Since yesterday, August 1st, another epic struggle is shaking the US. Roughly a year after the writers and film/TV actors’ strike of 2023, video game actors are flooding the picket line! Their main demand after almost two years of unfruitful negotiations: AI regulations. No, not the kind of AI regulations that coincidentally came in force the same day in the EU, but a contract that would require video game companies to get the actors’ consent before reproducing their voices or likenesses with AI, as well as providing compensation when AI is used to replicate their performances.
Video game companies are having a rough summer. Not when it comes to sales and profits of course, those are soaring. However, they may have to share a tiny bit of those profits, since a wave of unionising is wobbling the industry. It has been a particularly hot summer: following the unionisation of 600 workers in Activision Publishing’s quality assurance department in March, the more than 500 game developers at Activision-Blizzard who work on “World of Warcraft” formed a union in July. Just a few days earlier, Bethesda became the first Microsoft game studio to unionise (keep in mind that both Activision-Blizzard and Bethesda have recently been acquired by Microsoft), when 241 of its employees joined the Communications Workers of America (CWA); their effort was also preceded by the unionisation of 300 quality assurance workers of Bethesda’s parent company, ZeniMax Studios, in the beginning of 2023.
What does that has to do with Cyprus? Well, one of the largest video game companies in the world, , Wargaming Group Limited, is headquartered in Nicosia. As far as we know, video game workers, including actors, are not organised on the island; this should not come as a surprise, since even the “traditional” entertainment industry is hardly organised. Let us hope that the efforts of their colleagues in the US will motivate the local workforce – the IWW-CYROC is more than willing to join, house and support any unionising effort!
On a final note, Bethesda’s first online multiplayer video game, Fallout 76, is set up in West Virginia; a state which saw some of the largest and bloodiest labour struggles in US history, many of them organised by the IWW. When players find themselves exploring the post-apocalyptic shores of the Kanawha river while listening to Sixteen Tons and Dark as a Dungeon, they should keep in mind that prominent Wobbly Ralph Chaplin began writing the anthem “Solidarity Forever” while working in the strike committee with Mother Jones during the Paint Creek coal-miners strike in Kanawha County in 1913.
So, Solidarity Forever fellow workers, and never forget, an Injury to One is an Injury to All!
