There were reports of real fights breaking out in waiting lines, while in the U.K., parliament offered up a motion criticizing the game’s depiction of violence. Few people, however, thought to consider the hardware in play. That is, the impact of production in the poor, often developing countries where game consoles are assembled or which supply their key components.
The disconnect is something that Bentley’s Randy Nichols aims to change.
“To be honest about what video games are, we have to acknowledge the whole process,” says Nichols, an assistant professor in the English and Media Studies Department who joined the faculty in 2008. “While software labor itself is problematic, it becomes much more so when you look at what people go through in the production of these consoles.”
Outsourcing Outrage
Nichols is at work mapping the production and consumption of video games globally. His initial findings show an industry whose profits are often marked by excessive energy use, environmental degradation, and inhumane working conditions.
“We’ve essentially outsourced the worst parts of the process,” says the professor, who hails from Texas and earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Oregon. “The globalized nature of production becomes a mask for trafficking in human rights violations.”
From child labor mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to sweatshops in the Far East, the path of production for many high-tech devices and luxury goods isn’t pretty. Yet reports of problems are all but absent in the mainstream media. Instead, Nichols says, the general public hears “sexier” criticism of games like Modern Warfare or feel-good talk of software’s potential to fuel economic development.
“As you get further away from software, the process gets murkier and less discussed,” he observes. Tracking hardware development involves “crafting together pieces from a variety of disparate industry sources. Even farther down the production line, as you get to things like rare-earth metals, these come almost exclusively from the least developed parts of the world – from workers who are disproportionally women, and disproportionally small children.”
Pay to Play
The picture gets bleaker still. While overseas software designers earn a living wage to offset their workplace hardships, Nichols reports, the scenario is much different for workers who contribute to the hardware process.
“For people in the Chinese manufacturing industry, buying one of the gaming consoles ends up being almost a year’s worth of work.” he says. “That’s if they pay for nothing else, if they haven’t bought food or paid for rent.”
The disparity has hidden costs with implications both global and close to home.
“We need to think about the consequences of engaging with this technology,” says Nichols, who in April hosted a working paper seminar on his research at Bentley’s Valente Center for Arts and Sciences. “What does it say about power imbalances worldwide? What does it mean that I have this video-game console in my living room? I wanted to think about what it means to be someone who puts these [consoles] together.”
Those questions engage Nichols as a scholar and a teacher. “The benefit of being at Bentley is that I can talk to students who are going into the business, and say, ‘This is a business practice that we can do better – and can we figure out how?’”
