By the time Les Brown published his first Encyclopedia of Television in 1978, he was already worthy of an entry of his own.

Brown, who died Nov. 4 at the age of 84, was still an editor at Variety, the show business daily, when he published Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box in 1971. Coverage of TV at that time was largely a matter of day-after reviews, programming announcements and celebrity puff pieces. Television was treated as something magical and mysterious, as if those “free” programs just appeared out of thin air like electronic manna.

Expanding on his nearly two decades covering radio and TV for the trade publication, Brown lifted the veil on network television, using a watershed year in the life of CBS’s programming division to illuminate the scheduling chess game and the astounding amounts of money involved.

“The business of television,” Brown wrote, “is to deliver audiences to advertisers.”

The observation may seem obvious today, but at the time the notion that programs weren’t television’s products but rather its lures, was a revelation to the millions watching the “big three” networks every day.

Along with Horace Newcomb’s 1974 TV: The Most Popular Art, which dared to take entertainment programming seriously, The Business Behind the Box became an inspiration and essential guide for a new generation of television critics and reporters that asked tougher questions about the medium’s impact and social responsibility.

Brown’s encyclopedias provided succinct, clear explanations of the networks’ histories, key players, technical terms and slang, and became a crucial reference for reporters covering the TV beat, for scholars and for any couch potato who was curious about how and why the television industry worked as it did.

Ron Simon, a curator at the Paley Center for Media in New York, called Brown a pioneering television scholar.

“The several editions of his Encyclopedia of Television were essential reading to understand the sweep of media history,” Simon said. “His Channels magazine charted the impact of the cable revolution, showing all the forces at work creating a new type of TV. Les Brown, as well as any media historian, documented all the forces at work that resulted in our TV programming: creative, business, and regulatory. He shared his wisdom at many conferences around the world, especially the Paley Center.”

In 1982, Brown launched the magazine Channels of Communication (later just Channels). Unlike TV Guide, which served mainly as a program guide, and Broadcasting, which was more concerned with hirings, firings and bottom lines, Channels took an analytical approach to broadcast television’s strategies, trends, profitability and ethics.

Brown served as a Peabody Awards board member from 1982 to 1988. Newcomb, whose board tenure overlapped Brown’s by a year, recalled that he “made everyone think twice — or more — about their judgments of the media, and Peabody was strengthened by his own strong arguments.”

Newcomb, who retired last summer as Peabody director, also called Brown “a giant among television commentators in the formative years of the medium.  He was a fierce critic in the best sense of the term, always concerned with what television meant for the society at large.”

In later years, Brown taught at Yale, Columbia and Fordham universities. But his lasting legacy is the approach to reporting and critiquing television that his books exemplified.

As Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton tweeted upon hearing of Brown’s passing, Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box “remains required reading.”

Born of a handful of events and revelations in the games industry over the past few month as well as new directions in my research, this brief post about ethical gaming is a provocation for gamers and game studies scholars. It begins in the virtual frontier of Red Dead Redemption (RDR), a “sandbox” game set in the early 20^th century American West from Grand Theft Auto (GTA) creators Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive. RDR was released on May 18 with the hype of a summer blockbuster movie, and reviews of the game are glowing, if not embarrassingly gushing. New York Times reviewer Seth Schiesel likens the game to a Sam Peckinpah film and calls RDR a “tour de force,” lauding Rockstar’s creation of a stunning geographical environment filled with compelling characters. With an estimated development budget of 80 to 100 million dollars, RDR reinforces the hit-driven trend of big games from established studios. As both a gamer and game studies scholar, I have been dithering for weeks over whether to purchase the game.

My hesitation to play RDR reflects, in part, my disinterest in open world action games and a general dislike of the Western genre. I’ve played through the entire GTA series, including the Liberty City episodes for GTA IV, and I am a bit bored with the format, and with more action roles for horses than women, stories about the Wild West have never held my attention. Taste preferences aside, my reluctance to play RDR is largely driven by what I know about the labor conditions at Rockstar San Diego, the key studio in RDR‘s development. In January of this year a group of spouses of Rockstar San Diego employees publicly denounced the company for prolonged, mandatory unpaid overtime, which resulted in the physical and emotional suffering of their partners, forcing a few to seek medical attention. (To read more about this, see an Antenna post by Sean Duncan and a piece I wrote for FLOW.)

Unpaid overtime, commonly called “crunch time,” is a frequent point of discussion and tension among game developers, particularly when high-profile companies are accused of excessive abuse, like the Rockstar incident and similar complaints in 2004 about Electronic Arts. The industry’s professional organization, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), has issued several white papers and best practices guidelines, recognizing that the long-term health and institutional history of the industry depends on the health and happiness of its workforce. Last month Game Developer Research released a 2010 salary report, which revealed that 71% of game developers have worked in the industry no more than 6 years, and only 13% have a decade or more of experience. The workforce is also young, with 37% of employees between the ages of 25 and 30. Widespread attrition in what is popularly regarded as a “cool job” is attributed to the incompatibility of crunch time with the responsibilities of family life and the desire for a reasonable work/life balance.

The Rockstar controversy prompted me to consider my relationship to the media products I consume, both as a player and as a scholar. If I am careful to avoid clothes made in sweatshops, why not apply the same labor concerns to the games I play? I am not suggesting that working conditions for North American or European-based game developers are the same as working conditions for exploited apparel manufacturers. I am suggesting, however, that if the conditions of production (including labor) of the material objects we consume influence our choices – whether they be local, organic, sustainable or fair trade – why not the same principles for the immaterial products we consume – movies, music, television programs, video and computer games? If IGDA issued a “fair trade” label for games, would it encourage better labor practices and, at least, allow consumers to exercise an informed choice? Following the call of Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell for scholars to pay attention to the “ecological context” of the technologies we study, I am also thinking about gaming hardware: the console systems, handhelds, Wii peripherals and RockBand guitars that fill my living room. Under what conditions was the Xbox 360 manufactured? If I ever part with my PS2, how should I ethically dispose of it? Lisa Parks’ contribution to the future of media studies issue of Television & New Media (January 2009), made me wonder how games studies should also intersect with environmental and labor studies. I have no answers, just lots of questions that I am eagerly investigating. I also welcome your thoughts.

Post-script: As I edited this piece, an apropos link to PBS’s MediaShift came across my Twitter stream, “The Mediavore’s Dilemma: Making Sustainable Media Choices”. While author Don Carli does not specifically mention gaming, the column is illustrated by the game over screen of Pac-Man.

In the past few weeks, a fresh controversy about the working conditions in the industry of game development has arisen, this time centered on Rockstar San Diego.

Rockstar are best known as the developers for the Grand Theft Auto series, with Rockstar San Diego’s current project the upcoming western-themed sandbox game, Red Dead Redemption. A sequel to 2004’s underrated Red Dead Revolver, and highly anticipated as one of the more interesting open world game settings in recent years (think “Grand Theft Horse“), the game’s multiple delays have had fans and industry folks a tad concerned.

In a Gamasutra blog post on January 7th, we see what might be a cause of these delays. A set of anonymous “Rockstar wives” have levied claims of mismanagement and unethical workplace conditions on Rockstar San Diego:

To whomever it may concern,

In response to the unfortunate circumstances, some wives of Rockstar San Diego employees have collected themselves to assert their concerns and announce a necessary rejoinder, in the form of an immediate action to ameliorate conditions of employees.

The turning for the worse came approximately in the month of March of 2009. Till present, the working conditions persists to deteriorate as employees are manipulated by certain hands that wield the reigns of power in Rockstar San Diego. Furthermore, the extent of degradation employees have suffered extends to their quality of life and their family members.

…

Conclusively, if these working conditions stay unchanged in the upcoming weeks, preparation will be made to take legal action against Rockstar San Diego. This is the course that naturally presents itself, as either these conditions were manufactured from unawareness and actions to improve conditions will prove such innocence. Or if no action is seen after this letter, it clear that other aspects are the cause of the deteriorated conditions of Rockstar San Diego employees and must be further addressed. Rest assure, all that is desired is compensation for health, mental, financial, and damages done to families of employees.

With all due respect,

Determined Devoted Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees.

The “Rockstar wives” allege Rockstar San Diego’s management has instituted mandatory six day, 12+ hour work weeks, not provided appropriate pay for overtime, and created a culture in which stress is causing very real health problems for its employees (and their families). Rockstar has responded to these claims, and this is, of course, not the first time “industry wives” have been the ones to blow the whistle on allegedly damaging working conditions (the EA spouse scandal, started with a post on Livejournal in 2004, later revealed to be Erin Hoffman). EA’s case was resolved after a class action suit, and working conditions have apparently improved.

The underbelly of game development is one that rarely gets much discussion in public or academic discussions of games — assuming the “Rockstar wives” claims are accurate (and there’s some off-the-record indication there may be), these sort of claims arise periodically, then spur on “that’s just what we do in this industry” rejoinders until another class action suit is brought. It’s been six years since Erin Hoffman’s scandal, but these sorts of workplaces persist in the game development industry.

Assuming the “Rockstar wives” have something legitimate they’re on about, what needs to change about our reaction to this kind of industry scandal? How should news about unethical development conditions temper or shape what sense we make out of a media artifact?