Ergin Bulut

Koc University · Department of Media and Visual Arts

Like other creative workers, videogame developers believe doing what you love (DWYL) brings success and happiness. Drawing on three years of ethnography in a U.S. based studio, I theorize DWYL as a social fantasy, which glues developers to work despite cruelties. Because developers’ attachment to work is not an individual matter of the heart but a...

Initially known as “the Turkish Godfather,” Turkish TV series Çukur (2017–2021) occasionally received criticism from government ministers and the government’s media regulatory board. This was surprising because Turkey’s and Çukur ’s cultural universes converged around the masculinist protection of family and territory. So, why this political backla...

What happens to journalists when hit by a pandemic in a country governed by authoritarian media regulations? We examine journalists’ experience in Turkey’s mainstream and alternative media and find that while the pandemic has deepened their economic precarity, journalists further suffer from bodily and political precarity. In the context of Covid,...

Beneath Turkish TV dramas’ global glamor lie workplace accidents, systemic injuries on workers’ bodies, and deaths. In response, workers seek to impose restraints on what can be done to their bodies by resorting to law and evoking ideals of equality as they struggle for workplace safety, healthcare, and dignity. Drawing on ethnographic research acr...

A spectacular shock doctrine is reformatting Turkey since the failed coup in July 2016. We examine how the television economy transformed the organization behind the coup (FETÖ) from a public secret into a spectacle. We investigate the televised confessions of former Gulenists, who revealed the scandalous FETÖ’s inner workings live on television. W...

Game workers have a problem. They code values and ideologies into games, but they are either not aware of it or deny it. Through a constructive and critical engagement with Games of Empire, I propose the concept of “ludic religiosity” to reveal how white masculinity informs game workers’ professional discourses, technological practices, ludic desir...

This chapter focuses on another group of marginalized actors in the game industry: game testers. As a means of getting one's foot in the industry, video game testing constitutes an arena of “cruel optimism.” Video game testing is a decidedly temporary position appealing mostly to young people with fewer occupational skills than the core creatives....

This chapter assesses the domestic dimensions of the unequal ludopolitical regime. Keeping the discussion on social reproduction alive, it asks: What kind of classed femininities are at work in the domestic space, as far as the reproduction of techno-masculinity at Studio Desire is concerned? Drawing on interviews with game developers' partners, th...

This chapter examines how Studio Desire's workers were managed after acquisition by Digital Creatives in the 2000s. It documents the dynamics of what the game developers called “the trade-off” between financial security and autonomy. This trade-off reveals the interactions and struggle between the residual and the emergent cultures, where frictions...

This concluding chapter provides a critique of liberal attempts at achieving “quality of life” in the game industry. It considers universal basic income, game industry unionization, and the radical imagining of a postwork society. The chapter also emphasizes the immediate need for making demands based on utopian hopes. Through hope and praxis, game...

This chapter discusses how Studio Desire's relocation contingently brought about the revitalization of Game City's downtown. This revitalization was possible as discourses, imaginaries, and alliances at the local level converged around neoliberal public–private partnerships that fetishized creativity, privileged middle-class values, and promoted ar...

This introductory chapter provides an overview of precarious labor in the video game industry. The emergence of video games as a medium goes back to a moment of “refusal of work” when Pentagon scientists, tasked with beating the USSR during the Cold War, ended up creating ludic experiences on their work computers during times of boredom. Today, con...

This chapter looks at the difficulties experienced by studio management in measuring the productivity of Studio Desire's workers. While no easy task, managing productivity and cultivating driven workers is not impossible, and Studio Desire's management has been able to harness the temporal, spatial, and subjective dimensions of both the workplace a...

This chapter reveals how even upper-rank workers are not exempt from layoffs, financial insecurity, and the anxiety of working in a hit-driven industry. While being bought out by Digital Creatives initially provided financial security for Studio Desire's game developers, Digital Creatives' hasty, adverse investment decisions destabilized their flag...

This chapter presents the notion of ludopolitics to center economic and cultural inequalities in the game industry. People need to move beyond grasping game production as simply an economic process based on trade-offs between two supposedly equal parties. Game production is a problem of social reproduction rooted in politics. A two-part question th...

Casual games disrupted the games industry, but not in ways commonly believed. What if we left behind the hardcore vs. casual games dichotomy to reveal that casual gameplay and casual game development have extended the neoliberal and neocolonial logic of the industry? Casual games, in terms of design and industry practices, remind us that there is n...

Following the coup attempt in Turkey, former Gulenists made appearances on various television channels and disclosed intimate and spectacular information regarding their past activities. We ask: what is the political work of these televised disclosures? In answering this question, we situate the coup within the media event literature and examine th...

Creativity is at the heart of the video game industry. Industry professionals, especially those producing blockbuster games for the triple-A market, speak fondly of their creative labour practices, flexible work schedules, and playful workplaces. However, a cursory glance at major triple-A franchises reveals the persistence of sequel game productio...

Combined pdf of all articles published in the special issue "Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism", edited by Thomas Allmer and Ergin Bulut, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 16 (1), 2018, pp. 44-240

Combined pdf of all articles published in the special issue "Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism", edited by Thomas Allmer and Ergin Bulut, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 16 (1), 2018, pp. 44-240

The overall task of this special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is to gather critical contributions examining universities, academic labour, digital media and capitalism. The articles collected in this special issue (1) provide the context, history and theoretical concepts underlying academic labour, (2) analyse the relation...

The overall task of this special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is to gather critical contributions examining universities, academic labour, digital media and capitalism. The articles collected in this special issue (1) provide the context, history and theoretical concepts underlying academic labour, (2) analyse the relation...

The Spectacle 2.0 recasts Debord’s theory of spectacle within the frame of 21st-century digital capitalism. It offers a reassessment of Debord’s original notion of Spectacle from the late 1960s, of its posterior revisitation in the 1990s, and it presents a reinterpretation of the concept within the scenario of contemporary informational capitalism...

Drawing on a theoretical background that connects visuality to the construction of power relations, this chapter provides a representational analysis of Deliver the Nets and ultimately argues that, as a serious game, Deliver the Nets portrays Africa as a faceless continent outside of history. It provides an easy route to the eradication of serious...

This article investigates representations of disability in Turkish television shows on health in their relation to the hegemonic ideologies that shape and are reproduced by them. Three categories emerge: disability as a familial, religious and medical issue. Respectively, each category is moulded by and perpetuates a patriarchal motherhood discours...

Drawing on the literature regarding internships and cinema of precarity, this article addresses how one “learns” to intern and negotiate his or her class identity between a blue-collar past and white-collar future through an analysis of Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources. In contrast to Lauren Berlant’s astute though pessimist reading of the movie, I...

This article examines the legal infrastructure of social media governance in the politically contested context of contemporary Turkey. It looks at how social media companies (specifically, Twitter and Facebook (FB)) and the nation state (Turkey) have negotiated power in the aftermath of Gezi Uprising in Summer 2013. I argue that while today’s conce...

This article foregrounds the concept of immaterial labor to theorize the tension between the precarity of below the line workers and the glamor of above the line workers in the video game industry. I argue that even the most seemingly secure sections of the gaming workforce have a tendency to drift toward the economic precarity most acutely felt ac...

In this chapter, we explore schooling in the postcolonial context as a particular type of cultural artifact. Eschewing dominant qualitative research tendencies that privilege the word and the text over the visual and the physical, we argue that deeper complexities and nuances come to the fore when we focus on the visual fields, noting that the visu...

This article draws on ethnographic research that examines the contemporary articulation of class identity in the postcolonial elite school setting of Old College high school in Barbados. From the qualitative data derived from this study, we argue that social class is better conceived as a series of flows, mutations, performances and performatives....

This article analyzes Free Rice within the context of “the rise of the ludic sublime,” where video games are hailed as the solution to highly sophisticated political problems. As part of what we call practices of “philitainment,” Free Rice, we argue, functions within the political domain of what Jodi Dean has termed “communicative capitalism” and t...

In her book, Neoliberalism as Exception, Aihwa Ong usefully observes that the North American university has been dirempted from it historical role of preparing young people for democratic citizenship. It has instead, according to Ong, become the great global marketplace and grand bazaar for international students' ambitions. In what follows, we dra...

The labor of video game testers has barely registered within political-economic analyses of work practices in the game industry. This article addresses this gap through a critical deployment of the concept of precarity and its multiform nature experienced by game testers. Drawing on Harry Braverman’s concept of “degradation of labor,” I aim to cont...

The terms of the debate regarding vocational training in Turkey have been discussed in relation to the dichotomy between secularism and religion. This stems from the fact that Imam-Hatip schools2 belong to the category of vocational schools. In a country with such a tense secular-religious divide, the increasing interest of the business world in th...

Cognitive capitalism--sometimes referred to as "third capitalism," after mercantilism and industrial capitalism--is an increasingly significant theory, given its focus on the socio-economic changes caused by Internet and Web 2.0 technologies that have transformed the mode of production and the nature of labor. The theory of cognitive capitalism has...

Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.