Studying conditions lead to the reproduction of the industry’s problems

This article is a sub-section of a large report on French video game studies published by the STJV. You will find the table of contents of this dossier, and links to all its parts, here : https://www.stjv.fr/en/2021/09/report-on-french-video-game-studies/

The absence of questioning of the industry’s methods and the lack of a development of a critical perspective, combined with the high porosity between teachers and the industry, leads to the reproduction of the industry’s problems in schools. Many of them even come to consider them as normal for the industry and encourage their students to adopt them in their work organisation and social behaviour. These students will then join the video game industry and act in the same way, thus ensuring the reproduction of everything that is wrong with it.

The first articles in Libération and Gamekult discuss at length the practice of crunch in schools, and for good reason. Even in schools that make great efforts to limit workloads, students are expected to work 60-hour weeks or more. And that is without counting “pools”, very intensive work periods with various names such as workshop, intensive week, project week, etc., or project submissions, which result in very busy work periods with no special working time arrangements. The deadlines for these projects very often fall just after weekends and holidays, with the implicit idea that these breaks will in fact be used to do very long days (and nights) of work until the last minute before the deadline. It is not uncommon for educational departments to value all-nighters and projects with scopes far greater than what is manageable by students, as we have witnessed on numerous occasions in emails and messages sent to students. This unacceptably high workload has, as everywhere else, serious consequences for health and social life. Many students are already burnt out by the time they leave school, even before they have worked in a company.

The multiplication of working hours is also often encouraged, indirectly, by the opening hours of the school facilities. It is not uncommon for school buildings to be open to students until very late in the evening and on weekends and, in extreme cases, to never close. If access to the facilities is important for students to be able to use the school’s equipment, especially for those who cannot afford to buy expensive equipment by themselves, the resulting abuses are unacceptable. Systematic open hours, keys to the buildings provided to students, educational directors present on the premises to encourage project groups: when a school explains that it is possible to work at night in their facilities, they are normalising an abnormal practice, which the students integrate into their work process.

Discriminations of all kinds are also widespread in video game schools. Sexism, racism, ableism, LGBTI-phobia, and all other forms of discrimination are commonplace, reflecting the present of the video game industry, and shaping its future. Numerous testimonies we received speak of discrimination and harassment suffered during the course of studies, going so far as to push students to quit their studies or, worse, to end their lives. The second articles published in Libération and Gamekult go back through numerous testimonies about these discriminations and about the failure of schools to react, when they are not themselves at the origin of these discriminations.

Indeed, schools have a lot to do to stop discriminating against students. And this starts with the admission process, as it has been reported to us on several occasions that some schools have deliberately sidelined applications from disabled and/or LGBT people, considering that integrating them into the school would be “too complicated” and that “it causes problems”. This intolerable and of course illegal practice shows that the problems start before the actual studies begin, but of course they do not end there. People with disabilities, chronic illnesses or, in general, who need special accommodations to their studying environment and rhythm, either temporarily or permanently, virtually always run into a brick wall: schools expect them to fit in or leave the school. Those who try to report discriminations to the administrations are at best ignored, and at worst their voice is belittled and questioned, and their future within the school is jeopardised.

Speaking out alone is not always without consequences. Too often, the perpetrators of discrimination (teachers, administrators, students) are protected by the educational management, which does not sanction them, sidelines the victims instead of protecting them, etc. Many educational departments actively participate in discrimination in this way, but also by being a direct actor in it. Testimonies of educational directors telling women that they do not belong in video games, or disabled people that they must adapt to the industry and not the other way around are not so rare, and some schools even refuse to pass a year without any real justification other than pure discrimination. Cases of favouritism at the expense of marginalised people and/or those who speak out about the schools’ problems are also legion.

There is also a great deal of sexism in schools from men teachers towards women students. All too often, teachers use the leverage that the student/teacher relationship gives them to make unwelcome comments or engage in asymmetrical and abusive sexual or romantic relationships with women students, and face no consequences. These predatory behaviours towards younger women who are more vulnerable due to their hierarchical position are reminiscent of behaviours that can be seen in companies and in the social circles of video game workers. In schools they are facilitated, among other things, by the lack of preparation and training of teachers, who are sometimes not even aware of the potential dangers of this student/teacher relationship, and think that they can behave with students as if they were friends.

Students also often follow the toxic examples of their teachers, and engage in forms of discrimination and harassment that are common in socially homogeneous environments, such as the video game industry. This happens at school, but also on social networks and students communication channels such as Slack and Discord servers, etc., which very often exist in students spheres and which schools pretend to ignore in order to absolve themselves. For example, in a testimony we received, a student suffers “increasingly frequent humiliations on the school’s Discord”: transphobic, sexist attacks, to which the school’s management responded “that they could not do anything about it because it was not happening at school”.

Degraded working conditions for teachers

These conclusions on the student side are accompanied, with no surprise when one is familiar with the working conditions in video games and in higher education, by similar conclusions on the teacher side: schools can be a hell for students but ALSO for teachers and lecturers. Precarious contracts, very low salaries, lack of time to prepare lessons and to mark assignments, little or no educational coordination, hierarchical pressure, illegal lay-offs: the working conditions are excessively bad.

Even more disproportionately than in game studios and other video game sub-sectors, the teachers of the various video game disciplines are largely employed via precarious contracts. Fixed-term contracts covering only one semester, hours of teaching paid a posteriori as freelancers, etc. : for many, it is impossible to project themselves on their teaching and their students’ future, and even less on their own finances or career development. This precariousness also hinders teachers who would like to improve the curricula, since schools can simply opt not to renew the contracts of people who might stand up to them.

This precariousness thus serves to pressure workers into accepting intolerable working conditions. Video game schools often offer lower salaries than in other sectors, which already pay very poorly, even if you only take into account the class hours. For one hour of class, there are also hours of preparation, course editing, marking of assignments, discussions with students, but also commuting and hours of waiting between classes (without access to a workstation). Compared to the actual number of hours worked, the salaries are so low that they are not enough to live on.

« Whatever the experience and qualifications of the teacher, if they do not agree with their working conditions, they can simply leave at the end of their fixed-term contract and be replaced by a younger teacher who will accept the job and its working conditions. (…) I was almost always made to sign my contracts after the classes had started. Signing contracts very late is also a means of pressure for HR. The teachers are up against the wall. »

When these conditions are not accepted by the teachers, the schools put even more pressure on them, for example by resorting to emotional blackmail by blaming them for abandoning the students. And if they do not give in, they are replaced. When they express concern about the school’s problems or bring up students’ problems to their managers, their concerns and even their suggestions beneficial to the students are at best ignored by the school management, and at worst suppressed with harassment and illegal firings. Our findings show that the latter is particularly true in cases of discrimination, making schools direct accomplices to it.

While these working conditions do not excuse the misconduct that some teachers may exhibit, they can explain some of it, and show how the whole system is a vector of discrimination and abuse. They also partly explain the low quality of teaching, since they do not allow professors and lecturers to stay for a long time, to gain experience and to follow students from one year to the next. Again, one may notice a loop: the low wages of the industry encourage young workers to accept precarious contracts in schools to supplement their income, regardless of the conditions (sometimes, ironically, to pay off the loan taken out for that same school).

Schools do not make students ready for entering the labour market at all

This article is a sub-section of a large report on French video game studies published by the STJV. You will find the table of contents of this dossier, and links to all its parts, here : https://www.stjv.fr/en/2021/09/report-on-french-video-game-studies/

Project-based learning is often an excuse to “build up students’ portfolios” with no further guidance from the schools as to what this means, or a way to learn to work “just like in the industry” without any educational oversight, and thus without any feedback on how their training matches the reality of the industry. This situation, which is very widespread in video game schools, can be explained in a relatively simple way: video game schools do not prepare students to enter the labour market.

It starts with the inadequacy between the number of students and the number of existing jobs. We feel it is important to stress that video games courses train more people than there are available positions. If it is true in almost all disciplines, it is even more so in certain fields such as game design, or in faculties that exploit the appeal of emerging disciplines, such as narrative design at the moment.

In particular, most of the year groups are very unbalanced in terms of the majors offered, often being composed of 50% of game designers and other design majors. However, there are relatively few jobs to be filled in these specialities in the French industry and internationally. These inconsistencies with the job market force students to over-specialise, to acquire a double expertise by their own means, or even to change direction completely or to give up the idea of working in video games in order to be able to find a job.

Because even at the finest of schools, there is no guarantee that students will find a job in the video game industry, if they even want to after surviving the conditions of their years in school. Many former students have made this observation themselves:

“Today, out of a class of 35, there are maybe 7 or 8 of us still in the video game industry.”

The 2019 Video Game barometer published by the SNJV, a French employers’ lobbying organisation that also includes schools, tells us that 57% of students find a job in the video game industry within a year of finishing their studies, which is a far cry from the 80-90% job placement rate claimed by the vast majority of schools. These employment figures for the first year or two after graduation, when there are any available, are purposely distorted by school managements to impress: they include former students who have been pushed to take up a freelance status without worrying about whether they can make a living out of it (which is rarely the case), and the jobs of former students who have moved on to other industries.

Some schools even introduce job blackmail right from the start of training, encouraging students to accept exploitative internships and/or to take internships without an internship agreement, insinuating that you have to accept everything without question to make video games. It even happens that some of them provide students with forged documents, in particular to satisfy the (illegal) demands of companies.

As a reminder, in France an internship is not an employment contract, it is not supposed to replace a job. A member of the teaching staff is responsible for overseeing the internship, with an interview with students during the course of the internship, to ensure that it is going well (for example, checking that the student has a mentor, that the company provides him/her with the necessary equipment and that he/she is in the right conditions to work). Internships are very much regulated by law, this fact sheet from the Ministère du Travail gathers important information.

Schools regularly give very bad “advice” to their students, encouraging them to enter the industry by accepting very precarious, unpaid or underpaid jobs. Among the comments we received were these chilling words from a member of the teaching staff to an entire class:

“To be hired for sure, you take an auto-entrepreneur (freelance) status and you ask for half the minimum wage for a full time job.”

The lies, whether explicit or of omission, of private schools are playing on the cool image of the video game industry. They sell dreams by talking about a rich, growing industry where creativity is limitless, while students will discover after graduation that salaries are low, the jobs they fantasized about are rare, opportunities for career advancement are limited, and most jobs are in companies that are peripheral to mainstream game production.

Many of these students will have taken out loans to cover the ridiculous cost of their studies, which they will then have trouble paying back because of the precariousness of the industry, low salaries, or simply because they will not have found a job.The few who manage to get a job in the video game industry will, after a few years, reorient themselves towards industries with more interesting conditions and salaries, leaving room for students from schools who will in turn flood the market… Thus, the loop is completed.

Our presentations in schools, and our discussions with students and professors, have revealed that students are almost never aware of the basics of internship and labour laws when they start looking for a job, sometimes not even really knowing the difference between a salaried and a freelance status. These gaps show a lack of teaching, as students should be prepared to be able to defend themselves when they leave school, if only to enable them to know the different employment statuses and to identify an abusive contract… It is essential that labour laws and economic concepts related to wages be an integral part of the training of any higher education institution.

Educational standards are highly questionable

This article is a sub-section of a large report on French video game studies published by the STJV. You will find the table of contents of this dossier, and links to all its parts, here : https://www.stjv.fr/en/2021/09/report-on-french-video-game-studies/

If students feel guilty about promoting their schools, it is not only because of the poor studying conditions and the exploitation, but also because the education they receive is often of poor quality. It is difficult to praise the merits of a school whose pedagogy is unreliable or even non-existent, and whose relevance fades with each passing year. All the more so when the schools’ brochures often boast of course hours far in excess of those actually provided, with classes that are outright missing from the curriculum.

The classes taught, which are mostly technical at the expense of other forms of knowledge, very often teach students technologies and processes that are outdated in the industry and, in most cases, do not have any educational structure. This is because the vast majority of schools simply do not allocate any, or only very few, resources to academic consistency and monitoring. This lack of resources leads to a lack of communication between teachers, the absence of a stable curriculum, and a lack of consistency between disciplines. Classes that would benefit from being taught simultaneously are not, and the number of projects multiplies because each class requires a specific one, instead of grouping different works into a single project, thus contributing to the overwork of students.

Some teachers have told us that they have been hired and then sent in front of classes without any kind of syllabus, training or even basic tips from the educational department they report to. The high turnover of teachers and pedagogical staff prevents any continuity from one year to the next and leads to absurd situations where the same lectures are given two years in a row, to the same class, with two different speakers. To compensate for these shortcomings, students or teachers sometimes take on the task of pedagogical coordination in place of their school, but they are neither trained nor paid for this additional work. And the pedagogical departments do not facilitate this work: they are described as opaque, hardly communicating with either students or teachers. “Getting answers to our emails is a real obstacle course”, students in many schools tell us.

As if to drive the point home, these problems get worse as the years go by. With each passing year, schools are moving more and more towards a so-called ‘project-based learning’ approach, which allows them to leave students to fend for themselves without a teacher, sometimes to the point where Masters years are effectively completed without any classes. The mass adoption of this mode of non-teaching, apart from saving schools money by making the expense of monitoring training unnecessary, has no educational quality, drives students to burnout, increases inequalities, and gives rise to many of the problems outlined in the previous sections.

National day of action on October 5, 2021: call for a strike in the video game industry

While it may have seemed to be put on pause during the Covid-19 epidemic, the government has never abandoned its policy of destroying the French healthcare system and the welfare infrastructure which helps the majority of workers and unemployed people, whether they are looking for a job or have retired. On the contrary, the pandemic has become a convenient excuse for upcoming austerity policies resuming and continuing this destructive policy.

The enforcement of the last elements of the unemployment benefits reform will continue to impoverish hundreds of thousands of people, while state benefits are being further reduced, especially direct benefits for young people. If the lines of people in precarious situations looking for food still exist, the state aids to feed them have disappeared.

The comeback of the pension reform, defeated at the beginning of 2020 by a large social movement in which the STJV had actively participated, has already been announced.
With their desire to constantly raise the retirement age, bosses show once again that they have no problem with seeing workers die at work or live in misery in their old age and that, on the contrary, they consider these to be collateral effects necessary to develop their own capital.

There is no doubt that the government will use these counter-reforms to serve its presidential ambitions. The upcoming campaign and the 2022 election will see our rights and freedoms debated and negotiated, with a majority of candidates having only one wish: to reduce them. Rather than waiting to analyse the programmes to see who will be willing to leave breadcrumbs for the precarious, the young, retirees and workers, we must take the lead and impose clear demands.

This is why we demand more social justice, a real campaign against poverty and an improvement of public services. We share the demands expressed by the CGT- FO – FSU – Solidaires – FIDL – MNL – UNEF – UNL inter-union organisation:

  • an increase in salaries ;
  • the definitive withdrawal of the pensions and unemployment benefits counter-reforms ;
  • a real job with a real salary for everyone, and professional equality between men and women ;
  • the conditioning of public grants according to social and environmental standards allowing the preservation and creation of jobs ;
  • a ban on layoffs and an end to exemptions from the Labour Code and collective agreements ;
  • a stop to the increasing precariousness of employment and the instability of young people and students, and an ambitious reform of scholarships ;
  • an end to the closure of public services, job cuts, dismantling and privatisation in the public and civil service, and an increase in their resources ;
  • the reinstatement of all civil rights and freedoms for young people and workers.

The Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo thus joins these organisations in calling for a strike on October 5, 2021, and calls on video game workers, jobseekers, retirees and students to rally at their companies, in general assemblies and at demonstrations across France.

We would like to remind everyone that this call to strike applies to the STJV’s area of action in the private sector, and therefore includes anyone employed by a company that publishes, distributes, provides services and/or creates video games or video game equipment, whatever their position or status and whatever the type of production of their company (console games, PC, mobile, serious games, VR/AR experiences, game engines, marketing services, game consoles, streaming services, etc.), as well as all the teachers working in private schools on courses related to video game production. For all these people, and since this is a national call to strike, no action is necessary to go on strike: you can just not come to work on the days you want to strike.

Students are being exploited for the benefit of schools’ image

This article is a sub-section of a large report on French video game studies published by the STJV. You will find the table of contents of this dossier, and links to all its parts, here : https://www.stjv.fr/en/2021/09/report-on-french-video-game-studies/

These poor studying conditions are made even more difficult to identify when schools actively fight against their disclosure, instead of fighting against the problems themselves, and try to cover up any issue. Even if this makes the situation worse for victims and leads them to drop out of their school. The articles on discrimination and harassment published in Libération and Gamekult illustrate well the attitude of schools when they are faced with such problems. Since the publication of these articles, internal reports from several schools indicate that educational departments have remained silent about their content. The publication of an article and our press release, mentioned in the introduction to this report, on the suicide of a student at LISAA, had already led to a suppression of speech in this school.

This unacceptable repression is due to a number of reasons, but, at the systemic level, the main one is surely the dependence of these schools to their public image. Because their profitability depends on their reputation among people wishing to be enrolled there, and among companies, so as to be able to ‘place’ the students graduating from them (and thus use these placements as arguments with future students, closing the loop). This pushes school administrations to exploit students for their own profit.

In particular, we will see schools giving priority to students who are able to boost their reputation, and therefore to those considered ‘gifted’ in the current economic framework. In addition to deepening inequalities, as resources are redirected towards the students who need them least, to the detriment of those who need them most, this contributes to the degradation of relations between students, some of them causing harm to others out of a sense of competition, or jealousy. All of this takes place under the gaze of school managements, who even go so far as to protect abusers in order to uphold the reputation of their school. We received reports of students who had sexually assaulted and/or harassed others and were not punished because this could have ‘damaged the quality’ of their end of studies projects.

In fact, these student projects are used as marketing materials, serving to promote the school above all else. The theft of students work by their education institutions is a common practice: copying the video game industry, the schools’ contracts include copyright assignment clauses in their favour. Although always illegal, since it is absolutely impossible to assign rights to future works, which do not yet exist, in France, the existence of these clauses will allow schools to exercise leverage over students to claim the use of their work for their own publicity. As an example: the french Pégases awards, which grant an award (already problematic in itself) for student projects, attributes the authorship of these projects not to the students themselves, but to the school from which they come. Students are not considered the authors of these projects.

As if this were not enough, students are often forced, or in the best cases ‘very strongly invited’, to work to promote the school at open days and other trade shows. This unpaid work allows schools to fake transparency with visitors, allowing them to talk ‘freely’ with people currently studying at the school. In reality, students are often present to earn bonus points or because the school’s promotion counts as a required teaching unit. Schools provide them with talking points and monitor what they say, with several accounts reporting the discomfort and guilt felt by students forced to lie to convince high school students to enrol in a school where they themselves feel bad.

Ultimately, the exploitation of students can be extremely literal when schools use them as cheap, expendable labour. Because even when students work for their school within a legal framework, which is rarely the case, the double worker/student subordination relationship with the company allows schools to use the student status to put pressure on working conditions and salaries, with no possibility of external control.

Thanks to the testimonies collected, we were able to notice that schools exploit students to replace teaching units, by making them work for example on assignments for private companies “to prepare them for the professional world”, or even as “teachers” by entrusting lab sessions or first year lectures to students from higher years. Cases of illegal employment of students, without a contract and with variable “payment methods” (gift vouchers, discount on their tuition, etc.), are also not rare. Among other things, we were told of schools that use students as watchmen to keep the school premises open at night and on weekends, without any supervision, or as a replacement for the IT department by putting them in charge of maintaining the school’s computers and installing pirated versions of software.

French video games should not be a platform for the far-right

A few days ago, the French game publisher Microids, which produces many licensed games such as the upcoming new entry in the Syberia series, announced a partnership with the Puy du Fou to produce a video game about this theme park. We denounce this partnership and oppose the existence of such a game, which we think would set a dangerous precedent in our industry by normalising the presence of a brand with strong links to the far right and which actively participates in nationalist propaganda.

While the park presents a good-natured, family-friendly image, it is important to look at the content of its shows. Based on the concept of the national narrative, which postulates that the history of a country has been a continuous line for thousands of years, as if it had always existed, they praise and magnify pre-revolutionary, monarchist and feudal “France”. Their principal and most famous show, the Cinescénie, presents a uniform vision of history, erasing religious minorities and completely obscuring the relationships of economic and social domination between nobles and peasants. Their Manichean vision of history reaches its climax when they evoke the French Revolution, presented in a pure revisionist manner as a totalitarian and barbaric event against which the royalist Vendéens bravely defended themselves.

This backward-looking vision, which opposes monarchy and feudalism, presented as a happy and naive period of history, and the French Revolution, presented as dark and as the cause of a “French decline”, is dangerous. Through its counter-revolutionary discourse, it propagates nationalist ideas that run counter to social achievements and liberties, and promotes an unequal society.

These criticisms do not come from a vacuum, and are based on the work and denunciations of numerous historians and political figures. For those who want to go further, we can cite (all subsequent links are in French) Jean-Clément Martin and Charles Suaud, Michel Vovelle or this article by Guillaume Mazeau.

This situation is less surprising when one looks at the family that created and runs the Puy du Fou. The park is the brainchild of Philippe de Villiers, a far-right political figure close to Catholic fundamentalist circles, who himself acknowledged the park’s militant significance in an interview for the now-defunct magazine France, a far-right publication created by Damien Rieu (a right-wing Identitaire figure and a candidate for the Rassemblement National): “Through my books or my Puy du Fou, I have passed on many more ideas than by remaining the umpteenth crayfish in the basin “ [remarks reported by Libération here] .

His links with the international far right have led him to try to open similar parks in Russia and occupied Crimea, with the personal support of Vladimir Putin and Konstantin Malofeev, a royalist and religious fundamentalist activist close to the Russian president who is accused of having personally funded pro-Russia armed groups in Ukraine. If this were not enough, the Puy du Fou also houses an off-contract school with a traditionalist and militarist organisation, and finances an anti-abortion foundation linked to the anti-LGBT organisation “Manif pour tous”.

We can only deplore the association of Microids with such an organisation, which in our opinion would only help the Puy du Fou to extend its media presence, allowing it to spread its propaganda more widely. The planned release of the game in the spring of 2022 would also make the game’s communication campaign coincide with the campaign for the French presidential elections, which does not help. We ask Microids to reconsider this partnership.

Quantic Dream vs Le Monde and Médiapart : behind the theatrics, facts

Details added after the publication of our article: the judgement dismissed all Quantic Dream’s claims, against Médiapart AND against Le Monde, acknowledging the quality of the journalists’ work in both publications. Guillaume de Fondaumière and David de Gruttola (known as David Cage) lost against Médiapart and won, as individuals, against Le Monde, because the newspaper did not produce the testimonies it had in order to protect victims.

Last June, the STJV testified in court in favor of journalists from Médiapart and Le Monde, against accusations of libel from Quantic Dream. Our presence met with several of our interests. First, to help journalists whose job to keep the public informed about, and make visible, the problems of our industries and our society in general, was threatened by what we consider to be a SLAPP suit. Second, to defend workers’ freedom to speak about their working conditions, which is vital.

Today, September 9th 2021, we learned, with great pleasure, that Médiapart won against Quantic Dream, the court having dismissed their libel accusations. The French justice system recognised the seriousness and the good faith of the journalists’ work. However Quantic Dream, in its violent initiative to clean-up its public image, has sadly managed to get the court to recognise a case of libel by Le Monde against them. We do not yet know how the court motivated that decision, but it diminishes the freedom of speech and voices of victims of sexism, sexual harassment and, in general, awful working conditions, to the benefit of bosses who use all their resources to silence all accusation.

We want to share our analyses on what came up during the trial, and on its outcome. These feedbacks come from our representative in court, and from the minutes of the hearings.

Hyperpersonalisation of problems

We notice that most of Quantic Dream’s arguments actually fall back to personal matters (“I never saw any shocking photomontage before the affair”, “I don’t understand these articles, everything is fine to me”, “I’m struggling to forgive”, “I barely know Canard PC, this is why we don’t sue them”, “I only have to answer to justice, the tax authorities [and other insitutions]”, …), in particular when the studio’s bosses fiercely persist in thinking the only reason a journalist would want to write an article accusing them of maintaining a toxic work culture would be a personal enmity.

Although personal sympathies can contribute to problems inside companies, it goes without saying that not everything has to do with it. Someone fighting to enforce their rights doesn’t necessarily hold a personal grudge against their boss. Before anything else, it is about enforcing unfulfilled commitments. Likewise, the STJV, as a union, doesn’t hold personal grudges : when we defend someone against their employer, we do it because the respect of everyone’s rights is a collective matter.

The appalling ignorance of bosses about everything which falls out of their realm

One of the outstanding moments of the trial was when Quantic Dream’s lawyer asked our representative : « Did you do any work for Médiapart [by explaining journalists the situation of the industry, and giving them contacts] ? ». We don’t have to shy away from it : the answer is yes. We constantly provide work, made possible by pooling the resources of volunteer workers, for video game workers. We do not need journalists to be complacent, we only need to tell them about the realities in our field, which we know quite well.

Conspiracy theories are not always where we think they are

From this hyperpersonalisation and ignorance to third-rate conspiracy theories, there is only a short step, crossed with ease here. Quantic Dream’s obsession with talking about the alleged damages caused by these articles reveals an out-of-touch vision of the world, where everything is owed to David de Gruttola and Guillaume Juppin de Fondaumière. And the term conspiracy is not misused here: it is indeed the same mechanism of rejection of reality that leads these wealthy and extremely privileged people to look for fictional tormentors, or to try to erase all criticism, even legitimate and sourced

Lessons from the judgment

The court recognised the good faith and seriousness of the work done by the Médiapart’s journalists. Let’s remind right away that in this case, justice does not pronounce on the veracity of the content of the articles, in one way or the other. Quantic Dream’s management would therefore do well to avoid claiming to be cleared of all suspicions, even though its claims have been dismissed. This ruling confirms that the work of the journalists in this case was legitimate, and carried out under all the conditions of professionalism and prudence required. It should also be noted that this judgment recognises the absence of personal animosity, which was central to the accusation brought by Quantic Dream. It is now high time for Quantic Dream’s management to put an end to its communication and intimidation campaign.

We are shocked by Le Monde’s conviction, about which we will need more information to understand the judgment, as the accusations of personal grudges ringed very hollow to us. We will communicate further abouth this judgment at a later date.

In this case, as in the vast majority of those in which we assist workers in court, testimonies and public statements are not actions taken lightly. In this case, as in so many others, it is simply the last resort for people who have been ignored or silenced. Now more than ever, the STJV is determined to reduce the imbalance of resources inherent in conflicts between employees and employers, by supporting those who have to defend themselves against companies that use all their wealth to hide their wrongdoings rather than to solve existing problems, by talking to journalists who are conducting these comprehensive and detailed investigations, and by defending the rights of each and every one of us by testifying in court.

Studying conditions are often appalling

This article is a sub-section of a large report on French video game studies published by the STJV. You will find the table of contents of this dossier, and links to all its parts, here : https://www.stjv.fr/en/2021/09/report-on-french-video-game-studies/

Content Warning: In this article, we will discuss situations of abuse, harassment, assault, suicide, etc. which may be violent to read for those who have been subjected to such situations.

First of all, just like the video game industry, the studying conditions in video game schools and programs are very poor. While they vary from one school and program to another and from one year to the next, they come to impact every student’s education.

In terms of equipment alone, the STJV was able to identify many shortcomings: obsolete or broken computer equipment and office furniture, sometimes simply not supplied to students, accentuating the differences between students, with the more wealthy ones having access to personal equipment allowing them to work, while the poorer ones have to struggle with what little is made available to them. Some schools go so far as to lie on open house days: we have heard of schools that rent new equipment only for these days, in order to impress parents and future students. Elsewhere, facilities with high humidity, poor ventilation or no heating at all directly harm students’ health.

Although it seems to be becoming less common, many schools do not provide licences for software needed for courses. The installation of cracked (pirated) software on school computers or directly on students’ computers is a practice repeatedly addressed by the respondents. As in this testimony from a former ISART Digital student:

One of the compulsory steps before the start of the school year consisted in bringing one’s personal PC to the school’s IT department, so that the latter could install several cracked versions of software – normally not free – on it.

As reported in detail in the first articles published at Gamekult and Libération, the workload is far too high in video game and animation education, replicating the worst of the “crunch” found in the industry. The lack of teaching coordination leads to an accumulation of projects that cannot be completed and submitted under normal conditions, and the submission dates chosen (just after weekends or holidays) lead to overwork. When it is not the pedagogical management itself that pushes students to work themselves to death: we were able to consult numerous emails and messages sent to students in which they are pushed to work more and more, and where sleepless nights are presented as the norm, or even an ideal to be reached.

Expectations in terms of quality and quantity are also far too high, and exceed what would be expected of students in the midst of learning. Schools and teachers encourage them as much as possible to “produce” projects that look like finished products. The pedagogical aspect of the assignments is completely sidelined: the marketability of the projects (and thus the free work of the students) is the only thing that counts, without taking into account the consequences on studying and living conditions. Overwork is bad for one’s physical AND mental health, and is particularly dangerous at an age of social and intellectual construction.

In terms of socialisation during studies, the same major pitfalls were found in each of the schools for which we received testimonies. Sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and all other kinds of discrimination based on students’ identity, culture, place of living, disability, health, etc. are present everywhere, to varying degrees. Under the guise of ‘jokes’ a constant atmosphere develops in which anyone who falls outside the industry norm is reminded that they are not welcome. This sometimes leads to discrimination in school grades and promotion to the next year of school. Harassment by students, teachers, staff and/or management is not uncommon and every year leads to students dropping out of school, becoming depressed or, in rarer and more extreme cases, committing suicide. The second articles published by Libération and Gamekult address the case of sexism in more depth.

These abuses are made possible by the all-too-common lack of supervision of students. The lack of time and resources allocated to professors is partly to blame, and this situation is caused by the inaction of management, which considers all this supervision to be “secondary”, denying that student life is an integral part of the studies. Some schools go so far as to consider that everything that happens outside of projects and grades does not concern them: this has sometimes been explicitly said to teachers and students. This allows them to sweep aside reality and the direct responsibility of schools in the lives of students, be it their personal needs (disabilities, social situation, health, financial precariousness, etc.) and their relationships with other students (on social networks, between courses, at parties and events, etc.). The consequences of this lack of accountability are devastating, leading to students committing suicide when their schools’ management deliberately ignores repeated reports of harassment or attacks.

Report on French video game studies

Content Warning: In the articles presented here, we will discuss situations of abuse, harassment, assault, suicide, etc. which may be violent to read for those who have been subjected to such situations.

The experiences of our STJV comrades, the testimonies and feedback that the union has received directly, through alumni networks and our teacher colleagues, make it clear that the video game education sector, as a whole and in a systemic way, is harmful and destroys lives.

A public call for testimonies on students conditions (article in French) the STJV launched in early 2020 allowed us to confirm that the problem is much more widespread and, above all, much more serious than we originally thought. At the time of publication, we have collected around sixty testimonies concerning more than 30 schools, including the best known schools in France.

The suicide of a student at LISAA in December 2020 (article in French), followed by an internal repression by the school to cover up the event, had pushed us to accelerate our efforts to inform the public about this situation, and in particular to contact journalists to alert them to these issues. Thanks to our contact and based first on the corpus of testimonies at our disposal, they were able to launch their own investigations to confirm our information and then publish a series of articles on video game schools in Libération and Gamekult (links at the end of the press release) mid-April 2021.

The cool aspect of video game production, which industry companies already use to keep salaries and working conditions down, is also exploited by schools who take advantage of it to attract more and more young people ready to pay huge sums of money to try to make it their profession.

As everywhere else, as in the rest of the video game industry, mechanisms of economic, hierarchical, sexist, racist and ableist domination, as well as active repression from school managements, tend to prevent any improvement of the situation and to reduce (at least in appearance) the capacity for action of those who want this improvement.

These mechanisms also contribute to emphasizing inequalities and discriminations throughout the industry. Starting at the admission to schools with discriminatory selection processes and prohibitive prices, this only becomes more pronounced during the course of studies with every possible means: the near impossibility of having a job alongside classes due to the heavy workload, the scarcity and mismanagement of work-study programs, the unequal access to equipment, the pressure to do internships in any given city, without pay, etc. The diversity problems of the video game industry begin directly during studies.

The vast majority of the problems we have seen are caused by the commodification of education and students. Private schools remain above all businesses: they are therefore subject to profitability imperatives. This profitability has more or less importance depending on who owns the school, with in the worst cases groups or investment funds that treat schools only as cash cows whose profitability must always increase at the expense of workers and students. Even the best intentioned managements (when they are!) cannot escape this reality imposed by the capitalist organisation of the economy.

After nearly 2 years of work within the STJV, we come back in this lengthy report to the problems found in video game schools, the things to watch out for when it comes to studying video games, and what we can do and demand to prevent entire generations of people interested in our industry from continuing to be bled dry every year. We will only talk about video game schools here because that’s our sector and that’s where we have the most information, but with few exceptions, all of this applies to all of private higher education.

The size of this dossier means that we have to publish it in segments. We will publish sub-sections regularly, which will be accessible via the links below.

Part 1 – State of play

  1. Studying conditions are often appalling
  2. Students are being exploited for the benefit of schools’ image
  3. Educational standards are highly questionable
  4. Schools do not make students ready for entering the labour market at all
  5. These conditions lead to the reproduction of the industry’s problems
  6. Schools are serving the industry, not their students

Following our discussions with teachers and students, and considering the testimonies we received, we realised that these problems were not just common, but systemic. If at the beginning of our investigations we thought that the less known a school was, the more it tolerated abuses, we had to face the facts: all schools and curricula are affected.

It remains impossible for us, at this time, to name a private school or training programme that has not shown serious dysfunctions in recent years. One particularly chilling point is that we have heard of situations of harassment or outright sexual assault targeting female students in all the schools and programmes on which we have collected testimonies.

While it can be said that private education seems to be more affected overall than public education, this does not mean that the public sector is exempt from problems. Some of the lesser-known public programmes are organised in the same way as the private sector and, although they may be different, power struggles exist everywhere, even in the most prestigious public schools.

In most cases these problems emerge and persist because of the inaction of school administrations and/or the financial groups that own them. They are unwilling to give themselves the means to protect students because of nepotism, opportunism, economic concerns, lack of empathy, or ignorance of the situation of their students.

Part 2 – Paths forward

The problems and discriminations present at the general society level can therefore be found in video game education, concentrated in a series of socially homogenous spaces creating an omerta, where all victims’ voices and attempts to fight back are harshly suppressed. If students environments are prone to this, it is not only because of its specificities. The causes of these terrible situations have the same roots as those found in work environments in general.

They are first of all economic: companies’ financial motivations, which are impossible to avoid under a capitalist economic system, make their profitability prevail over the living conditions of students. This problem has been reinforced in recent years by the creation of monopolies in private higher education, with increasingly large investment groups absorbing independent schools and smaller groups. Not coincidentally, this phenomenon also exists in the video game and many other industries.

These economic motivations have a direct impact on the social dimension of these schools, where power disputes and the forceful enforcement of hierarchical relationships are more than common. A genuine economic domination is exerted on professors and students.

The problems described in the first part and their causes are well known to workers’ and students’ organisations, who have been fighting against them for centuries, but also to the companies themselves, which know how to hide or exploit them when it is to their advantage, even if some of them seem to be trying recently to provide actual solutions.

The frequency and severity of problems encountered locally depends on a range of factors, and the responses from schools vary greatly. Some of them are not designed to help students at all, and others, although well-intentioned and sometimes well-designed, completely miss their targets, take up resources that would be better spent elsewhere, or have harmful side-effects.

We will now look at the solutions proposed by these different actors, discuss their relevance, outline those that seem most appropriate, and consider what we can do and demand to prevent entire generations of people interested in our industry from being bled dry each year.

  1. Many suggested solutions are dead ends or lies
  2. In order to move forward, changes must take place at all levels
    1. In the educational content
    2. TBA
    3. TBA
    4. TBA

The report will be made available as a .pdf and .epub once fully published.

The Libération and Gamekult articles we were talking about in the introduction are available, in French, here :

Health measures: finding safety in the collective, despite the government

Others have laid down very clearly the basic problems posed by the government’s implementation of the “health pass”: see in particular this article (🇫🇷) , or the communiqués of the CGT (🇫🇷) , the Union Solidaires (🇫🇷) and the Union Communiste Libertaire (🇫🇷) . Beyond the measures themselves, this is yet another example of an unacceptable method of governance which consists in announcing new rules without debate, in making MPs vote without negotiation and in imposing measures without justification, destroying one of the foundations of democracy: separation of powers.

It would be a good idea for the government to review its justifications because, behind its reassuring speeches on the health situation, there are real problems and even profound inconsistencies. Its eagerness to return to “normalcy”, driven as it often is by electoral ambitions, leads it to lie by implying that the vaccine is some kind of magic wand that will put an end to the epidemic for vaccinated people.

While the benefits of vaccination (significant reduction of risks for oneself (🇫🇷) and others (🇫🇷) , and ultimately participation in the eradication of the virus) are immense and indisputable, it does not provide 100% protection and does not entirely prevent people from infecting themselves or others. The vaccine is therefore not an individual solution, but a collective one.

This is why it is important that as many of us as possible get vaccinated, not to follow the government in its individualistic ideology but for the sake of everyone’s health. The government’s campaign is full of lies and disproportionately favours the wealthy, like all its policies. Let us act autonomously to build a vaccine coverage capable of protecting all workers!

Let us not forget either that behind this calamitous management of the pandemic and the vaccination campaign, the government intends to relaunch reforms just as harmful for workers, in particular on the topic of unemployment benefits and pensions. It is out of the question that after having done less than the bare minimum in managing the pandemic, Emmanuel Macron should impose these unfair, unjustified and massively rejected reforms.

Faced with the government’s lack of clarity (for example, when it was announced with great fanfare that employees without a health pass could be dismissed (🇫🇷) , although this has fortunately been withdrawn from the law that has been passed), the STJV will continue to help and protect workers who need it.

In the current context, this means sticking to the following facts (in addition to what we already said at the beginning of the summer):

  • Remote work remains a practical and effective solution, proven by more than a year of health crisis. The video game industry as a whole is very conducive to working from home. Video game companies must continue to use it until the health situation really allows for a relaxation of the measures taken.
  • The application of preventive measures (disinfecting and ventilating offices, social distancing, wearing chirurgical masks at all time during working hours) is vital and mandatory whenever being present at the office is necessary. Minimum air renewal can be measured (with CO2 sensors) and, in poorly or not ventilated spaces, air filtering devices (HEPA norm) can be installed and regularly changed to lower the risk of transmission.
  • The possibility for companies to suspend a contract for being unable to present a “health pass” for workers in a place where it is required (and therefore NOT in companies producing video games!) is an aberration, all the more so as the current vaccination rate does not allow everyone to be vaccinated on the day the health pass comes into force. We will firmly oppose any employer attempting to use this measure, especially when other solutions exist. The suspension of salaries is a brutal and unacceptable sanction, and should simply be banned.
  • The parliament has finally ratified, in article 17 of the voted law (🇫🇷), the right for employees to go and get vaccinated during working hours, without any deduction from salaries or payed holidays. There is therefore no longer any excuse for this, and we will be uncompromising with any company trying to oppose the exercise of this right.

In any case, the STJV will continue to monitor the implementation of government measures and the general attitude of companies in the sector. We are always available to those who need our help or have questions about their situation or that of their company. Please do not hesitate to contact us at

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