Fired for Making a Game: The Inside Story of I Get This Call Every Day

I Get This Call Every Day is a short and very, very simple point-and click adventure with not much pointing, minimal clicking and zero adventuring. You might argue that it's barely a game at all.

The player, a call center operator, answers a telephone and tries to help a member of the public change his home address on the computerized system. This is a call we've all had to make at some point. Most of us have never experienced being on the other end of the phone, the inanely polite clackety-clickety person who frustrates our desires to just get this tiresome chore done and over with.

What unfolds in the game is a dull conversation in which the player seeks to establish the caller's credentials through various legal criteria — government identity number, previous addresses, bank statements — the dreary inventory of real life.

Drama, of a sort, is established because the caller is not very bright. He lacks the necessary documents that will enable him to pass through the security questions. He is, in short, kind of a dumbass.

Playing the game through takes a few minutes. Replaying so as to explore other possible endings takes a few more minutes. I Get This Call Every Day uses a crude art style, minimal mechanics and homemade voice acting. It costs $2.

Also, it's wonderful, a clever piece that offers real insight into what it's like to work in a call center. It's a protest against the misery of dehumanization in modern workplaces, in which a human being is expected to be a not-human being; where common sense is confounded by brutal bureaucracy and normal conversations between real people are replaced by robotic binary interactions.

The player "wins" by persuading the caller of the necessity of offering up some proof of being who he says he is. The inference is that governments pass laws that are designed to protect individuals from malicious criminals and that these laws pass on certain obligations of self-identification to the individual.

The player loses by sassing the caller, or by waving his moronic responses to security questions through the system. The player must remain firmly polite while fulfilling legal obligations.

At every turn, the option you really wish to take is the one that gets you fired. Like reality, it's a game that seems to offer many options while really offering very few.

Gallant released the game at the end of last year. To his surprise, his email campaign to grab a little publicity paid off: a few stories appeared on game sites like Kotaku. A reporter at the big local newspaper, the Toronto Star, heard of the game and called him for an interview. Unexpectedly, a big story appeared on the front page of the newspaper.

In the game, Gallant does not mention the CRA as his employer. But the newspaper article did. That's when he knew he was in trouble.

When he got into work on the day the story ran, his union reps came by his desk and advised him to stay off the phones. It was clear that he was going to be carpeted. He waited. "I was a bit of a wreck," he says. "Pretty distracted. I had a hard time focusing."

The time came for the confrontation: "I had two union reps with me. I walked into the meeting. We had the director and the assistant director. Then there was the building manager and someone from staffing. When someone from staffing is involved, that's when you know that things may be bad for you."

As a government employee, Gallant has signed certain confidentiality agreements. "I've been told that I can't talk about the details of the meeting. I'm not entirely sure why that is. The meeting was pretty much just them gathering information about what exactly it was that I'd done; whether I was aware of the rules that I had broken.

"They asked me, did I own davidsgallant.com? Yeah, that's my website. I run it. I have full control over what's posted over there. Then they started asking me about things posted on there that could be of a negative consequence. It took me a while to realize that they were asking about review quotes from people who had reviewed the game that were saying things like, 'I will never get a job in a soul-sucking call center.'

"That's a negative comment about call centers. I work in a call center. Therefore because I've posted that quote, someone else's words, I'm potentially in violation of rules.

"At one point I was asked to explain why the job was soul-sucking and why I was feeling like less of a human being. It's a little odd to try and explain that to someone who genuinely seems to not understand what is bad about working in a call center."

This part of the meeting lasted for about 30 minutes. Then the bosses asked if they could spend some time playing the game. Gallant found this encouraging.

He did not like his job, but he needed it to pay his bills, he needed it so he could continue his passion for making games in his spare time. He did not want to get fired.

If these guys played the game, they would surely see that it was not really about the CRA, made no mention of his employer, did not violate anyone's privacy, did not mock the public. It's just a commentary on call center work, which everyone understands is a boring job.

He eagerly gave them a free link to download and play the game. He left the room. They kept him waiting outside the office, with the union reps who agreed that some action would be taken, possibly a written warning or a temporary suspension.

An hour and a half later, they walked him back in.

"They started reading me a letter they had prepared. It's a very long, two-page thing. Basically you have to turn it over to the second page. It's like that moment in a reality TV show when they're about to say who gets kicked off, and then they cut to commercial. The tension is there, but they turn over the page and of course the first line is, 'Termination of your employment as of blah blah blah.' It shocked me. I didn't expect that."

He returned home, told his wife what had happened. "They never got a chance to actually play it. That I found to be the most interesting thing. The decision was made and no one played the game in that process."

He adds, "The way they explained it to me was that it was a technical limitation that they didn't know how to get around. But if you're dealing with someone who made a video game, at least have someone who knows how to go to a URL and unzip a file.

"There were certain elements that I have to agree with. There are rules I agreed to when I took the job and those are rules that I broke with knowledge that I was breaking them. I didn't think that was termination-worthy. When I hear that they actually never experienced the game, it just makes me feel like they jumped to a conclusion and didn't take the time to fully understand what was going on."

For as long as there has been work, people have been protesting about their working lives through songs, stories, jokes. It seems probable that Gallant lost his job because the media took note of his work, and they took note of his work specifically because it's a video game.

If he had been seen in a comedy club riffing on life in a call center (without mentioning his employer), his act would not have made the front page of the Toronto Star. The Minister of Revenue would not have issued a statement saying she found Gallant to have behaved in a way that is "offensive and completely unacceptable." He would not have been marched into that office and fired.

Those things happened because the people who fired him, the Minister who castigated him, did not really understand what he had created. A comedy routine, a song, they could have processed. The fact that they did not play the game, that they found a way to fire him that did not require that they play the game, tells its own story.

It is unthinkable that they would have failed to experience any other protest form — a YouTube video of a song, say — before coming to their decision.

(Polygon reached out to the CRA for comment. Our call was not returned.)

He was not fired because he wrote a game about working in a call center. He was fired because a story about the misery of working in a call center, and dealing with members of the public, appeared on the front page of the Toronto Star.

As a piece of protest by a call center worker, the game achieved something a comedy routine, a blog post or a song could not have done. Its message reached a very large number of people. But somewhere along the way, the message was corrupted.

"I think maybe the fact that it's a game sexes it up for the media," Gallant says. "It's hip and trendy for all the kids and their interwebs. Maybe if I was a beat poet at a jazz club rocking it out for 10 or 15 people [snaps fingers], maybe it wouldn't have made the front page of the Toronto Star. In fact, maybe it wouldn't have been an issue at all.

"The argument's been made that if I had expressed it in any other medium, maybe they wouldn't have reacted so badly, and that's certainly a possibility."

In the last few years, tools have emerged that allow almost anyone to make a game. David Gallant admits to possessing low skill levels in game design and art. But he does know how to use basic game development tools, and he knows how to tell a story.

The emergence of these tools allows people who aren't game designers to experiment with the form, to tell stories that are not designed to be commercially successful, but are designed to reach players as carriers of emotional insight. A game appears about gender change or depression, being in the thick of a political riot or the pain of losing a child.

Games like these often ignore the sort of hooks and feedback loops that game designers know so well and that deliver that intangible quality of "fun." They can sometimes feel like hard work to play.

But they exist because games are a great way to create empathy between the creator and the audience. Reading a blog post about working in a call center is not as personally affecting as pretending to be a call center worker in a staged simulation. Hearing someone tell a funny tale of the shit that call center workers deal with is not as powerful as dealing with that same shit, even in pretend form, yourself.

This is why games have become the mode of choice for people with something to say. In terms of being wholly about something more than traversing a cartoon character across a screen or eliminating pop-up bogeymen with bang-bang shooting tools, this is new.

Games are not supposed to offer serious commentary on society, on life, on humanity. The media, the mass media anyway, do not yet understand this. For them, games are a mystery or perhaps a joke without a punchline, something for young people and social misfits.

Gallant says, "There are a lot of people who don't even see video games as an expressive medium. Maybe we're falling victim to the traditional media just understanding games as entertainment."

I Get This Call Every Day isn't just about call centers. David Gallant's story isn't just about how political machines punish those who inconvenience their senior operatives. It's about games as a medium for ordinary people to say extraordinary things about their unique lives in ways that we have never seen before.

The people who fired Gallant saw the game itself as an irrelevance. They took his job away from him, and probably the chance for him to get a similar job, because a newspaper story had made them look bad, had made their boss look bad.

From their actions, it does not seem to have occurred to them that the game might have something to say about the way they arrange their working practices, the effects they have on the people around them. Instead of the game leading to a conversation about their silly rules, it led to the termination of Gallant as an employee.

"I'm glad that I'm no longer working there," he says. "I've been informed that employees, fellow co-workers, not at the Toronto center but elsewhere in the Canada Revenue Agency, have actually written to the Minister requesting my reinstatement. As much as I admire that sentiment, I wouldn't want the job back for anything. But yeah, to have jumped on me like that, I don't think it was right."

He adds, "I would have hoped, maybe, that the game inspired someone, somewhere, to do something about the conditions that employees in call centers have to work with. Instead, they fire the guy who made the game."

Gallant has made around $10,000 from sales of the game, and says he will continue to make games. He is still looking for a job, and is hoping to land a low-level role at a game company. He believes that many potential employers outside gaming will Google his name, and will believe that he is a troublemaker who was fired by the government for making a game.