North Philly Notes

This week in North Philly Notes, Tongyu Wu, author of Play to Submission, writes about her “Triple Cultural Outsider’s Adventure.”

Play to Submission stems from a research adventure by a Chinese-educated female graduate student and explores the enigmatic gamified culture of Silicon Valley’s tech firms. When I began my graduate studies in the U.S. in 2010, I never imagined that Silicon Valley would become the focus of my PhD study. However, as I gradually established my academic identity, two things became clear.

First, as an antinomian Chinese scholar, I resisted the notion that researchers from developing countries should focus solely on their home country. I wanted to explore “Western world” issues just like scholars from the West. Second, as a sociologist, I knew early on that I wanted to devote my work to labor studies. But  my rebellious nature pushed me to break from the conventional focus on service work prevalent in 2015 and instead explore understudied work and occupations—types of work representing the future.

After a summer of hesitation, in 2012 Silicon Valley came into the picture. After spending another one to two years reading, I entered the tech world, thinking I was well prepared. I joined Behemoth (pseudonym), the tech company I studied, with the notion that fun perks like gaming TV stands, video game consoles, pinball machines, and Nerf guns were mere gimmicks, a facade of corporate culture meant to distract. Drawing from previous ethnographers, I expected engineers to be weary of this “fun” environment. But when I encountered the Code Review Roulette game, my assumptions were shattered.

Picture this: engineers, faced with the dreaded task of code review, devised a game reminiscent of Russian roulette. The rules were brutal: “Whoever gets the bullet does the CR!” Watching Jay load a toy revolver, spin the cylinder, and pull the trigger against his temple was nerve wracking, but he survived the empty chamber. Peter was next, nervously mumbling about the odds being in his favor (“Can’t be me…. The odds are low! Only one in six.”). Charlie, ever the analyst, calmed Peter through math: he turned to the whiteboard wall and wrote Peter’s odds as an equation: “(5/6) * (1/6) = 5/36.” In spite of his anxiety, Peter too escaped the bullet. But when Charlie took his turn, the game ended with a bang and he took on the code review task.

This moment was my wake-up call. The chaotic fun I had dismissed was far more spontaneous and authentic than I had realized. It wasn’t just a corporate gimmick; it was deeply embedded in their work process. Behemoth had transformed reality into a game. The question then becomes, what is really going on behind the ludic gaming scenes?

To unpack this cultural puzzle, I leaned into my double cultural outsider status as both  a Chinese and  a gaming amateur. When I saw a “Dungeon Master” hat and “A Dungeon Master’s Guide to Software Development” manual being passed around during a software design meeting, I asked Jack, “What is a Dungeon Master, and why is it relevant here?” Jack’s reaction was sheer incredulity. “You don’t know D&D?” he asked, puzzled. For an American, this might be surprising, but as a Chinese, the world of Dungeons & Dragons was foreign to me. Jack, of course, couldn’t accept that there were people on Earth who didn’t know Dungeons & Dragons, so he explained D&D and its parallels with software development in detail to me.

Under Jack’s guidance, I saw the software development team in a new light. The D&D framework transformed their routine work into an epic narrative. The team members, now metaphorical warriors, wizards, and oracles, navigated the unpredictable terrain of code with the same determination found in a fantasy realm. This narrative reframed the constant pivots and uncertainties of software development as adventurous detours filled with surprises and excitement. This gamified lens turned the drudgery of “crunch mode” into a narrative of triumph and adventure. Engineers stayed up nights, battling “pirates” (error spikes) and commandeering “ferries” (ingenious algorithms) to keep their projects afloat.

Through this exposure of my cultural naivety, I began to crack the code of Behemoth’s culture. The D&D narrative was merely the entry point into a world saturated with gamification. Rampant games dominated the engineering floor. Racing games pitted engineers against machines (and each other) to swiftly recover systems, spiced up with leaderboards. Completing scattered tasks within the minimum viable products was turned into a badge collection game. Pranking games injected hacking humor into routine tasks.

As I familiarized myself with Behemoth’s gaming narrative, I became an attentive audience. Yet I knew I would never be a true player, lacking deep immersion in gaming culture. But why did these engineers invest so deeply? The answer emerged through conversations where the term “gamer” was frequently invoked. It became clear that most engineers were born between 1979 and 2000, aligning them with the rise of the video game industry and likely self-identifying as the “gamer generation.”

Seeing these engineers through their gamer identity revealed a harsh truth in the tech world. For these gamers, the gamified environment wasn’t just entertainment; it was a necessity. Behemoth’s world was their reality, contrasting starkly with their sparse personal lives, usually confined to a bedroom with four walls and a $30 inflatable bed. This escapism drove them to immerse themselves in the company’s constructed wonderland, to the point of addiction. Ben’s story was particularly telling. He always expressed how fortunate he felt for having this job at Behemoth, as he got to make money by doing what he was passionate about and could hang out with like-minded friends all the time. However, right after I left Behemoth, I was told that Ben abruptly quit, just standing up one day from his desk, handing his badge to the manager, and leaving. He may have reached his limit—records show that Ben logged into the work system almost twenty hours every day.

My adventure in the tech world added another layer of unpredictability, as I married a Chinese software engineer in the midst of my research. This marriage brought me two new identities: an engineer’s wife and a friend to many Chinese immigrant engineers. In the engineers’ terminology, I now had the opportunity to play two new characters and explore even more intriguing detours.

As an engineer’s wife, I saw firsthand how gamified work relationships invaded our family life. Almost every night, my husband would rush to log into his STEAM account, joining his software development team in virtual battles late into the night. Our interactions shrank to mere minutes before bed. When I asked if he enjoyed the game, he explained he did not only play out of fun but also out of obligation—to build rapport with his development team.

As I became friends with many Chinese engineers, I saw their struggles in the gamified tech world. My friends, puzzled by their white colleagues’ obsession with these games, often got together to discuss strategies for participation and fitting in. When I asked if they really needed to engage in these games, their response was clear: “Of course.” They understood that their gaming outsider positions seamlessly transitioned to peripheral work status in the team. So they had to overcome all obstacles to participate. Such is the nature of this work culture.

Filed under: asian american studies, Asian Studies, cultural studies, economics/business, Education, ethics, gender studies, Labor Studies, Mass Media and Communications, race and ethnicity, sociology, women's studies | Tagged: Asian American, Chinese, cultural studies, D&D, engineering, games, gamification of work, Silicon Valley, software development, tech firms, work, work culture, work life balance | Leave a comment »