When I was doing my week-long residency at Georgia College, I came across a news report about a case of workplace exploitation and abuse in Indonesia. At first, I read it out of curiosity and then realized that it is perhaps related to crunch culture and exploitation that have been prevalent in the global video game industry.

The perpetrator, Brandoville Studios, also sounded familiar to me. I tried to remember when I first heard it. It turns out one of my former students at President University did an interview with a game designer who at the time worked at the company, for their thesis project. According to my student, Brandoville Studios had a reputable name in Indonesian video game and animation industry. They always had a strong presence at job fairs. And as a AAA game company, they also had worked with big clients such as Disney. So this is not just a case of a random Indonesian video game company.

This makes me wonder about how much of a norm crunch culture is in Indonesian video game and animation industry. The creative industry in Indonesia has developed rapidly in the last five or ten years. Many Indonesian game and animation studios, as well as individual artists and designers, have worked as subcontractors for big companies like EA, Disney, etc. And I am guessing that these studios and people probably have to sign NDAs for their clients. This is something that I will have to research further.

The case of Brandoville also makes me think about the recent unionization movement in video game industry, particularly in the US. World of Warcraft developers recently formed a union, the largest and most inclusive union at Blizzard. SAG-AFTRA is currently authorizing a video game strike in support of its video game worker members. In an ideal world, I would also like for this unionization movement to happen in Indonesian video game and animation industry. But Indonesia has a union culture that is distinct from the US or many other western countries. So I need to think more about this Brandoville Studios case and its ramification to Indonesian video game and animation industry.

In the meantime, if you are not familiar with crunch culture in video game industry, you can watch this episode from Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act, which is a good intro to understand this problematic culture, that I always use it in my Global Video Games class.