Sustainable work in the creative industries: Game developers' working conditions in the digital games industry

The digital games industry is one of the fastest growing branches in the creative sector in Sweden: In 2018 the number of employees increased with about 14 percent. Specific for this branch is that digital games companies compete in a highly globalized and digitalized market dominated by a few large corporations. It creates the backdrop for specific working conditions. Previous studies from North America and the UK point at high workloads in combination with insecure work contracts and exploitation of the game developers’ own passionate interests in gaming. The quest for being creative is often juxtaposed to economic efficiency, as well as being used as means of obscuring precarious working conditions. There are however few studies of working conditions in the digital games industry in the Swedish context.
The aim of the study is to gain knowledge of the working conditions and working culture in the Swedish digital games industry. By doing that we may identify conditions that support a socially sustainable working environment. The study departs from the following research questions: 1) How are working forms and conditions understood, experienced and negotiated? 2) How are creative work understood, experienced and organized? Through primarily in-depth interviews with game developers, motivation and driving forces are investigated, as well as experiences of (in)security related to working conditions and organizing practices. This opens up for analyses of boundary negotiations between work and leisure, how different type of work is valuated socially and economically, and how creativity is understood and negotiated in a commercial context.
The study contributes with generic knowledge on the working conditions in industries where norms and structures are unclear and renegotiated due to factors such as digitalization, globalization, expansion, and particularly in working cultures characterized by informal relationships and blurred boundaries between work and life.