Studio closures, harassment, crunch time, rumblings of unionization - game labour issues currently have unprecedented public profile.

Join us at a public forum with game developers, media work researchers, and digital labour activists to discuss working conditions and social inequalities in the video games industry and strategies to improve conditions in digital media.

The forum will be moderated by Austin Walker, the Editor of VICE Games. Six speakers - game workers, union organizers, and researchers - will participate in a moderated conversation, followed by Q&A and refreshments.

This event launches “Contested Formations of Digital Game Labor,” a special issue of the journal Television & New Media, currently freely available as an open-access publication.

Guests

Dan Joseph, PhD is an organizer with the Game Workers Unite Toronto chapter, a freelance writer, and researcher of game work, apps, and platform capitalism.

Katherine Lapointe is an organizer with CWA Canada/Canadian Media Guild, this country’s only all-media union, with members at VICE, BuzzFeed, CBC, Canadian Press and other outlets across the country.

Maggie McCaw is a documentary visual researcher and was the first Branch President of the VICE Canada Union from 2016-2019.

Austin Walker is the Editor of VICE Games and the host of the podcast Friends at the Table. Before his career as a critic, he studied the intersection of play and labour at the University of Western Ontario, where he was a Research Associate in the Digital Labour Group.

Johanna Weststar teaches at Western University. She researches working conditions in the video games industry and partners with the International Game Developers Association to conduct developer satisfaction surveys.

Jennifer R. Whitson teaches at the University of Waterloo. Her research centres on game developers, as well as digital media surveillance and social influences on software development.

Sagan Yee is an animator, experimental game designer, and Executive Director of the Hand Eye Society, a video game arts not-for-profit organization.