“You Don’t Really Feel Like a Human Being” - One Worker Shares What It's Like to Play Video Games for a Living
“You Don’t Really Feel Like a Human Being” - One Worker Shares What It's Like to Play Video Games for a Living
Video game studios are exploiting their most vulnerable employees and laying off tens of thousands of workers. Unions are trying to put a stop to that.
The following is an interview I conducted with Wayne Dayberry, a Quality Assurance tester for Zenimax, a video game studio recently acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion. Dayberry is a member of the recently formed Zenimax Workers United-CWA union and is one of their lead organizers. The union is currently bargaining their first contract with ZeniMax. The QA team has formed its union in the midst of several other successful drives in the industry, with QA workers at Raven Software, Blizzard Albany, and Keywords Studios also unionizing. This labor organizing is happening in the midst of tens of thousands of workers across the industry losing their jobs in mass layoffs. Microsoft recently shuttered multiple studios in what one developer described as “a fucking gut stab.” Microsoft imposed those layoffs shortly after posting profits of $21.9 billion in the latest quarter, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year.
Dayberry and I spoke about a range of issues, including working conditions, how they formed their union, and what unionization has achieved for them and their comrades in the industry. The plight and perspectives of everyday workers such as this are very important to air, discuss, and think about. This interview has been lightly edited for style and clarity. Portions of this interview originally appeared in Jacobin.
KODY CAVA: Zenimax was recently bought by Microsoft. Did that change anything for you guys?
WAYNE DAYBERRY: During our campaign we were bought by Microsoft. And we were still under the radar then, and we gave it a little bit of time to see if any changes would happen favorably for us. And once it turned out that pretty much nothing changed on our level, then we went ahead with our plan to organize.
CAVA: How is the contract bargaining going?
DAYBERRY: I feel like though it has been a year since we started, the amount of work that's been done, like we've made the most of that year. Part of what slowed us down was that the more other groups organized, the more tables Microsoft had to sit at. So we went from meeting a whole lot to a little bit less for a while there, but we're trying to wrap it up as soon as possible. Both parties are interested. They want to be completed with this process, and we want our people to start benefiting from what we've negotiated as soon as possible as well.
CAVA: Why did you choose to organize under the Communications Workers of America (CWA)?
DAYBERRY: A big part of it is that they were already showing interest in organizing in this industry, and it seemed like you'd want the people that are already aligned with what you're going for. And aside from that, just on a personal level, they're great people, and they were able to give us the confidence that we needed to invest in a group to have our back.
CAVA: What were some of the reasons you chose to organize in the first place?
DAYBERRY: It's kind of like a death by a thousand cuts. We had enough. There's enough systemic issues that exist in any company that's in this industry. So, we have some shared ones with other people and then there was issues that were unique to where we're at. As it turns out, there are not that many unique ones, to be honest. The more we've had conversations with people in other studios, it's all kind of the same issues. Like crunch mentality — not as much that it exists, but how it's handled and what could be done to prevent it; lack of transparency in general on how things work; ill-defined roles at work. It's kind of hard to tell who's supposed to be doing what and how to climb a ladder up. Overall, QA has been like the toner cartridge. If the company is a copy machine, we're the thing that just gets replaced once it's out. That's how it's been since QA has been around in this industry. You run people until they're burned out. And QA is often considered the first step into the industry. Unless you know someone, you've got to climb the ladder, and you can't start as a world builder. You have to get in somewhere. So the industry knows that they're going to have an unending supply of people that are fueled by passion. So then those people get bottlenecked in a job that, instead of keeping around veterans that know what they're doing, just interchanging people once they've had enough and can't take it anymore.
CAVA: What are some of the main demands you’re making for this first contract?
DAYBERRY: Zenimax had independent contractors. That's pretty consistent throughout the industry, but we've actually made some changes to that in our negotiation. Instead of having contract workers, have something called a temporary employee, and it's a role that's going to be less exploitable, more or less. And part of the message that we're trying to send is that you should treat this job like it is any other facet of a game being made. Development, production, art, audio, the people that they get in these other departments, they're good at their job. They want to keep these people. They're good audio people. They're good world builders. They're good artists. Why would you not want that also applied to the QA department? If the QA department is running on all cylinders, your product's going to be fucking great. And if it's not, it's not going to be good. I guess that's pretty fucking obvious, but you can get away with just using people until they're burned out. They go off somewhere else and then you get new people.
I think the general industry perspective on what QA does is wrong. There's a difference between finding a bug and finding a systemic issue. Investigation has to be done. Outsourcing happens a lot, and outsourced companies usually run on “bug quotas.” They can find issues, they can find a coffee cup that's an inch above a table, but that's not a systemic problem, that's a bug. But when you have somebody that is able to, not just run through the game and see what's wrong, but to be able to test the limits of the game itself, to identify what could be weak points and prod at those weak points, to find an issue where it seems like a singular event and be able to track it through the game to find that it's more of like a glass fracture, like a web of issues going through it. When you have people like that on, your product is going to be rock solid when it comes out. But the industry has never been about keeping those people on board. It's just been about having bodies in seats. And we're trying to push towards this new idea of, why not retain skilled employees? Why not make QA a possible career choice rather than just a foot in the door?
CAVA: What are some of the things that a good contract can do for the industry at large? How does it set an example for others?
DAYBERRY: I think that we are encroaching into an area where the people that are not currently thinking about organizing are seeing other people's benefits from organizing. Even in our own company there's support for what we've accomplished. So we've been able to show, just in our own world, the ripples that come out from that. Look, with some effort, they're able to right this wrong that's been a problem for a long time, or protect somebody that usually wasn't protected. Organizing is difficult. It's trying to convince someone that what you're saying is going to happen with a fight rather than it just could happen. Groups are now organizing and benefiting from organizing, and it's going to make people realize that the systemic issues that they are suffering from don't need to be something they need to continue suffering from. Eventually it's going to become the majority in the industry. Your company's not going to get applicants if you're one of the holdouts that are still willing to treat people like shit.
Again, it's not just in QA that there's issues. There's issues in all the departments. It's just how that shit works. There's people at the top making a lot of money. And then there's the people at the bottom making the thing that makes that money. You'd think that with the amount of money that comes in to this industry that it would benefit somebody to be a part of it. And it does if you're on a certain level. But if you're anywhere from even up to producers and singular devs, everybody's not getting paid what they should be getting paid. Again, the industry knows we're reusable. So, just trying to put a halt to that whole fucking thing.
But the more that this gets out there, the more interviews we have, the more successes that are passed around, I think people are slowly now passing the point of hesitancy when it comes to showing interest in it. I think there's going to be a spike in the next couple of years that is noticeable. It's this whole new concept of treating people well. I'm not saying that mega-corps are going to change overnight, but there's going to be a couple of places that are obviously better to work at that have unions, and there's going to be no choice but there to be some kind of ripple coming off of that.
And to underscore that too, I think this current generation is less inclined to eat shit on a regular basis than past generations. A big part of what got us going was the younger members in our unit.
CAVA: How broad was the organizing effort at Zenimax when it started? Were there a lot of people on board from the get-go?
DAYBERRY: At the start of it, it was just me in 2020. And there was a moment where there was a blow-up in Slack [a messaging platform]. Part of what was the catalyst for our organizing was this Fallout 76 event. It was the first time that almost everybody in the department was in the same situation. Before, we would have separate teams. You might be on a team where if you work with Tango [a Zenimax subsidiary], they run a tight ship. So that's not going to be as hard of a project to work on as Project B, that kind of thing. So for the first time, everyone's kind of suffering the same, and the systemic issues were being highlighted and underscored in this situation. And someone, a supervisor, I can't remember what it was they said, but they said something egregious enough that myself and someone that's since left the company fired back. And we had like an hour-long back and forth with this guy in front of basically the entire department. And neither me or the other person got fired or anything. They kind of just brushed it off. But that was the first... There was a chorus of emojis to things that we were saying. It kind of gave us the impression that we were like, okay, that's good. We're not crazy. There's some validation there. After that I had a moment of…that was more of a mental breakdown for me. I was terrified, just terribly angry. And after that died down, I was like, OK, all that anger got me was stress relief, but I didn't change anything.
After that, I reached out to a bunch of people in the department and collected about five grievances or five issues they had with the department. And I said, just give me these. I'll keep your name off of it and I'll submit it to management and HR and say, here, we have these issues. Is there any chance we could try something? And I didn't expect anything to come from it except the proof that there wasn't any other option but to organize. Because we turned that in, had a pointless conversation, acknowledged that I did indeed get a survey taken. It kind of came up short.
At this time, in 2020, it was about the same time that people in Blizzard started their unionization fight. And I had this grand idea of, well, if I can get in touch with someone at Blizzard, we're trying to do the same thing. Maybe there's some sort of collaboration, some communication or something that can go on. So I started pinging people in our company asking if they knew anybody that had gone to Blizzard. And I finally got put in touch with someone that was at Blizzard. When I got in touch with them, they had actually just quit, but they were part of the group that started organizing there. And they put me in touch with a specific individual in the CWA. So I reached out to them and what followed was two or three months of regular conversation about the issues that we've had, what's happened so far, how many people are there, that kind of stuff — just kind of laying the groundwork. And I was able to get 12 other people to consider this option of going the direction of organizing.
My original pitch was: I'll do everything and I'll be the person that takes the hit. All you’ve got to do is say yes eventually. I'll do whatever it takes. Because I knew that was going to be hard. People don't want to get fired, don't want to need a new job They’re trying to work up through here. Between that and in-house systemic issues, fears of reprisal from people, and being blacklisted, there's a lot of that negative culture that would have to be broken through. So I figured I'd just say, you don't have to do anything at all. Make it that simple. And I ran it like that for a while. I had a couple of people helping me out. We had a Discord server as a meeting place. And I started collecting a decent amount of people. We got up to around 60 people, maybe 80 out of 180. And then in 2021, we bled out about 43 longtime testers.
At that point, we really buckled down with CWA. A buddy of mine, Zach, had stepped up and started running it with me. And then we built an organizing committee and then our campaign really kicked off during 2022. So it was an individual effort for a while. And then we had a mock of what the right way to do things are. And then once we linked up with the CWA, they helped us get our shit completely together.
CAVA: What were some of the difficulties in organizing, in getting people on board? How did you communicate with your fellow workers?
DAYBERRY: A lot of it was via Discord. That initial dust-up I had with management on Slack was in March, like two weeks before lockdown in 2020. So as soon as we had momentum, everyone's work from home now. Keeping momentum up in Discord with conversation and then also having regular meetings, actual voice meetings helped bridge that gap. There was an amount of people I was able to bring on that I had known for a couple of years that I didn't need to meet. I just needed to give them the idea. With the newer people, the difficulties started kicking in with the work-from-home. You're reaching out to somebody that you've never met. They don't know you and you're dropping this huge thing on them. But at least in my experience it was all about adding some kind of human touch to it. I think that's what the voice meetings added. I could say all the same in a block of text and it's just a block of text. But being able to say that stuff and being able to project some amount of calmness or confidence, that was the thing that I think made it happen for us in a big way.
And the more people that we had step up to join the organizing committee, the more people we had speaking, the more perspectives, the more voices we had, I think it really tied everything together. Just passionate speeches.
CAVA: What do you make of the argument sometimes bandied about that games are getting more expensive to make (because consumers apparently demand the steepest production values) and therefore are inherently riskier projects for companies to take on, thus "forcing" companies to downsize a whole lot of people if the product doesn't do so well?
DAYBERRY: Off the top of my head, there are a lot of games being produced that were made by one or two people that are tremendous and are more successful than triple A games. There's a game that came out not that long ago called Lethal Company, and it's just one guy who made it and there's almost nothing to it. But it was outselling everything when it dropped. The thing that makes that game perfect is there's just enough detail for there to be a game. You can tell the difference between walls and enemies and floors and stuff. But it's also the audio experience. It's scary as fuck. Anyway, it's proof that you don't need to make something completely diamond studded. People may indeed want that, but also I would have to imagine some way to be able to plan a project in a way that you don't gut yourself. It's one thing to be like, oh shit, this game ended up being $300 million to make. And now we got to make that up. Well, how did you fuck it up? Did you start knowing that? And if so, then why are you surprised now? So there's no real transparency on our end of what goes into planning it.
There's a lot of companies that talk about how they run lean as a positive trait. Like, we only have just enough people that we need, which then puts you in a situation where if something goes wrong, and you only have X amount of people that can do X amount of work and X amount of hours, that's when you start needing to outsource and pulling contractors. And part of the question for me is how much of that could be completely eradicated by just not trying to maximize profits? Companies will stick to a deadline because they don't want to lose face. But if you stick to a deadline and your product's shit, then you're going to lose the face for a shitty product. And then you're idiots for releasing it when you said you were going to if it wasn't ready to release. But if you miss your deadline by a month, then you may also take out the human cost of crunch culture.
CAVA: How have you seen the video game industry change over the years since you’ve been a part of it? Did things used to be better for workers?
DAYBERRY: This industry took off so fucking fast. I'm 42. when I was younger, every adult was avidly against video games. You know, mind rot, you should be outside, and all that stuff. But now we're up into the point where that is quite different. As time went on, they became more and more acceptable. Guys that would fit into the jock category were playing Madden. Even if you weren't a video game player, you were doing something game-like or a specific game. I think it just shot up so fucking fast that no one took time to put in rules or worried about people getting torn up and stuff. It was just this money-producing thing. As long as everything was working, then why stop? And pre-internet, with the lack of transparency — there was a show on a channel I don't think exists anymore, like 20 years ago, where the thing you got to win was to become a game tester. You get a job testing games. And it was getting torn apart because everybody that had worked in games before were like, it's not a fucking prize. You're about to get video games ruined for you because it was even fucking worse back then. So I think this is just a thing that's been building where everybody that wanted to be a part of this industry, trying to jump on a moving train, are getting all fucked up. And now everybody has collectively reached a point where it's not sustainable anymore. We will not have a video game industry anymore if things keep working like this.
It's not that different from textile workers and coal miners and stuff. Those jobs all of a sudden existed. People needed jobs. So they got them and put up with them because you needed them. But then it got to a point of like, okay, it's been fucking 20 years of this and I've lost three kids into the gears of this machine. There's gotta be a fucking end point to that. And I think we've hit that point. Things shot up so fast in the tech industry, from landlines and having to be at a TV set to watch a show, to where we're at now. I think the morality of it is catching up all of a sudden. We put it in a place and it was exciting and awesome and we wanted to be a part of it. And now we just took a second to take a breath and, man, this is actually fucking me up being a part of this. Why not take the kids-crawling-into-machines factor out of this industry?
CAVA: So that being said, what are some specific changes that could make things better for the industry as a whole?
DAYBERRY: Shifting things away from outsourcing would be a big thing. This may be obvious, but pay. Something that's kind of new to this conversation is the option to work from home. The concept I was talking about before, the lack of ability to sustain a career, to be able to invest into this in some way, it is a fulfilling job. People are going to spend money on this game that they want. You want them to have a good experience. I play games. I don't want to buy something that's shitty. Like buying a microwave that works three times.
To be able to have a clearly defined role and to be able to have a clearly defined path to get to a place where you're comfortable. I think just something as simple as that would make a really big deal. You come into the industry with expectations of like, I'm going to climb a ladder. Then you're just in this mosh pit and you either can exist in the mosh pit long enough to get spat out into some other place or you quit and either try your luck somewhere else or leave the industry. It also became a factor once people got a taste of it via the lockdown. People with families all of a sudden had a shitload more time with their families and you can do laundry on your lunch break. The amount of time that you're not spending in traffic. Even here in Maryland, there's a lot of people that, if you live a town away, you're fucked. That's two hours to go a half hour away. So work-from-home wasn't something that we would have argued for until it had happened. Look at the benefits of it and look at the lack of hit to production. While we were in lockdown, we released games on time that did well. There was no evidence that there was some sort of downside to that as far as production is concerned.
CAVA: How have you been using the new union to collaborate with other unions or video game workers who are interested in organizing?
DAYBERRY: We went to the Game Developers Conference and we were able to not only get the word out in general there, but collaborate with each other. This is the concerns we have. This is concerns other people have. The more communication we have with other groups that are organizing and moving forward, the more that shift can all happen at once. The whole thing with organizing is communicating. Communicating with somebody in the sense of listening to the issues that they have and being able to tell them something back. This is what we can actually do about it. And not just an idea, but like, here's what another company did that's in a union. Here's the leverage that we have.
There's a certain amount of calmness that gets passed along if somebody spends 30 minutes airing grievances and you're able to alleviate all of that, give an answer to them. All we have to do is sign this card and then that's a thing of the past. A part of what was a boost to our organizing effort was once we had a place to talk in this discord server. Once more people had a chance to say, here's a bad thing that happened to me. And then nine other people are like, some shit like that happened to me too. It was validating for everybody once everybody knew that they weren't alone. Combined with identifying with the suffering of others as well. Once everybody knew everybody else was having the same problem they had, it solidified the idea that we were working for. And none of that would have happened if those conversations didn't happen. If it was all just one-on-one conversations, we could secure votes or whatever, but it's that sense of community that really got us going. And I think that community is already growing and it's only going to get bigger. We were all fighting for the same things that are the same systemic issues that are shot through the entire industry. So if they're all handled in a similar fashion and around the same time, then there's no choice but the industry is going to have to flex in our direction.
CAVA: You said that it feels like a death by a thousand cuts to work in the industry without the protection of a union. What were some of those cuts, specifically?
DAYBERRY: As far as advancing in my career, there's a lot of moving the goalposts back that can happen. Also I had to work six day weeks for a year. They have a protocol in place, like, you can't work seven days. That's too much. And we won't do overtime, but you can do six days. And the effect of the grind, it goes by so fast where all of a sudden like, holy shit, I've been doing this for a year now. And in my situation, when I asked, “Hey, what's the deal? When's there going to be a change or something?” And to get back an answer that was more or less, well, it'll stop when it stops. And it's like, ah, shit. Okay. That's terrible. And gas lighting being an effective thing for management. Individually you can't have a successful conversation with management because you can't say we all think this and we all feel this way, because you're the only one there. “I'm not hearing this from other people,” and such like that. So the lack of having a voice. It was just years of kind of just doing what I hoped was the most I could do without getting much feedback. It’s that weird, frustrating place of like, what the fuck? There's just boxes I can check to move forward, I checked them, but I'm not moving forward. But there's also no reason why. Frustrations like that. Again the death by a thousand cuts. You don't really feel like a human being. You're treated less-than than other departments in the building.
A lot of people that have these jobs want this to be their career in some form or another, whether it's QA or production or world building or audio or art. When it comes to the point where it's like, hey, I should stop for my own benefit, I'm not going to let them use me like this, there's a certain amount of love of the game in a lot of the people. They don't want this product that they're attached to to go out bad. So they'll work extra hours unpaid to make sure things get covered and they'll stretch themselves thin. Someone puts a workload on you that's more than your workload, you can't do much about that. Pre-union you just sort of got to take it and go with it. And it's easy to use yourself up doing that because it's why you're there. You do take pride in it. Our names are in the credits. People know us. If we put a game out, even my friends are going to tear me apart about it. That's the thing that lets them, on the higher end, get away with that kind of stuff. They're doing it for the money. We're doing it for the love of doing it. It's just pure passion. It's easy to exploit.
CAVA: Given the current state of the industry, what would you tell someone who is wanting to enter into the industry today? Someone who is interested in attending an industry trade school? What should their expectations be? As a mentor, what advice would you offer?
DAYBERRY: Well, I myself lack education past high school. There's a lot of people that come into QA with a degree of some kind, like in art or programming or something that is their next eventual step.
But I would say to keep that passion tempered and to not mix up overextending yourself with being passionate. I think there's a line there. It's easy to lose yourself in that. It's like, hey, if I go this far over the line, that's how much I care. Which isn't untrue, I guess, in a sense, but, to keep perspective on that. Your passion's important and use that to fuel yourself, but also don't let it push you over the line of doing damage to yourself. And I guess that's easier said than done.
Honestly, my best advice is just to not mix up. What the difference between this generation and past generations is before the whole deal was you take it. You're lucky to have a job, and you don't complain because you need money. But it doesn't have to be that way. And the more recent generations have shaken off that. You get that Boomer mentality of like, just do what you're told. And it's like, well, but what if it was different than that? What if we didn't accept torment and suffering. New people are seeing the failure in old ways.
CAVA: What are some of the more immaterial things that unionizing has done for you guys? Besides wages and benefits and all that?
DAYBERRY: There's the pride in it. What we actually accomplished. We accomplished it at a — even before Microsoft bought us, Zenimax is a significant name in the industry with a significant following and a significant history in the industry. And the pride in it, accomplishing it and accomplishing it well. We had 180-something people just at Rockville plus two other locations that had at least 60 to 100 people, and being able to stay under the radar to collaborate together, to come closer together as people. Like before this, it was kind of cliquish. Now people know each other and they know each other's stories. That's definitely one of those bigger immaterial things. Like, it's changed the culture in the workplace. People have the ability — not the ability — they have more of an option to care about each other now because we can actually do something about it. Before we could just say, “Hey, that sucks, I wish I could do something about it.” But now we can actually say, “Hey, I heard so-and-so say this on this other team. Let's look into this and see what we can do to support them and what they need.”
For me personally, which I'm sure can happen to anybody, I kind of found a calling in it. I've never been able to pour myself into something. I'm not someone that does shit like this. It surprised me more than anybody else. But it's that fucking rewarding and it feels so fucking good to connect with people, to have genuine conversations and to be able to do something. It's not like we're just getting people more money. We have a voice and the human suffering level will go down. And it's inspiration for the next group. There's a studio out there that has less than 300 people in their department. Then they can definitely do it if we could, you know?
So it just, it feels good to be part of that facet of…shit I don't even know how to say it. Just to be in that group, to be part of that world…I can't put it into words. It just feels fucking really good.