Cultural Studies Speaker Series: Ergin Bulut (Koç University)

A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry 

by Ergin Bulut (Media and Visual Arts Department, Koç University)

Meeting ID: 991 6525 9966

The fusion of work and play, desire and work, and performing a labor of love have become a hegemonic narrative across the globe. The video game industry stands out like a natural center of this fusion in the form of a dream job. The main question of this talk is: Who can play and who has to work in the video game industry? Grasping the personal, social, and emotional cost of racialized and gendered labor practices through the lives of video game workers, Bulut critiques liberal conceptions of creativity and discourses around quality of life in this unpredictable industry. In this talk,  Bulut will make an invitation to politicize love at work, while making a call for considering universal basic income, unionization, and a radical postwork imagination.