15.1: Introduction

People often fantasize about Hollywood’s workforce being composed of innovative people imbued with refined tastes and aesthetics. They are further imagined as being well paid and therefore able to enjoy a rosy bohemian or bourgeois lifestyle, as opposed to other industrial workers. This romantic vision of the hip Hollywood creative may be apocryphal, but few would deny that the industry has long prospered because it has been able to foster and harness the creative energies of its employees. Moreover, Hollywood has served as a model for other creative industries in the United States, including gaming, animation, software, and information technology (IT).

This paper offers an alternative perspective on creative labor by investigating the values and attitudes of workers in Asia. The data of this study is based on my face-to-face interviews with workers in different kinds of game-related companies in China, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, as well as observation in their working sites from 2011 to 2013.¹ These locales vary from large-scale factory-like game enterprises with over one thousand workers to small companies operated by a few personnel; they include online or video game companies, game distributors, and production houses that focus on animation, character design, or programming for online, mobile, and web games. The interviewees include workers of all levels: owners, artists, programmers, distributors, and promoters. These interviews cover various modes of creative labor in East and Southeast Asia. By comparing the lifestyles of these Asian workers with their U.S. counterparts, this chapter suggests that “creative labor” in East and Southeast Asia does not conform to the model described above, due largely to different industrial practices and cultural contexts as well as different experiences with processes of globalization. Given these divergences, the term cultural labor is more apt and comprehensive, indicating the ways video game production varies around the world. Moreover, this essay highlights distinctions within this Asian region, noting different attitudes, practices, and working conditions.

Three modes of cultural labor are theorized: in Korea, progressive artists, who are innovative in developing their entrepreneurship; in Southeast Asia, skilled conformers, who are “the arms” of the Western giants; in China, the contented bourgeoisie, who are skillful but less creative under state censorship. The presence of these emerging forms of cultural labor in Asia challenges the ethnocentric view of creative labor that has largely been shaped by North Atlantic tradition.

Previous studies of creativity suggested that research on creativity has been limited by ethnocentric boundaries in a world of cultural pluralism, implying that the traditional Western model of creativity is not appropriate in Southeast Asian countries. Maharaj Krishna Raina investigated the labor and lifestyles of Southeast Asian creative workers, concluding that they varied greatly from their Western counterparts.² Beth Hennessey proposed that the concept of creativity is not applicable across nations, suggesting that creativity is constituted by both apparent and embedded values of different nations and is dependent on social agreements about what precisely constitutes creativity.³