TW: depression, suicide, employee abuse, late-stage capitalism

“I personally think that being able to work 996 is a huge blessing”
- Jack Ma, Weibo, April 15, 2019

It’s 2 AM. Black eyelids and blacker coffee. The investor report is due tomorrow, and yet another group of college students has started a startup targeting your company’s market value. Unfortunately, they don’t intend on sleeping, so you pull another can of Red Bull from the employee breakroom fridge. After all, no intelligence can leapfrog four more hours of code. Perhaps, if I…

“Could you help me forecast upcoming B2B sales trends for Q2?”

Get back to work.

On December 29, 2020, at 1:30 AM, a commodity trader surnamed Zhang collapsed in the street while walking back home with her colleagues. Rushed to the hospital, she was pronounced dead approximately half an hour later. She was 23. Zhang’s death marked the second overwork-related death in a month for Pinduoduo, the unicorn commerce platform startup worth more than $170 billion (and the owner of Temu, the popular Western shopping app), and sparked widespread outrage among Chinese netizens, leading to a government investigation and a user boycott that dropped Pinduoduo’s market cap by 6.1% in a single day. The CEO pledged to do better, the users who boycotted Pinduoduo reinstalled the app, and Zhang’s death was forgotten.

Two weeks after Zhang died, a Pinduoduo engineer in the app infrastructure department asked for leave early and traveled home. On the afternoon of January 9th, 2021, he leaped to his death from the window of his apartment building. News reports later surfaced that employees in his division were made to work 300 hours a month, with many of those hours without pay.

A few days later, a whistleblower named Wang Taixu filmed a video of a colleague collapsing and being taken into an ambulance after working overtime at Pinduoduo’s offices, and was promptly fired. In response, he published a Bilibili exposal that confirmed not just 300 but 380 hours of work a month, as well as various poor working conditions such as having 8 bathrooms for 1000 employees (in response, the administrators put up signs requesting employees to “hurry up”), forcing employees to work during Lunar New Year, forcing employees to work overtime to make up for hours lost if sick, and fluctuating salaries and bonuses seemingly on a whim’s notice.

The three deaths, as well as Wang’s exposal, solidified Pinduoduo as the face of the infamous “996” system, which stands for workdays from 9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week, with companies often requiring employees to work unpaid overtime past the 996 system itself. Popularized by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, 996 – or even worse – is virtually universal among Chinese startups and behemoths alike in the fast-moving Chinese technology sector, where investor expectations are high, potential profits are higher, and where competitors will do anything to undercut their competition. Indeed, Pinduoduo reached its ascendency by undercutting countless other 团购 or group-buying companies, achieved through intentionally selling at a loss and bleeding investor dollars until its competition could not afford to keep up. Furthermore, Pinduoduo prided itself on having more features and integration than any of the competition, from native compatibility with uber-popular WeChat and QQ to fully-streamlined supply chains with multiple fallback suppliers to custom-designed AI meant to help shoppers.

In hindsight, the notion that a startup could fully build such a streamlined and efficient platform, perhaps more so than even Amazon, while simultaneously expanding to all of China, Singapore, and Southeast Asia in the span of two years without brutal working conditions was foolish. But what choice did Pinduoduo have? It was competing with dozens of other startups, all aiming for the same piece of the pie, and all with similarly horrid working conditions. Had Pinduoduo implemented humane working conditions, it would simply dissolve in the sea of failed startups, in which case another company with terrible labor practices would have dominated the market segment. After all, at the end of the day employees are simply just a resource, and like any other resource, the goal is to get maximum value at a minimum cost. Pinduoduo, like all the other startups it was competing against, was just another cog in the machine of China’s emerging information economy, a gladiator forced to fight while the spectators of venture capitalists cheered on.

A Blessing for the Herd, developed by ex-developers from Tencent and Netease (two companies notorious for their 996 practices), was created as a response to the Pinduoduo situation and depicts the daily working lives of dozens of employees at a small ecommerce startup. This is not a new concept, and multiple games have already tackled the 996 system in-depth before, such as the aptly named game “996me”. Yet, where A Blessing for the Herd diverges from the herd – and where it shines brightest – is in its brilliantly-written characters, as well as its focus on the societal structure and economic incentives that makes 996 not only possible, but often necessary to a startup’s survival.

Instead of playing as an employee, you play as the CEO of the company, tasked with managing dozens of employees, each with their own struggles and aspirations, as you try to claw your company’s way towards profitability, fight back against competitors trying to do the same thing, and fulfill the impossible expectations of the investors who loaned you money. Playing as the CEO naturally gives the game more depth in both gameplay and narrative, as it enables choices you make to have ramifications not only on you, but on everyone that surrounds you, as well as changing the goal of the game from simply meeting a deadline to reaching “success” for the company, a far more abstract and seemingly-impossible affair.

Your main goal as CEO is to ensure maximum worker productivity while growing the company and staying within the monthly allotted funding given by your investors. Worker productivity can be increased through two main methods: upgrades to your workplace, such as break rooms or yoga studios, or overtime. The former option improves the mental and physical stability of your workers while simultaneously improving productivity, but depletes a significant amount of your already-limited funding, when you still need to spend money on marketing and salaries and rent. The latter option is free and gives a bigger productivity boost than more break rooms, but depletes mental and physical health, which gradually depletes their maximum productivity in the long run, while also increasing the chance of employee sudden death, leaving the company, or suicide. Yet, in the face of almost-impossible investor expectations, you quickly learn that overtime is basically essential to avoid your company immediately drowning in a sea of red numbers. Therefore, to make sure that your company doesn’t fail without killing all your employees, a careful balance must be struck.

The narrative centers on six key employees: Lin Tong and Gao Qi, the two leaders of the R&D division, Luo Xin and Zhao Nan, the two leaders of the Product Development division, and Fan Ruichao, the marketing head. Each employee, including you (a dog), are represented by and depicted as an animal, with the only characters in the game depicted as humans being the investors, which illustrates their power over you and your startup’s replaceability in the Chinese economy. For instance, Fan is extremely aggressive in his marketing efforts, often recruiting new users using unscrupulous and sometimes-illegal practices to boost user figures, an important metric for investors. As such, he is depicted as a boar, due to the boar’s status in Chinese culture as being aggressive and confident. Each of the six key employees represents one of the main demographics of people in the tech industry, from the meek yet talented worker who keeps their head down to the ambitious employee willing to do anything to get a promotion.

Ever since I’ve gotten proficient at Chinese after four years of self-study, this game has been one of the top things on my backlog. From its release in 2019, it has been regarded in China as a cult classic, and by many Chinese netizens as one of China’s finest indies, something made more impressive by China emerging as one of the most vibrant and bold indie scenes in the world. On TapTap, a popular Chinese mobile app store for gaming, A Blessing for the Herd was ranked as the #1 highest rated game for two years in a row. From reading the synopsis, it was immediately evident that this game had unquestionable potential, and I was extremely curious where it took its unique ideas. While I have never experienced the 996 system myself or seen it in person, in Japan the idea of dedicating long hours towards a company is seen as normal, and my dad clocked in early every morning and clocked out when the sky was black, doing god-knows-what at the small chemical company in Shizuoka-shi where he received his monthly paycheck. When I was growing up, the concept of studying hard to ace the common test to get into a good university, in order to join a company upon graduating – putting in overtime regularly – and climbing up the corporate ladder was seen as normal, and was instilled in me from an early age. Of course, this game covered the startup boom in China especially among technology companies, which I was interested in as it was so radically different compared to the Japanese system I was used to, yet at the same time, so many elements were the same, from the corporate hierarchies to the emphasis on company loyalty to the characters involved. It was “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics”, perhaps. As such, I walked in expecting a decent story critiquing the 996 system, but nothing really more than that.

What I didn’t expect was a story that exposed the absurdity and inequality of China’s childhood rat races and the Gaokao exam, or a story that lamented Chinese people forgetting their own ancient wisdom and culture to worship at the altar of consumerism and their blind admiration of the West. or a swiftian story that picked apart the bureaucracy of different Chinese agencies and their artificial inefficiency, or a story that explored China’s massive (and growing) rural-urban divide and how long-entrenched societal systems like the Hukou household registration system exacerbates that divide. In other games focusing on Chinese corporate culture, these societal issues would be brushed aside or ignored entirely, perhaps included as a two-sentence quip in a twenty-hour game. Not here, though. A Blessing for the Herd is a game that isn’t content to point its sharp pen at the 996 work system, or even the corporate structures that enable it. No, it’s a game that is smart enough to know that corporate culture ultimately is largely derived from societal norms and values, and that one cannot fully address the injustices in companies without taking a glance at the society that enabled it. While relatively brief in size, these ventures into the tears in Chinese society in the midst of rapid modernization are packed with detail and emotion, complementing the main story perfectly while never detracting from the tightly-paced writing. Indeed, many of the game’s most brilliant moments come from these asides, these dazzling introspections into Chinese society as a whole.

That’s high praise, especially when the main story itself is so good. As stated earlier, the main story essentially functions as six intertwined character studies, with the company and its success being the common thread that links each character story together. Given the lifelessness of the corporation and the lack of a preset main plot, one would assume that the progression of said character stories would largely be dependent on player agency. Yet, while this game gives the illusion of player agency through the way gameplay is perfectly intertwined with story, because the player fundamentally has very little agency on changing the end result of the gameplay, the progression and ending of the story is hence inevitable. After all, regardless of what you do or how you optimize, you will always lose at least 10 million RMB a month (which, according to the developers, is by design), with hanging on and optimizing your gameplay only a temporary gauze in the hemorrhage of investor funds, often by no fault of your own. This is what leads to the tragic but beautifully inevitable ending of the game (no, it’s not the company going bankrupt), which not only ties up the fate of the company but the fate of all of the characters in a shocking yet sensible manner.

Indeed, let’s talk about said characters, shall we? While all of the characters in this game get luscious development and are very well-written, I would like to shine a spotlight on a few of my favorite characters that had a particular impact on me.

Luo Xin has been described by the developers as the “real daughter” of the game in subsequent interviews, and it’s easy to see why: she gets more screen time than any other character, and she has the most tragic story in the entire game. The developers, in their reflection, note that when the Chinese internet bubble started, product manager was among the most desired jobs in all of China, as people dreamed of creating unique projects that could change the world. Yet, this subsequently led to a surplus of product managers in the market, and when combined with the bursting of several bubbles in the Chinese technology sector, led to the vast majority of product managers quitting the technology sector or migrating to more in-demand jobs. As a result, the remaining product managers are often driven by passion more than anything, due to the low pay, long hours, and constant struggles of the profession – leading to the occupation having some of the highest depression rates of any job in China. Product managers need to have constant communication, arguments, and quarrels with all sectors of the company, often acting as a mediator in negotiating between different divisions from designers to programmers to the accounting department. Yet, even after all that, the vast majority of projects proposed are ultimately rejected, leading to what the developers themselves term as the feeling that “all efforts are illusory”. Luo Xin perfectly reflects this ideal of a person whose passion drives them to the point of insanity, and whose quest to create the “timeless product” eventually leads to her depression and suicide. Her descent into madness, partially spurred by your actions as the CEO, is one of the most important events that happens in the game, and illustrates the human impact of 996, as well as the effects when creative passion is exploited for monetary gain. And in a medium that has often struggled to portray mental health, with many games ranging from DDLC to Milk Outside a Bag of Milk often ending up romanticizing and smoothing-out mental illness into some voyeuristic aesthetic to be slapped on top like an ableist Band-Aid in lieu of actual substance or depth, Luo Xin’s progression is raw and ugly – much like actual mental health struggles. It’s heartbreaking, really, to see her creative dreams descend into nightmares. From the start, it is evident that Luo Xin represents the story of someone working at Muccy Games, given both the background of the developers and that such a highly personal and specific story cannot be formed from consciousness but instead experience. To whoever the owner and creator of this story is, I hope you find inner peace.

Gao Qi, represents to me, both the Chinese idealization of women in the workplace and the end result of it. Her character is constantly depicted as innocent, docile, and pure, sometimes with a slight sexualization bent, which fits her persona as a sheep. Yet, by the end of the story, she is a completely different person than when she began, due to the countless examples of harassment (and worse) that she experiences. She becomes more mature, wary, and guarded; she fights back and demonstrates her independence in the face of a culture and society not designed for her. Perhaps the closest analogue I can make is Tess from Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy: two characters once pure but drastically changed in the face of cultural norms and societal misogyny – and yes, the two are similar in more ways than one (think strawberries). Gao Qi’s story most represents the developers’ anger at not just Chinese corporate culture, but long-entrenched social norms as well, and the perspective that one cannot truly understand the former without understanding the latter. While Gao Qi’s story isn’t the first time I’ve seen a critique about the lack of agency, domesticity, and objectification of women in traditional (and modern) Chinese culture, or even the first time I’ve seen a story where a woman is forced to get an abortion to secure a promotion at her workplace, for her story to be told in a way that takes such full usage of the video game medium’s strength and to be told this eloquently is a delight.

As someone who migrated to America by myself a year ago, at the age of 15 and a half, I deeply connected to Lin Tong’s story for personal reasons. The idea of being an immigrant in a new land, the unfamiliarity and sense of starting over that it entails…these are all universal experiences, unconstrained by demarcation lines or the passing of time. The way that her story is outlined and the way it progresses has actually reminded me a lot of my own story, which has led to an introspection and reflection on my own life – after all, nobody in this game has a happy ending. Perhaps it is a normal occurrence, or a fate to be avoided? In all likelihood, it is both. Either way, the fact that my current life nearly perfectly matches up with the early sections of Lin Tong’s story terrifies me, and I should probably spend more time connecting with my family now that I think about it. Ah well, I’ll do it tomorrow…

Before concluding this review, I’d like to touch on the game’s status as a mobile, free-to-play app. This, for good reason, probably raises concern to a lot of you – after all, Chinese free-to-play mobile apps have a reputation of being either gacha games or ad-infested shovelware. Luckily, I’m happy to report that this game is neither of those. There are no ads during the game, besides a few optional ads you can watch to gain some in-game money (which, again, is useless because you will always end up returning a negative profit at the end of the month). There are no gacha elements either. The developers themselves have stated that they actually lost money developing this game compared to operating expenses (office rent, etc.), and that the decision to put this game on mobile for free was mainly to get a wide playerbase and attract brand loyalty for their future projects, forsaking any money to be made in exchange for publicity and recognition. This, hilariously, reflects the startups depicted in the game itself, who care only about growth and expansion and a bigger user base over profitability. Either way, it seems to have worked, given that I’ll just about buy anything Muccy Games releases next, regardless of price or platform.

Had A Blessing for the Herd been simply a game about the experiences of workers in the 996 system, the sheer quality of its writing and characters alone would have made it a landmark in Chinese indie gaming – the fact that it accomplishes all that while also hiding a viciously-laced satire about Chinese corporate culture and the materialistic bent of modern Chinese society makes it nothing short of unbelievable, all while weaving its game mechanics into the tapestry of the story in a way so seamless that ludology and narratology seems to melt and blend into one. This is a work that is very distinctly and proudly modern Chinese, which is something so rare and refreshing in an environment where so many Chinese indies are trying to be something they aren’t, focusing on settings like Ancient China or anime instead of drawing inspiration from the China that surrounds them every day. In contrast, A Blessing for the Herd embraces its Chinese heritage, drawing from the experiences of the developers’ own lives and the current state of China, resulting in a game unapologetic in its dedication to its own creative vision and overflowing with passion and heart. Rather than being a “996 game” or a “corporate game” or a “management game”, A Blessing for the Herd, more than any other game I’ve played, represents the quintessential Chinese picturesque of the modern era. For a group of game developers who used to work on cash-grab gacha games to create such an indispensable work as their first independent project is extraordinary, and I cannot temper myself for the next Muccy Games release.

I end this review with an excerpt from the developer’s reflection on the game itself.

“Sometimes I am also quite puzzled: Your XX Group and XX Company have almost a monopoly position in the industry, why do you need employees to work overtime continuously? Are you that busy? How much money can you make for the company? If you still need employees to work overtime like this, aren't you monopolizing it for nothing?”

This, for all the game’s success delving into the logistical and practical and societal reasons companies use 996, is the one question it is too afraid to ask: the moral reasons for China’s corporate culture. After all, there are no words to be said, and no answers to be found. Perhaps the most harrowing takeaway from A Blessing for the Herd is that there is no alternate ending. There is no solution. Whereas games like Bioshock and The Stanley Parable explore the illusion of choice through flipping traditional player-game interaction feedback mechanisms, here, the illusion of choice is embedded in the entire structure itself. The game itself isn't preoccupied with pithy questions about free will -- rather, the structure of 996 is a natural extension, a conditia sine qua non of the structure of modern Chinese society. And in modern Chinese fashion, then, such a question is a question that should be avoided.

And so, the cycle continues. Keep your head up, do your code review, and get another Red Bull from the fridge; it’s going to be a long night.