Gamers of the World Unite! Organising the Digital Proletariat
By Rüdiger Brandis and Alexandra Petrus
On the first of May 2025, International Workers Day, the traditional union demonstration moves through Berlin towards Alexanderplatz. Among the thousands of workers chanting and singing, a small group marches under a flag decorated with characters with raised fists demanding: “Game devs, organise!” For the first time, the German division for game workers of the trade union ver.di met in person on this historic day to join their comrades on the streets for better working conditions and rights for all. This small gathering represented the hundreds more who spent the previous three years unionising the German games industry by assisting in founding works councils and connecting workers with union representatives. These digital workers confront their massive devaluation and replaceability in an industry that, perhaps more so than any other, represents the rapid decay of the so-called professional-managerial class into the volatility of any other service industry.
But while we made a rare move out of our offices and homes onto the streets that day, the common space that we share, fight over, and organise is the digital: a space ruled over not just by the corporations we work for, but also the conglomerates that own the services and platforms that structure and control our work. It is here that we, as game workers, come together to plan our next moves and from which we strike, but also turn to for comfort when we are mistreated or laid off. And it is also through these digital platforms that we gaze on one of the most glaring oversights of socialist organising: the communities not of game developers, but of gamers.
The digital worlds we create and the industry we form are that of a largely, though not intrinsically, reactionary medium with imperialist origins and increasingly fascist leanings. With digital computing and games’ origins in US military experimentation, digital games marry the two pillars of Empire: the military and the market. Moreover, after a crash in the North American market in the early 1980s, digital games were rebranded toward the hyper-masculine and militarised. Steve Bannon, despite at first sporting an anti-gamer rhetoric in his right-wing online newspaper, Breitbart, recognised the ideological malleability of those living on the social margins and sought to build up a gamer audience, setting off cascading events that would bring gaming communities into increasing contact with right-wing ideologies in the 2010s.
Surprisingly, the political radical left has shown little interest in digital games. Reactive liberal platforms concerned with the dangers of gaming’s ability to recruit toward fascism have emerged, but seemingly little attention has been paid by left organisations and parties to use the medium as a recruitment platform themselves. The liberals are fighting the symptoms but not the cause. This is inexcusable!
Worldwide, more than 3.5 billion people play games and invest themselves in their various worlds to the extent that they form a significant part of their identity. Workers of all ages—the proletariat—not just children, spend their free time in digital game worlds, communities and forums, spaces porous to right-wing populists and fascists who prey on their participants’ vulnerability. We cannot leave these spaces to them! And we can do something about it:
First, game communities with a tendency for progressive topics need to be approached and integrated into the organising efforts of traditional left organisations, namely unions and parties. Every socialist knows that the revolution is not won in the parliaments of liberal governments, but relies on the organisation of the people at the places where they work and live. Thus, we as organisers must play games with them, approach them with our expertise as workers, union members, and intellectuals, to not just understand what people are longing for, but to start building this world with the people together. Gaming creates communities that are ripe for the taking for this form of organising.
Second, the question of taking on the industry itself must be tackled. The most important step involves the organising we have described at the beginning of this text, which logically involves radical shifts in the medium itself. As making games is an expensive and long process, we suggest instilling political change by leaning into the modification of existing popular games to literally reprogram them to fit our political messages. Modding is the practice of changing or expanding an existing game with additional content. Other than traditional serious games that have to rely fully on their own persuasive abilities and marketability, mods enable us as organisers to rhetorically expand into the spaces of existing popular games. We need to think of gaming as a space ready to be seized for organising together with the proletariat whose experience and allegiance is detrimental to our success. And thus we say: Gamers of the World Unite!