Game Worker Solidarity: Mapping Collective Actions in the Video Games Industry

The Game Worker Solidarity project, documented in this commentary, maps collective actions taken by game workers to improve working conditions, presenting its findings through a public website and searchable database. The authors argue that understanding existing and potential forms of worker organisation is essential to the future of games and game production. The project was launched in 2021 as a form of co-research, combining the perspectives of a game worker and an academic researcher, and was partly inspired by a similar mapping effort focused on the tech industry. Its stated aims are to document the emergent unionisation movement that followed 2018 and to archive the longer history of worker resistance.

The dataset, compiled through crowdsourcing, news searches, outreach to unions and campaigns, and an open submission process, comprised 155 unique solidarity actions as of 2023, spanning 1955 to the present across 19 countries. The United States accounts for the largest share at 76 actions, followed by France (19), Canada (12), South Korea (10), and the United Kingdom (9). The authors acknowledge significant limitations, chiefly an English-language bias that likely underrepresents activity in countries such as South Korea. Actions recorded rose sharply from 29 in 2018, the year Game Workers Unite launched, to between 20 and 24 annually from 2019 through 2022, a pattern the authors partly attribute to heightened news coverage following that event.

The commentary identifies several emergent lessons: that alternative, workplace-based approaches to collective power are gaining ground; that control over work, such as crunch and the kinds of games produced, has been less often targeted in campaigns than pay and union recognition; and that organising must meet game workers within the digital spaces they already use. The authors also highlight divergent union models across countries, from enterprise and independent unions to affiliations with established national unions, and call for greater international cooperation as the industry becomes more globally integrated. Several concrete wins, including a collective bargaining agreement in Croatia and permanent contracts for QA workers at Activision Blizzard, are cited as evidence of tangible outcomes.