johnson, he shares an anecdote about how he almost drowned and then on the walk back it started to rain. All his friends were bothered by the rain, but because he was wet and had almost drowned he was unphased. The point of the anecdote was to draw parallels with the poor and working poor, and their relationship with the mechanisms like stock markets and GDP.

The abandoned people of Tenderloin are indifferent to financial shifts in the games industry, they are too busy trying not to drown.

Similarly, the companies pushing AI are doing so to redirect money away from the very workforce that made them that money in the first place. Tom Smith helpfully pointed out that these are the same companies that have not had qualms with having union members held up at gun point when they attempt to meet with peers in places like the Philippines.

Every day I look at LinkedIn not just to continue a pointless argument, but also to keep track of trends, and there isn’t a single day where there is a new person reporting that they are Open to Work. Many of these people are still the right side of comfortable whereby stocks, housing prices, and advances in AI matter to them.

However, if this continues to happen, then people that used to be comfortable will start drowning, or almost drowning as companies plug the idea of ‘democratising game development’.

I was unhappy with the lack of tangible goals Tom Smith provided but it seems to me that joining a collective and ‘become ungovernable’ is the right advice in the short term and the only choice in the long term to avoid being left without a voice in this so-called ‘democratic’ industry.

If this interests you please check out the following unions:

IATSE

Game Workers Coalition

CWA

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