As video games make billions, the workers behind them say it's time to unionize

At an industry conference for video game developers in late March, the thousands of lanyarded attendees could try new games, swap business cards and hear from experts on rendering realistic blood spatter. Or they could talk about unionizing. Hundreds joined a series of standing-room-only roundtables on the topic of organized labor, taking time away from the Game Developers Conference to brainstorm ways to build worker power in an industry that is almost entirely nonunion. Organizers with Game Workers Unite, a group that has sprung up in the last year to push for wall-to-wall unionization in the $43-billion game industry, kicked off each session with an icebreaker: "Damn the man." "Damn the man" for making designers work 100-hour weeks for months on end to deliver a game on time -- a practice known as "crunch" that often comes without overtime or bonus pay.