Union Busting in Space: Labor and Company Violence in Fullbright’s Tacoma
By: Brandon R. Chinn
Tags: Gaming, Labor, Tacoma, Articles, Unions

Union rights are the past, and the future.

[Heavy Spoilers for the video game Tacoma]

On Sunday, November 5th 1916 in Everett, Washington, an event transpired that would become infamously known as Bloody Sunday. Everett, a town about an hour’s drive from Tacoma, was rife with unrest and labor disputes during the town’s depression in 1916. Strikers and union organizers attempted a five-month long strike that was broken up by vigilantes hired by local businesses.

Nearly 300 members of the IWW, or Industrial Workers of the World, met in Everett to support the strikers and their labor movement. A local sheriff hired some 200 vigilantes to back union busting efforts, who describers the strikers as ‘anarchists.’ As the sheriff stepped forward and accosted them, shouting “Boys, who is your leader?” the IWWs shouted back in a jeer: “We’re all leaders!”

The sheriff opened fire, and what followed was ten minutes of open gunfire that resulted in half a dozen dead and dozens more wounded. Sunday, Bloody Sunday.

Life aboard the Tacoma is represented through AR.

Unions in Space

In Fullbright’s follow-up to their hit game Gone Home, there lies a gentle examination of union busting, solidarity, tyranny, company manipulation and attempted murder. All of it takes place by virtual representation in a space station called Tacoma, named after Tacoma, Washington. The future presented in Tacoma is achingly familiar — hyper-corporations have gained a death grip on influencing society and worker’s rights are still being fought for in the far-off year of 2088.

Not only are companies like Amazon or Carnival responsible for commercialized space travel and indentured artificial intelligences, but they have crafted their own universities and influence the political sway of entire countries. The space station Tacoma is one of many orbiting stations owned by a new company named Venturis, who owns and operates several of these stations. Tacoma, launched from what is now the country of Cascadia, is a Lunar Transfer Station operated by humans that acts as a cargo transferring point between Venturis’s many luxury lunar hotels and Earth.

Tacoma takes a gameplay nod from Fullbright’s previous game Gone Home, in that all of the information in the game is gleaned through a system of exploration and examination, piecing together audio clips, notes, and physical details. The player’s surrogate, Amy, is an almost-silent protagonist who works through what happened aboard the station in the months and hours preceding her arrival via AR. What follows is a harrowing story of union busting and labor that remains rare within the video game medium.

Near the beginning of Amy’s investigation we are treated to the AR celebration of ‘Obsolescence Day,’ a moment celebrating the complete automation of robots and technology operating space stations. This holiday is celebrated in jest, referencing a moment eight years earlier when robots were supposed to completely take over the jobs of human beings. This pseudo-progression of technology was thwarted in part by legislation and union efforts, and the space station is littered with union flyers and memorabilia.

This celebration of Obsolescence Day is the first clue as to the direction of Tacoma’s inspired narrative.

Companies in this future carry ‘loyalty debt’ for their workers, making job transferring difficult.

Planned Violence

A meteor crashed into the station days earlier, leaving the crew aboard with only 50 hours of oxygen, no comms, and no idea if they were going to be rescued before their untimely deaths. As Amy investigates the station she discovers the harrowing truth — everything was planned.

In the final moments of the game it is revealed that Sareh, the doctor aboard the Tacoma, made a grisly discovery through the station’s AI, ODIN. Via a pre-recorded PR announcement from Venturis’s CEO, Sareh discovers that a plan was launched through another AI named JUNO to help rig an ‘accident’ on-board the Tacoma that would kill all onboard and be the linchpin needed to bust the union and create new legislation to help automate the stations. Venturis has tried for years to create the ‘Venturis Belt’ a series of automated homes that is restricted by the legislation they desperately seek to repeal.

What leads to Sareh’s grisly discovery is the tangle of lives aboard the Tacoma, all of it presented through colorful AR shapes and interesting soundbites that take in everything from romantic couplings to familial issues to personal finance woes. Every member aboard the station is a real person with a real life, and we are giving an intimate view of their anchor points as they struggle to do their jobs.

Tacoma paints a bleak utopian future where everything in reach but the cost is ghastly. Nearly every character has a moment showcasing their staggering debt, their loss of income, rejections from prestigious schools and jobs that will not hire them because they haven’t met required obscure quotas. These are people who are struggling individually even as the company they work for seeks to murder them.

Moments aboard the Tacoma are lived via replaying AR snippets.

Tacoma explores a vast narrative across its few hours, a constant contrast between stark technology that’s been retrofitted to be comfy and smooth at the edges. Life has become more bread and circuses at the end of the twenty-first century, and individuals make their life decisions knowing they will amount impossible debt. The lives we see onboard the station are as complex as the people who live them, with many religious creeds, races, sexes, genders and walks of life communing together for common goals.

Fullbright’s video game coalesces the idea that this isn’t some distant fantasy coated in brightly colored cyberpunk. What is happening aboard the Tacoma is happening all over the world, constantly, right now, in your very country and town. Union busting and labor violence has a long and staggered history that has been constantly stamped out by narrative, distraction and legislation. Bloody Sunday is as far from us now as the attempted murder aboard the Tacoma.

Solidarity Is Life

As Amy exits the station after rescuing ODIN for Venturis, we are presented with an optimistic twist: Amy was never working for the company but for the AI Liberation Front, a guerrilla organization fighting for the rights of indentured artificial intelligences. She offers the AI asylum, ODIN agrees, and they depart together for the stars, coupled with the knowledge that all those onboard the Tacoma survived and were picked up by one of Venturis’s competitors.

I first played Tacoma upon its release nearly three years ago, and part of this replay was to discover something in the game I had missed the first time. Through my own experiences with unions, union busting, labor and company violence I have personally witnessed the egregious anti-human actions of companies constantly trying to take as much as they can. What Tacoma presents is not some fantasy — this is the life we lead right now. These struggles for unionizing and employee rights and safety aren’t the distant future.

What Tacoma does best is showcase the fight we are making together. Every job, every role, every person is necessary. Through every scrap of paper and corrupted audio file we piece together the lives of those on board the station and what they did to help one another, to survive. They doubted. They fought. In the end, they all came together and made certain their labors were seen and valued. Solidarity is hand in hand with individualism, it creates the tact and tapestry of life. Unions allow us to live. The support of one human is the support of many. An injury to one is an injury to all.