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It won’t surprise you that the conservative doesn’t like unions, but I do agree with the idea. In theory unions ensure safe work environments and proper treatment by their bosses. In practice, however, unions will bully you into joining or bully businesses into accepting union influence. And more often than not unions aren’t always working in the best interest of their membership while donating to primarily liberal politicians. I’m not going to go further into my general issues with unions because this isn’t a political blog but if people really want to know I’ll write something for my personal Tumblr page with more detail.
I want to focus on one particular union, the American Federation Of Musicians, and their issues with the video game industry. Apparently the agreement the union leadership came up with was not favorable with video game companies and so AFM musicians are more or less barred from doing video game work since in the entertainment industry anything done outside of union-approved studios is met not with “fine, something goes wrong and you get screwed over there’s nothing we can do for you” but with “we’re going to fine you tons of money for doing work we don’t approve of”, which hurts any affiliated musician who wants to create scores for video games. (Music scores, not high scores. 😀 ) Well, one of those members has had enough of that and decided to strike back.
Austin Wintory has worked for games such as Journey and Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded as well as some movies I’ve never heard of. It was Wintory’s work for the Kickstarter game The Banner Saga that brought the AFM breathing down his neck, but instead of backing down he decided to speak out in this video.
My question is why the union hasn’t come up with a better agreement that the game developers are willing to go along with or why the membership hasn’t been allowed to vote on it. Shouldn’t the members decided how the union serves their interests? At any rate I wish Mr. Wintory good luck in defending his right to work and hopefully the union and gaming studios will come together and work out an agreement that best serves both the studios and composers (you’ll see in the “related links” that at least they reached a deal with Microsoft) because a good soundtrack can make for a great gaming experience and, like movies and TV, sometimes even makes good listening outside of the game. And composers shouldn’t be denied the opportunity to get in on this new medium that they really want to push their skills on.
By the way, someone linked (via Google Docs) to a pdf of the agreement from December 2012 if you’re interested.
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