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This article advances the research on unionization and collective organizing in the games industry by highlighting potential future challenges of international solidarity as identified by the Marxist concept of labor aristocracy. While much of organizing and unionization in the games industry are in their nascent stages by focusing primarily on the national question and the nature of work in the games industry, the nature of global supply chains, and free flow of capital emphasizes the importance of global perspectives on how game workers can organize. Primarily, this article is concerned with the material effects of 21st century imperialism on collective organization, where the Marxist concept of labor aristocracy identifies the privileged strata of game workers in imperialist countries who benefit from exploitative international relations between core and periphery economies through higher wages, positions of power, and affordable access to commodities. As a result, these groups of game workers should, according to the implications of labor aristocracy, hold a material investment into maintaining the exploitation of game workers in the periphery. This means that the current social movements to organize and unionize in the games industry potentially encounters the challenge of international solidarity with workers whose exploitation those in the imperialist countries benefit from. This article identifies such challenges through interviews and an online survey with game workers, organizers, union representatives, and leaders of international organizations. The findings reveal the international character of game work and the challenges of national legislation; the importance and challenge of building solidarity between game workers in the core and periphery; and finally, the potential strategies for unions and organizers to cultivate international solidarity. Thus, the article clears a forward path for both production research in game studies and labor organizing in the Western games industry through a global perspective on international material relations and historical materialism., gamevironments, No. 17 (2022): Special Issue "Social Justice"

Source at https://www.peterlang.com/series/nbg. In this chapter we present a theoretical framework to facilitate teaching and learning about, rather than with and through, audio-visual media in upper-secondary education in Norway. Drawing upon Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, we show how aspects of production, form, reception, and reproduction can be approached in school contexts to treat audio-visual media as more than allegedly neutral tools for set educational purposes. Arguing for the continued relevance of a critical media literacy tradition also in contemporary digital classrooms, we illustrate the applicability of our approach through illustrating analyses of the historical digital game This War of Mine and the online game platform Roblox.

We believe that the representation, construction, manufacture, and exclusion of monsters across genres and media is an increasingly pressing issue for individuals and civil societies on a global scale. The widespread use of exaggerated frames presenting a variety of others as mere threats has deadly consequences for many people—worldwide. And, ‘Western’ liberal democratic elites urgently need to acknowledge their own role in such processes as the current construction of ‘Monster Assad’ as a Hitler-esque tyrant intending to ‘gas his own people’ or the continuing framing of Iran as ‘a nuclear threat to world peace’ lead by ‘nuke-building, apocalyptic mullahs’ are equally irresponsible and dangerous acts as the presentation of ‘non-normative’ persons as a menace to cultural and societal stability or the assumption that certain people are simply born as terrorists. We believe that as researchers, students, employees, workers, pupils, retirees, and others—in sum: as citizens—, we must be aware of such discursive moves of othering and exclusion and learn to identify these, connect them to underlying interests, and then resist and subvert them to avoid more killings in our or others’ names. This is our responsibility especially as contemporary global crises intensify bringing with them the need for ever new scapegoats to explain away the real contradictions underlying these relentless challenges.

To you, dear reviewers: Your monstrous support was, as so often, unpaid—but valuable indeed. The energy you have put together in writing your thorough reviews substantially helped in shaping and re-shaping (and sometimes even re-re-shaping) the wonderful scientific endeavors of our authors.Thank you so much!

VonAbisU—dies sind die Kurzbiographien unserer zwanzig MaMo-Autoren; in alphabetischer Reihenfolge., From A to U—these are the short biographies of MaMo’s twenty contributors; in alphabetical order., FraA tilU—her finner dukorte biografier av våres tyve forfatterne; i alfabetisk rekkefølge.