The purpose of the assigned reading, which points out the 17 suicides of Foxconn workers in the last 5 years, is to illustrate yet another dimension of gaming.  As Sample acknowledges in his article, a complete study of videogames doesn’t only include gameplay, soundtrack, and storyline, but also considers hardware and history.

While the articles by Johnson and Sample show us the dark side of producing technology, I’d like to point out that technology helps us.  Even Foxconn, which is nearly demonized in Daisey’s speech, can be viewed in a positive light.  The company employs, houses, and feeds nearly one million people—a fact that seems overshadowed by the suicides.  Furthermore, the inputs needed to make a smartphone aren’t limited to what’s talked about in Phone Story.  The people who design smartphones, write the software for smartphones, and market smartphones certainly have happier stories than the workers at Foxconn.  And finally, Johnson, Sample, Daisey, and Phone Story don’t mention the enormous benefit that consumers of smartphones experience.

I am all for searching for narratives in the production of videogames and videogame platforms.  I think that we can gain indispensable insight when we consider who makes what we play, where it came from, and when it was made.  However, let us remain impartial while examining videogames.  Let’s not make claims that when I play Temple Run on my iPhone, I am responsible for the enslavement of children on the other side of the world.  I hope that class on Tuesday won’t merely be a discussion of subpar working conditions in China, because that’s outside the domain of videogame studies.