In January of 2022, a disastrous Fox News interview stymied (read: halted) the exponential growth of the r/antiwork subreddit. During the pandemic, in the rare gaps of reflection afforded in opaque times, the occasional class warrior in all people stewed in the digital percolator. Something about the unchanging four walls of a hasty home office allowed labour to materialize as an object to be examined, poked, prodded, appraised; an outlet was needed for discussion of this immutable part of life that seemingly never satisfies. Antiwork initially rallied against pointless labour, it championed adequate compensation for the sale of body and brain, it committed itself to the pursuit of a healthy work-life-balance. It represented a level of class-consciousness and solidarity that the platform previously showed little empathy towards.
January was where two conflicting ideologies brewing in the forum came to a head - that of fair work, and that of no work. The latter fermented from a simple start - the malt of post-scarcity sprouting vague tendrils that consume discussion and spit out idealism, ‘reckons’. What movement existed was struck through with a misrepresentation that devoured itself; culminating in the interview where a moderator of the space gets somehow dunked on by Jesse Watters. Utterly defenceless, the moderator can’t place the ideology they’re supposed to represent, and Watters clumsily shears the philosophy through its transept into two uneven halves.
The clip is shared. The community is aghast. Class solidarity flips to class conflict. It happens.
Get this; Shipbreaking is satisfying. Shedding great plates of titanium, prising back each layer to delicately clip the innards from their moorings. This comes with knowledge - you learn layouts and know precisely where to punch a perfect hole to jettison cargo. You develop process and a flair from execution where you drift, clip, neaten, correct. Each new task comes with an implied moment of sizing up your quarry, a hands-on-hips examining of the stretch of plates and pipes before kneading out the stiffer knots of metal. In countless reviews and critiques, there is talk of the bones or ribs of the ships that you slip through in a dance of reverse-repair; a tiny little vet making incisions in a metal mammal. It is a joyous game, and it is joyous labour.
This is the magic trick of Hardspace: Shipbreaker; highlighting labour as a worthwhile, entertaining, and fulfilling pursuit. It rapidfire simulates the mastering of a craft, the satisfaction of a ‘job well done’; but encases that spark in an interior system that’s outwardly oppressive. That doesn’t make much sense, but I'm trying to get this written fast - and besides, it’s very easy to pretend it does make sense. If you can simply imagine the words fitting together better it’ll save both of us a lot of time and me a lot of effort. Thx xx
Here’s the antiwork comparison. Shipbreaker illustrates the “worthwhile” of labour: within or extant from the system of capital it exists in. It sits firmly on the former of the two camps - “let us work in a meaningful way within the bounds of the human rather than the financial”. The game knows Shipbreaking is an enjoyable art, its characters share a fondness for the job; it should be done… but not like this.
There’s a core here that’s clumsily explored in the capital N “Narrative” of the game. The cast of characters does slide maybe too far into black-and-white territory - they certainly contain depth and dimensions but socket into a narrative that’s awful obvious. Take Weaver! A yearning for the joy of a job he’s no longer fit to do is displaced by a management of it; a care and affection for people that honeys his voice in fatherly advice. His purpose in the narrative is ultimately just to become straightforwardly, linearly radicalised. We’ve all been there. Hal, the company representative, is a funhouse mirror of every bad boss you’ve ever had. His purpose is to be the blank-slate baddie who instead gets linearly, more obviously toxic - and whilst the twists of the knife and outward cruelty are effectively cartoon-villainish, they’re never unexpected.
And while we’re here, the implication of a winding path of repetitive debt leading to immortal slavery is something that’s not leant into or made obvious enough. That’s a silly sentence, so we’ll unpack it. The corporation the player works for, LYNX, allows its labourers to make huge profits by taking on the dangerous task of shipbreaking - but a ferocious sign-on-fee means that the player has to work, and probably die, before they’ll ever pay it off. Dying sounds bad for everyone - so luckily LYNX has a solution - the Everwork program - providing memory-complete spares of employees the moment they perish. The price? More money than you’ll have earned in every shift prior, nudging you further into that big hole we call debt. Now that idea has ballooned like a children’s bouncy castle, we can play in its imaginative space.
LYNX is effectively running a house-always-wins form of labour where credits earned are neatly offset by predictable mistakes and extortionate supply costs - and the Everwork program being inescapable means employees are essentially locked into eternal, ageless servitude. They’ve manufactured labour that can never fail, and a workforce that can never escape meaningfully. You’re an immortal slave and work is your hell. Maybe Shipbreaker is just entrusting players to put these pieces together, but I’ve not heard anyone talking about this implication. Evidently it’s just because I have a massive, massive brain, and a colossal head to keep it in.
Regardless of these flaws, this core is molten-hot and mature for the medium; it knows what it is doing. It’s a game that’s meaningfully in conversation with gaming. It’s in conversation with the dopamine drip, the progression loop, the mastery, the numbers going up. Maybe I'm being silly but I love the word ‘credit’ here for the game’s currency - acting as either generic spacebucks or a signifier of merit and ownership. And that bottomless pile of debt forces you to look for progression elsewhere - namely in slowly reassembling a ship that’s part-hobby and part ticket outta this dump. A critical plot-point that pinches it away from you playfully (and emotionally) manipulates those linear strings of upward momentum we’re so used to having in basically all of games. When you realise that the aforementioned credits aren’t a meaningful metric, you can focus on the work outside of its capital - and I think that a lot of people who doggedly stick to credits as a yardstick for improvement report the game not quite working for them. LYNX Tokens, the other form of currency, reek of scrip - the scent of which twins with the banjo-laden soundtrack to drag the game’s redolent connections to Americana, prospecting, and ‘gold in them hills’. Lovely stuff.
But by virtue of the media and our preconceptions of it, what the game is telling you about work can’t ever truly sing in a way that isn’t abstract. It is unavoidable that the player can stop playing; breaking that delicate illusion in two. The player is free to interpret this work as joy, as stepping away from the machine allows them to pocket the tactility and satisfaction into chunks, dinky squares of chocolate to savour rather than an unending slab whose sweetness is dulled by monotony.
I’ve not worked true “hard labour” jobs, but I’ve regrettably done an awful lot for the service industry. These are jobs where your fingers get all flaky and raw from dishes and your bones ossify from standing rather than, you know, imminent death from several hundred tonnes of flying space debris. But there’s a flicker of comparison in there. The feeling of an early-morning-opening or a late-night-close comes with a rooted satisfaction, running a ‘tight ship’ (rather than destroying one, I suppose) and having an ownership of a space that you’ve perfected, only to have it twisted by one shift too many, one hour when you didn’t need one, one overseer who hoovers up… credit…
So why is Antiwork important to this story? I’m not sure. I forgot. I think I wanted to illustrate some larger connection between the inherent value of work and the CAPITALISATION that’s turned the process of extracting that personal value sour. Antiwork is precisely at odds with itself in a way that Shipbreaker illustrates; ‘work can be fun! Not like this…’. As the game closes out with a successful unionisation effort and an understanding that the player may want to continue working the shipyard, you understand that play and work can be twinned in a way that’s healthy. They keep the Everwork program, you can work forever; it’s the choice that’s important. “You didn’t waste your time” - the game is keen to remind you - “this work is good”.
There’s a line from the ferociously punitive 6/10 IGN review that I really like: “By the end of its campaign, the repetitive objectives and intentionally slow progression made shipbreaking start to feel like exactly what it’s simulating: hard labor.” Goodness, isn’t this juicy. Shipbreaker, and this review of it, work in tandem to blur the line between games about work and games that are work. It’s fascinating to me because it ties repetition and boredom to labour. Beforehand, the satisfaction flowed thick-and-fast and work felt like it wasn’t. It illustrates the former side of the antiwork spectra. But doubtless, for our noble reviewer - with deadlines and critical burdens to worry about - the game slipped from fun to job. And then Shipbreaker wraps back round on itself: its point is made and its critical pearls ripe for plucking. If I were paid to write this I would enjoy the game less, which is the whole point. ‘Aint that something weird.
I don’t really have a conclusion, I’m not a very good writer yet. But you are very capable, what with your huge, succulent brain with all its slippery thoughts and unctuous feelings. There’s “gold in them hills”. Play Shipbreaker and let its illustrations and imperfections sit in your brain for reference or action. It is an achievement, a broken disco-ball of interpretation where a light, caught at the right angle, dazzles.
