In addition to her full-time job as a quality assurance tester for an Orange County, California-based game developer, Kinema volunteered with Game Workers Unite to organize the video games industry. This volunteering, which she estimated as 60 hours per week, included giving and receiving training and was supported by crowdfunded monthly income. Kinema and games writer Liz Ryerson were the main figures behind the initial expansion of Game Workers Unite in early 2018. Kinema helped to organize a panel on labor at the March 2019Game Developers' Conference and in May, helped to organize the walkout at Riot Games over its handling of sex discrimination. She assisted Riot workers in creating an organizing committee after they attended a 2018 Game Workers Unite meeting and further advised the organizers via phone. Following two years of discussions, in January 2020, Communications Workers of America hired Kinema to organize workers in the video game and tech industries. It is the first such union-sanctioned initiative in those sectors. Her initiative with Wes McEnany is named Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. She plans to use the Communications Workers of America's infrastructure to fight issues including crunch time, layoffs, and workplace ethics, which she has contended as working conditions for employees who choose employers based on ability to make societal impact. She also emphasized the slow-moving nature of organizing through one-on-one relationships. Companies organized through CODE include Glitch. Variety named the Game Workers Unite organizers and Kinema among the most influential people in video games in 2018. In early 2020, Kinema said that she was involved with almost every video game worker unionization drive in the United States. She had previously trained with the Industrial Workers of the World.
Personal life
Her name is a pseudonym chosen so that she could continue working in the games industry without risking dismissal or reprisal under at-will employment. She described undergoing "pretty extreme lengths" to separate her full-time career from her work as an organizer.
