Joachim
@JDespland
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Teacher and game developer. He/him
Occupied Tiohtiá:ke
Joined February 2012
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A friend cut this clip from a talk I gave at the last CGSA conference, where I talk about the buzzword of "sustainability" in games, and the special role of labour organizing.
(On that day the sky in Montréal was orange from the Canadian forest fires):
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Activision-Blizzard is working with a union-busting firm, "Wilmerhale" - the same one that Amazon is using.
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FYI the original version of the poem about the holocaust starts with "First they came for the *communists* ".
The reason you might not know this is that in an act of extreme irony and cynicism they took out that first line for the version they put on the US holocaust museum.
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So it turns out that most of the original creators of Disco Elysium have been involuntarily pushed out of the company, including Robert Kurvitz, the lead designer and writer(!)
This is super fucked up, but unfortunately not particularly surprising for the indie games industry.
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This article is kinda weird. Accessing the internet is very easy in Cuba; the island has full 3G coverage and smartphones are everywhere. The only "restrictions" are US-based firms blocking access to their content to connections from Cuba (experienced this myself with zoom)
For years, Cuban teens resorted to espionage tactics to watch Game of Thrones and play World of Warcraft. Today the "SNET" stands as a a triumph of collective action:
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If you work at Eidos / Square Enix DO NOT contact the NAVEX Global "whisteblowing platform" or "tip line".
NAVEX Global is another union-busting firm (also used by Amazon) and they act as a front to gauge workplace organizing and help management cover things up.
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It needs to be very clear to everyone that this is where the unpaid wages of the crunching devs go
Houser brothers expected to receive bulk of $538m Red Dead royalties
Analyst predicts big payout for Rockstar founders and 'a few key insiders'
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westerners will accept any atrocity if you tell them that the victims deserved it because they made the wrong choices
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You: "Workers and owners don't have opposing interests, we're one big family, management knows best and we have to be productive to succeed in life"
Your boss: "I'm glad that not too many peasants will die because otherwise I'd have to pay them more, amirite fellow capitalists?"
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Disco Elysium is an absolutely monumental game, a work like no other this industry has ever produced.
Absolutely disgusting that it and the people who created it have just been chewed up like this, by opportunists & careerists capitalizing on its success.
The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone -- everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.
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The story of indie games: In 2008 when Braid came out, the programmer owned the company, but the artist was just an employee working for him. Now in 2019 Jonathan Blow is rich and a shitty reactionary centrist nerd, and David Hellman is drawing socialist propaganda comics.
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yelling "read walter benjamin" at my screen every day on twitter dot com
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This is baffling. Why would a non-union studio tweet this? Start with unionizing Devolver Digital. Unionizing is not a metaphor or a marketing buzzword.
I thought maybe an employee tweeted this without approval but it's been up for 22h.
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After its invention, Tetris spread as shareware throughout the socialist world, and for a time it was impossible for any firm in the capitalist world to own exclusive rights to its distribution. The story of Tetris is a story capitalist appropriation and enclosure of the commons
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then perish
EA believes an uptick in unionizing workers across the game industry could pose an operational risk to its business.
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Before this gets shared too widely I should probably point out that FT is wrong to assume the dynamics that applied under feudalism apply to capitalism as well. Under the artificial scarcity of capitalism workers' bargaining power has no relation to population density
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wow it's so cool how in the west we have real democracy and the monarch is just a symbolic figurehead that we just keep around for the tourism industry and who has no political authority
NEW: The 22-year old woman who was arrested after holding up this anti-monarchy placard at St Giles' Cathedral has now been CHARGED “in connection with a breach of the peace",
@PoliceScotland
confirm.
Will appear at Edinburgh Sheriff Court at a later date.
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Due to the US-imposed blockade, all online traffic has to go through Venezuela - which is why the solutions described in the article are useful: they allow local "caching" of large files and a way to avoid low ping for gaming. The article implies all sorts of other stuff however.
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Valve claims to be a "non-hierarchical" workplace, but just like any other capitalist business, the workers are not the owners. The hierarchies are unspoken, hidden behind a bad-faith facade of friendliness, which can only make working conditions worse, produce anxiety and abuse.
An former employee of Valve and other companies has a lot to say about the ugly internal politics of games industry jobs
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I try to avoid sectarianism on twitter but it's hard to suppress the frustration and contempt I feel towards the American anticommunist "left". If your politics are based on seeking validation from liberal middle-class friends & family, now's a good time to rethink priorities
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People need to get past bromides like "crunch is bad for business" and realize that business owners like the Houser brothers are pocketing hundreds of millions *because* they are not spending this money in overtime pay for devs who put in 70+ hour weeks
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This would almost always immediately lead to complete death spiral collapse. It became player practice to devise ways of executing nobility as soon as they arrive to prevent this transition. DF was the only game to simulate capitalism so accurately that it destroyed itself
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My favorite epoch in the development of Dwarf Fortress is when there was a feature where lower-ranking nobles that move into your fortress would eventually mandate the establishment of a market-based "dwarven economy"
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Weird how when a Chinese studio releases a game everyone feels the need to mention how scary China is - but Cyberpunk 2077 comes out and no word of how CDProjekt Red received funding from the Polish government under the rule of far-right holocaust-denying "Law & Justice" Party🤔
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to all the indies responding to the latest abuse stories by posting about how they're going to start a new game studio except good because they will be a good boss: i'm looking forward to unionizing it
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Ever think about how medieval peasants had all these complex elaborate & precise processes to make things like cheese, mortar, ale, soap, etc, but alchemists spent time writing down shit like "if you cum in a pumpkin and let it rot inside a horse uterus it'll make a little man"
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the idea that people become more right wing with age is a myth, people do so when they accumulate wealth & property and benefit materially from complicity in the imperialist super-exploitation of the global south, which is what happened to the 3 previous generations of westerners
millennials aren’t getting more right-wing as they age: fascinating statistics via
@jburnmurdoch
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where are all the people who defended za/um management now? all those arguments about how it's actually good for the workers when the "money people" run the studio?
Around 24 employees at ZA/UM (Disco Elysium) are at risk of redundancy.
The standalone expansion for Disco Elysium was cancelled.
The Sequel was cancelled in 2022 and a new Sci-Fi IP was paused in 2023.
They have still two games in development.
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Don't be fooled when bosses try to coopt the language of working class struggle to justify their shitty business models.
"Artists need to get paid" created a world of DRM platform monopolies making billions for shareholders while artists are still paid less than ever
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Imagine if the alt-right won and ended up being the ones writing the history books. How they would teach future generations about "SJWs", the "PC police", "cancel culture", etc
This is basically where everything you've ever been taught about communism since childhood comes from
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Guys like Boby Kotick will threaten to have you killed but they are terrified of unions. I've seen it first hand. It's the one thing they know is a threat to their power, and they will do anything to sabotage union efforts and to manipulate you away from joining them
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if this turns out to become part of the accepted justification for why it was ok for the company to get rid of them i swear i will personally destroy the entire videogame industry
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@Samu_751
@runin2traffic
The money people come from a background which says you gotta grab when you can even when it in fact does not make much economic sense.
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this statement from the bodycam game is telling in how it aligns perfectly with the rest of the industry, not how it differs from it
"avoid undesirable topics such as discrimination, racism, violence against women & minorities"
"no manichean take" (bothsidesism)
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Imagine if people talked about other art forms like music the same way they talk about "empathy" games. "The purpose of this breakup song is to help people who have never gone through a breakup understand how it feels"
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Your centrally-planned dwarven commune would suddenly implement private property and develop a class system, and the institution of wage labour. Now different job earned different wages and dwarves had to pay rent to property-holders and puchase commodities to fulfill their needs
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People and institutions *should* be pressured to "pick a side" against fascism, and all the more so the more powerful they are. Fence-sitting shouldn't be an option for anyone with any ounce of authority granted to them by society.
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"We need gambling mechanics in games so devs can pay rent" says the investor who lives off collecting rent on property, meanwhile every dev i know working on a game with lootboxes absolutely hates it and wants to organize to take back creative decision power from management.
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Same if you work at any other workplace making use of their "services", of course.
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just another reminder that the IGDA is not a substitute for having unions, and that its board of directors is mostly bosses
Devs say the International Game Developers Association, that criticised the industry for ignoring harassment allegations, failed to investigate similar complaints
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Make sure to install this historical accuracy mod that fixes the only issue I have with Dwarf Fortress
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if you're making a cultural product in 2020 you have 3 choices:
- extreme irony poisoning, no sincerity
- earnestly naive, completely taken apart by the slightest critique
- communist propaganda
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@ScottishCommie
"Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the US as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco." (Barbara Fields)
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Get involved in the fight for worker power and against abuse and exploitation in this industry. Game workers are always stronger when they unite!
If you want to be part of making that change happen, there are lots of places you can go to get started.
@CODE_CWA
runs free organizer trainings every weekend (). If you're in Canada you can contact
@GWU_Montreal
or
@GWU_Toronto
. In CA there's
@GWSoCal
.
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There should be more attention paid to the fact that the reason these reports are being published is because Paradox workers are unionized and union groups were able to conduct a survey on gender discrimination at the studio
Multiple women tell UK and Swedish press about a "toxic" culture at Paradox Interactive where harassment is accepted
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The fact that something so minimal as just public discussion about unions is enough to put pressure on business owners to prove they're a "good boss" who cares about their employees, should tell you how much actual unionization would be capable of achieving in terms of gains
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If you truly care about supporting the creation of small art games, start fighting for rent control in your city, for fewer hours and higher pay at your day job, for free universal healthcare and childcare
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I'm sorry but this comes off as very confused. Everyone who is hired by an employer in the industry for a non-management role is part of the working class. The working class is defined by its relationship to capital: it's not an aesthetic, a cultural background, or a pedigree.
Ok, here we go. I've spent the past year collaborating with People Make Games on this, exploring the shocking lack of working class folk in the games industry.
Please watch, please share. It's probably the most important work of my games media career.
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Multiple of these buyers therefore independently claimed they owned Tetris, and sold their separate versions of the game. It took many legal battles for one corporation, Nintendo, to eventually come out on top.
Today they've made their own version of history the "official" one
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A lot of people in the games industry still seem to think that a union is something that comes to you in order to provide you a service, as opposed to something that you build yourself along with your coworkers.
The sooner this changes the faster unionization will succeed.
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Game industry bosses are panicking because of all the union talk! They're desperately trying to find a way to keep things under control. This is a great example of how things get moving and change gets promised in response to even early organizing activity
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With glasnost and the dismantling of the soviet union, several people tried to make money by taking advantage of the situation and of the lack of established intellectual property frameworks, claiming to foreign buyers that they held the right to sell the Tetris "IP" to them.
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Gotta love this genre of journalism that goes "Are working conditions bad in X industry? We interviewed a business owner to find out"
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"surprising"
Google has hired a consulting firm known for its anti-union work, a surprising move that appears to be a response to employee unrest at the company
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Learn to recognize and protect yourself against the classic anti-union moves employers love to use
Big historic labour actions like the ones we saw today are inevitably going to be followed up by union-busting from bosses. But union-busting is a LOT less effective if workers expect it in advance. Here's a list of common tactics to share with coworkers:
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This "catch" is an illegal union-busting practice and the headline of this article is misleading and should be changed to reflect this
And here's the catch: Activision will not give raises to Raven QA testers, who are unionizing, "due to our legal obligations under the National Labor Relations Act," the company said in an email seen by Bloomberg News.
Story:
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If you are in HR or management and supportive of unionizing efforts in games, and you are sitting on evidence of industry blacklisting of organizers or people who speak out against unfair labour practices, please please consider leaking what you have to your local GWU chapter
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Unionizing is not a new "scene" or ~aesthetic~ for you to recuperate lol come on
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Did you know that the directors of the 1993 Super Mario Bros. live action movie, also directed an animated "Marx For Beginners" short film?
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Get involved in the fight for worker power and against abuse and exploitation in this industry. Game workers are always stronger when they unite!
If you want to be part of making that change happen, there are lots of places you can go to get started.
@CODE_CWA
runs free organizer trainings every weekend (). If you're in Canada you can contact
@GWU_Montreal
or
@GWU_Toronto
. In CA there's
@GWSoCal
.
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crunch is not a "failure of management" as long as management's job is to get the most work out of the labor force for the lowest cost - if studios were to actually pay for all these unpaid hours of crunch, it would mean a lot less profits for the owners!
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"no one wants to work" always meant "people aren't desperate enough to accept terrible wages & conditions" which is why "we need to boost unemployment" is the solution
From “nobody wants to work” to “employment is too high”
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Indie studio owners take advantage of the perception that their business is just a group of friends having fun together, and of their branding as "progressive", "wholesome", "authentic" or "creative", in order to disempower, abuse, and exploit the people who work for them.
Following months of interviews with developers from across three different, highly prestigious indie studios, here’s our investigation into the emotional abuse employees have been suffering at the hands of their founders.
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Learn to recognize and protect yourself against the classic anti-union moves employers love to use
Big historic labour actions like the ones we saw today are inevitably going to be followed up by union-busting from bosses. But union-busting is a LOT less effective if workers expect it in advance. Here's a list of common tactics to share with coworkers:
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these kids actually got a very valuable education on how bourgeois democracy works
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If you are going to GDC pleasse be aware that the director of IGDA is planning to give an anti-union talk there
(looks like my suspicion is confirmed and it's almost certainly going to be an anti-union spiel)
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@KumarsSalehi
weird how the people who were trying to warn about the proud boys being dangerous are now considered a terrorist organization by the government
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The only reason you need to pay rent, and need game-making to be a job to make money in the first place, is because of the ownership class taking your survival hostage in order to force you to generate profits for them.
And they have the gall to act like they're doing you a favor
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Québec's videogame business owner association (La Guilde) is announcing their new "Diversity and Inclusion Plan" which includes a "help line" service ran by "Relais Expert Conseil" : the same union-busting firm that Ubisoft hired last year after the abuse scandal at their studio.
By the way, this "Relais Expert Conseil" HR firm that Ubisoft is paying to do their "external investigation" looks like a very standard corporate crisis management & union-busting service.
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Remember that literally the worst thing that can happen to a business owner or a landlord if they "lose everything" is that they have to get a job like everyone else.
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Elon Musk believes that we live in a simulation and so he thinks if you make your car low poly it will go faster
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I originally made this after seeing this bad NFT crypto art take, but it turns out this person does understand Benjamin, they just also are an avowed fascist
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One of the functions of liberal academia is to train the children of the bourgeoisie to adopt the language of the oppressed, to coopt and recuperate revolutionary ideas. Then they graduate and grow up and this is the end result.
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just throwing this out there but maybe journalists reporting on the game industry shouldn't take press releases by studios currently involved in massive labor unrest at face value and repeat them uncritically
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If GDC happens but all the talks by the big companies are cancelled, I propose that game devs replace attending those sessions with gathering up in yerba buena into a large general assembly to discuss the way forward for unionizing of the industry
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this official account is hiding replies and blocking accounts that are critical of the game's imperialist politics and its treatment of war crimes
The wait is over!
Experience modern war as it’s really fought.
Today, the battle begins.
#SixDaysLaunch
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The games industry produces literal mass media fascist propaganda. It's perhaps the main vector for it today.
Lots of people in this industry who think of themselves as "apolitical" for the sake of business are essentially collaborators
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if anyone tried to convince you in the last few years that actual systemic improvement could happen in the videogame industry without unionizing, they were lying to you because they want you to stay vulnerable and easily exploitable
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There's a kind of artist who would hate it if we created a world where art was decommodified and where everyone had the time and resources to make art - because what they really want is not to create art, it's to be seen as special and better than people who have a normal job
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@bombsfall
the game industry has been making a lot of progress improving the diversity of the ex-state-department and ex-CIA executives it hires
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So you know, maybe when some of us are saying that games like Call of Duty are US imperialist propaganda - we're not being "metaphorical" about it
Blizzard/Activison hired the Bush administration's DHS torture apologist (Townsend) as VP of corporate affairs and "chief compliance officer" and that they hired former CIA exec & Trump state dept (Bulatao) as "chief administrative officer"
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if you're wondering what the "money people" running the company are like, check out this 2017 interview with an executive:
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Much of what the industry sells is power fantasies for the consumer to enjoy playing the role of what is, in our reality, the oppressor.
But dealing with the realities of this oppression might ruin the fantasy, and raise challenging "political" questions - hence, whitewashing
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On the emotional labour discourse: Capitalism works by commodifying more and more human social relations (turning them into market-mediated transactions) in order to continue expanding. Nothing is immune from this (including care, friendship, etc)
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