This is tautology rendered into achievement. Of http://www.rsgaming.com/ course it's true that the whole studio contributes to the final product. Of course Blizzard's Runescape games are Designed by Blizzard Entertainment. It is telling of the ideological and material conditions of the Runescape games industry that the simple act of giving a full group of workers credit on their production seems like an accomplishment. The irony, of course, is that those employees, beaming with pride, aren't themselves named or credited in the recruitment video.The only major difference between Blizzard's video and the sort of messaging you'd find from a smaller, less successful studio is the clip's glossy production values, which recall a movie trailer rather than the low budget cheese of such videos from yesteryear. And that's a problem. Given Blizzard's success and market strength, one might expect Blizzard to be able to go further than this industry-standard rhetoric. But the video makes no mention of the concrete benefits that working at Blizzard provides. There's no mention of benefits or wages; nothing about crunch time, that specter haunting the industry; nothing about the sort of material, tangible things that make a difference in how one is employed, rather than how one feels during employment. There are perfectly acceptable, subtle ways to talk about these things without veering into the gauche. Employees could talk about their own financial security, or about being able to plan for the future while simultaneously being fulfilled with their work today. Other industries do this, why can't we?But your recruitment will be based in love, not on wages. The mentions come rapid fire, culminating in the grand pronouncement from one employee: Blizzard employees are just a bunch of geeks, just like you. This is a window into how the industry as a whole views employment. As one of us has written about before, this is an industry with a layoff rate twice the national rate[PDF] across all industries and a culture of crunch where 68% of respondents work more than 50 hours a week for months at a time in order to get a product out the door. It's a bad tradeoff: In exchange for being quiet about wages, hours, benefits and the like, you'll get to hang out with like-minded people you'll love to be with. The Blizzard video is the distillation of this pitch in a very blunt form.