Critical Perspectives on the Games Industry: Constructs and Collusion

Abstract

Douglas Coupland’s satirical novel Microserfs (1996) explores the lives of a group of technology geeks who work as low-level programmers and testers at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond near Seattle in the mid-1990s. Through Daniel’s blog style diary entries their motivations, hopes and dreams are revealed as they are gradually tempted to relocate to Silicon Valley in California by the lure of being in at the start of a new and exciting games software project. Coupland draws upon months of observational research in both of the novel’s dramatic locations to capture the optimistic zeitgeist of the time in the American software industry, and anticipates the technology boom and dot.com bubble of the late 1990s. The novel is laced with ironic knowingness which reveals much about the difference between the projected self-image of the software industry, the realities of the business and the everyday lives of its workforce. The self-image of the software developers is that they are creative cultural entrepreneurs working in a cooperative, casual, flexible and open campus-style white space environment, where motivations to work long hours are derived less from financial reward than from artistic, technical and personal developmental compensations. In sociological terms, the developers are ideal typical members of Florida’s creative class who share a common identity through adherence to a creative ethos which is inseparable from their economic function, and determines similar social, cultural and leisure choices (Florida, 2004).

Spent two hours in the morning trapped in a room with the Pol Pots from marketing... like we don’t have anything better to do eight days before shipping... I think everyone hates and dreads Marketing’s meetings because of how these meetings alter your personality. At meetings you have to explain what you’ve accomplished. You end up becoming this perky, gung-ho version of yourself that you know is just revolting. I have noticed that everybody looks down on the gung-ho type people at Microsoft, but nobody considers themselves gung-ho. Fortunately gung-ho-ishness seems to be confined exclusively to marketing meetings. Otherwise I think the Campus is utterly casual. (Daniel in Coupland, 1996: 25)