15.6: Three Modes of Cultural Labor
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- Anthony Fung
- University of California Press
The two dimensions of creativity dependence and creativity tolerance yield four possible quadrants or formations of cultural labor. The fieldwork in Asia yielded at least three modes of cultural labor.
Progressive Artists
Cultural labor in Korea works in a democratic, free-market environment where the business model of games depends on both internal consumption and export. The conditions of the market, the democratic system, and the business models of the games companies are similar to those in the United States. Koreans used to be the leading players in the games market in Asia and still contribute to many leading games on the market. One of the most important games is Aion: The Tower of Eternity , a MMORPG released by NCsoft, a major Korean game developer. It was first released in Asia in 2009, and by May 2009 had acquired 3.5 million subscribers in the region, where China is the largest market under its operator Shanda Interactive Entertainment. Aion was later localized for Western markets, including North America, Europe, and Australia.
My interview with a former NCsoft programmer who was involved in developing Aion revealed the conditions of Korean cultural labor. The venue of the interview was picked by the interviewee: the backyard of a stylish coffee shop in the Bochun area, a district featuring well-preserved traditional Korean houses where artists reside. During the interview, I saw visitors going back and forth taking photos. The interviewee was well aware of the overly romanticized lifestyle of cultural labor in the area. Because of their strong programming skills and sophisticated tastes, which are in high demand, they are able to pursue a relatively uninhibited lifestyle. The interviewee is now a graduate student at Seoul National University writing a thesis on the Korean creative industry. He has confirmed that he will return to work at NCsoft after completing his graduate degree. Coincidentally, another programmer I met was also a graduate student, at Yonsei University. As he explained, he became interested in games when he was in high school. His mother promised to pay his tuition at a private game college where students studied game programming, if he passed his college entrance exams with flying colors. He did, which allowed him to study game design and work for a game company while also studying as an undergraduate student at Yonsei. The money he earns as a game developer is considerable and allows him to pay the tuition at Yonsei, which is one of the most expensive private universities in Korea.
The information revealed in the interviews suggests that these cultural workers are part of an educated elite in Korea. They can be regarded as middle-class workers with a flexible schedule and relative creative autonomy. They readily switch between studies and work, and living expenses are not a financial burden. Hence, they resemble artists enjoying a high standard of living. Moreover, they are able to live in downtown Seoul, which is unaffordable for many university graduates. The interview with another Seoul National University student who wanted to enter the industry revealed that the expected average annual salary was around two to three million Korean Won (US$20,000–30,000), which is not a particularly high salary, but the increments could be very high, depending on performance.
I deliberately discussed politics in Korea with them, particularly asking them about President Park Geun-hye, the first woman president in East Asia and the daughter of Park Chung-hee, president of South Korea from 1963 to 1979, when South Korea was a military dictatorship. Interestingly, the interviewees did not seem concerned with politics and soon changed the topic to the history of gaming in Korea, game development, and the support provided by KOCCA. This does not mean that they were not reflective or critical, but it is a significant shift from their parents’ generation, when educated young Koreans were passionate about politics. Unlike the old days under authoritarian rule, they have a strong belief in the current electoral and democratic system, which allows individualism and generally supports creativity. Subscribing to civic nationalism, they highly value the authorities’ rapport with the games industry.
Skilled Conformers
Cultural laborers working in the Southeast Asian region, including Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, can be considered skilled conformers. In the major cities in these countries, cultural workers take pride in subcontracted jobs from Hollywood and elsewhere. In response to our question of why Singapore was chosen to inaugurate a Disney game in Asia, the CEO of Infocomm said that for Disney, “it is difficult to have control in other countries. [Singapore] is the only place that they will feel that everything will be accomplished according to their plan.”
Asian cultural labor perceives China as the most profitable market in Asia aside from the United States and Europe (the CEO of the distributor of World of Warcraft in Singapore concurred). If these small- and medium-size Asian companies could break into the Chinese market, American game giants would entrust them to be the distributors to the Chinese market. The dependence on the American market, in their view, is not imbalanced; instead their view aligns with the government’s point of view, and they feel privileged to be the “Asian arm of Hollywood.” They believe that their creative industries have greatly contributed to making Singapore an international cosmopolitan city on par with the professional standards of Hollywood. In 2014, the Singaporean government aimed to attract Disney and Lucasfilm to locate their Asian headquarters in a futuristic horseshoe-shaped building, the Sandcrawler, in Fusionopolis, the new cyber area of Singapore. In a joint effort, the National University of Singapore and the Media Development Authority launched the Singapore Hollywood Attachment Programme, which networks with top IDM (Interactive Digital Media) institutions in the United States to place Singaporean students. These are conscious efforts by Singapore to keep up with the West. In short, they want to follow, conform to, and defend the Western standard of creativity.
On the other hand, the philosophy of cultural labor is synchronized with the official ideology of the state. Executives and employees of major game companies in the region express a strong sense of social contribution and harmony, values they share with the authorities. Infocomm, the Singapore game distributor mentioned earlier, launched many offline activities to attract online game players to socially beneficial causes, including their blood donation event. Virtual gifts were given to players who participated in the event.
According to the CEO of a major Malaysian game company, Codemasters Studio, both the company and its employees embrace global standards while also maintaining local values. Codemasters, which has been in operation for seven years, is like many other companies in Southeast Asia. It started by producing CGI for Pachinko and now focuses on subcontracted game art for overseas clients in North America, the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan. The CEO of the company explained that he is proud of the fact that most employees were trained in Malaysia but they are all familiar with creative products from around the world. Given that awareness, he notes, “When you talk about style we are quite flexible. I will say that it is our strength actually. So we don’t really favor any type of style, but we are quite flexible. When we actually talk to people like those from the UK, or from the U.S., we communicate quite well. Moreover, I think the main strength is our communication.”
The strength of these Malaysian laborers, as they see it, is that they embrace Western aesthetics. In fact, most feel “superior” in that they share among themselves values that are not local but cosmopolitan. In other words, they regard Western values as more modern, trendy, and worldly than indigenous Malaysian values. As we found in our fieldwork, most of these workers display Western pop culture decorations—including posters, toys, and games—in their offices, work spaces, and production sites to demonstrate their artistic, avant-garde, modern values. Their work spaces provide a stark contrast to other offices in Kuala Lumpur.
Contented Bourgeois
Cultural labor in China is characterized by contented bourgeoisie. China’s domestic cultural market is as large as the American market, and in Asia, China competes with Korea for exports. There is always a perceived shortage of talent in the market. The entire cultural labor market in China can be explained by the literal Chinese translation of Yu Xin’s (513–581) ancient Chinese expression “Crouching tiger, hidden dragon.” The essence is that China is full of talent that remains unseen and undiscovered. The fact is that in major Chinese cities and universities, this hidden talent has to be actively sought by major game companies. They prefer to appear as “curling roots”—crouching tigers that are content with politics and society as long as their lives are settled. Thus if game companies want to expand, they must provide incentives to attract workers from leading universities and other game companies.
The head of a game engine programming team at Perfect World Company—one of the largest online game companies specializing in MMOPRG in China and an IPO company on the NASDAQ—described the trajectory of his work experience. He started with a Taiwanese company and produced the strategy game Three Kingdoms . He then was brought in by Perfect World to lead a game production team. When asked about his views on developing games, he offered a very pessimistic response, saying that it is very difficult to break out of the corporate culture to launch a small start-up. Although his team is exceptionally talented, with the capacity and know-know to develop a full-fledged game engine on its own, the path is full of obstacles. The biggest problem is financing. He mentioned that at least two phases of capital investment are required to develop a game. On average, RMB 12 million is required in the first year, mainly for salary, and in the second year, a special bonus or commission has to be distributed to the team. The high investment makes it impossible for him to start his own business. Hence most people seek refuge in big companies, where the corporate culture is pragmatic rather than imaginative or spiritual. The guiding principle is the contractual relationship, which specifies incentives based on commissions or stock options. When asked how long he would continue to work for this game company, he responded, “Right now I am quite distressed. The day drags—it’s okay to stay in a big company. People resigned because [the job] is too demanding and life is too stressful. I am now twenty-six. I am too old; I can’t move.”
However, in terms of salary relative to living standard, these workers in fact lead affluent lives. Based on our estimation of his monthly salary, which is at least RMB 30,000, the interviewee could live luxuriously. However, he rented a small, old apartment and worked long hours, and he said that he did not have much of a personal life in the city, since he devotes most of his time to his job.
We heard similar concerns from the vice president of Perfect World. The interview was conducted in a canteen on the ground floor of a complex located in the Shangdi district of Beijing, an area designated for high-tech industries. Despite the building’s postmodern appearance, office decorations hardly reflected the bohemian values of the so-called cultural laborers. Against the plain gray walls and floor, the tables were packed close to each other, and people sat back-to-back on low-budget chairs in a closed, noisy, stuffy environment. In contrast to this dull, monochromatic interior, the food was extraordinary! The entire interview was conducted in a quiet corner of the canteen. I was on my way out after finishing the interview when I came across a senior programmer sitting at a crowded table outside the canteen. He seemed socially detached and relatively subdued. I would say that he and his team, who sat around him, were quite content with the bland office environment.
This visit to Perfect World immediately deflated my fantasy about these cultural workers. It seems that on both organizational and individual levels, the lifestyles of these workers were among their lowest priorities. My visits to the game production sites of the giants, Perfect World and Qilin, as well as to smaller-scale game companies, reconfirmed my presumption that these workers were concerned with sales figures, not lifestyle. In contrast to high-tech companies like Yahoo! and Gamania, which equip their offices with coffee bars and play corners against walls of highly contrasting orange and gray, these companies have large-scale offices with endless partitions and small cubicles where a programmer or artist sits.
It could be said of cultural labor in China that despite the “creative” nature of the industries, the programmers, artists, and marketers in these game companies resemble industrial workers in their tastes, aesthetics, and lifestyles. Their offices and hubs, sometimes called creative clusters, resemble factories where games are produced on computers and servers instead of machines on an assembly line.
The blind pursuit of wealth amid a chaotic market is typical of China. From the perspective of cultural laborers, because they are constantly exploited by the system, what matters to them is the immediate financial reward, not a fancy lifestyle that might not be sustained for long. While the individualistic pursuit of desire is on par with those in the creative industries in the United States and Europe, other factors differ. On the individual level, the assumption of a democracy of economic agents is not valid because China is not a state that allows free choice. 19 In the market, if competition or entrepreneurial actions drive knowledge, then that knowledge, hence creativity, does not exist because the market, particularly the cultural market (for example, media, books, and films), is dominated by a very few wholly or partly state-owned companies. 20 Even when creativity exists, it is distorted. In this unregulated “market,” both investors and entrepreneurial consumers seek to navigate an array of choices to maximize their benefits without the baggage of intellectual property and copyright as in the West. 21 As many interviewees expressed, once a game of considerable popularity is published by a small company, major players simply clone it and improve its quality).