Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Fri 03 Jul 2009 01:19 PM PDT
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter
Amidst the
current convulsions, global capitalism has one consolation left for its
increasingly desperate subjects: you may have lost your job (or will
never be able to retire from it), you can't afford to go out, but you
can always stay home (if you still have one) and play a video game. As
Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch fell and General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler reeled round the edge of their grave, North American
sales of game hardware and software hit all-time highs in 2008.
Forecasters claimed virtual play was recession-proof; a maturing
audience of stay-at-home gamers would cocoon around the Wii, Xbox360 or
PS3, or migrate to World of Warcraft or Second Life, to
enjoy a diversion from economic disaster. Such estimates of
game-business resilience may prove optimistic: by 2009 job losses were
hitting industry behemoths such as Sony and Electronic Arts (EA). But
this latest iteration of bread-and-circuses culture-theory nevertheless
provides a timely entry for a discussion of digital games as exemplary
media of contemporary Empire. We use
"Empire" in the sense proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to
designate a post-Cold War planetary capitalism with "no outside," [1]
but we modulate their account to take greater consideration of the
internal frictions wracking this order since the millennium. By Empire,
we mean the global capitalist ascendancy of the early twenty-first
century, a system administered and policed by a consortium of
competitively collaborative states, among whom the US still clings, by
virtue of its military might, to an increasingly fragile preeminence.
This is a regime of biopower based on corporate exploitation of myriad
types of labour, paid and unpaid, for the continuous enrichment of a
planetary plutocracy. Empire is an order of extraordinary scope and
depth. Yet it also is precarious, flush with power and wealth, yet
close to chaos as it confronts a set of interlocking economic,
ecological, energy, and epidemiological crises. Its governance is
threatened by tensions between a declining US and a rising China which
could either result in some super-capitalist accommodation,
consolidating Empire, or split it into warring Eastern and Western
blocs. Its massive inequalities catalyze resistances from below, some,
reactionary and regressive, others, like the global justice and
ecological movement, protagonists of a better alternative. What makes
virtual games' technocultural form exemplary of Empire is their
identity with its key means of production, communication and
destruction--the digital network. More than any previous media other
than the book, virtual play is a direct offshoot of its society's
crucial technology of power. Sprung from the military-industrial matrix
that generated the computer and Internet, games are today a test ground
for digital innovations and machinic subjectivities: online play worlds
incubate artificial intelligences; consoles plug to grid computing
systems; games are media of choice for experiments in neurobiological
stimulation and brain driven telekinesis. And, once suspect as
delinquent time waster, virtual play is increasingly understood by
state and corporate managers as training populations for networked
work, war and governability. We examine the relation between games and Empire in terms of the virtual and the actual,
conjugating this couplet with intentionally fuzzy logic in two distinct
yet overlapping ways. The virtual is the digital, the on-screen world,
as opposed to existence "IRL". But "virtual" also denotes potentiality; the manifold directions in which a given, actual, situation might develop. [2] The technological and ontological virtual are distinct and should never be conflated. [3]
But they are related, through the practice of simulation. Computers
create potential universes. They model, dynamically, what might be.
Such simulation is vital to a power system engaged in the high-risk
military, financial and corporate calculus required for globalized
control. It is from such simulation that virtual games emerged, broke
loose into ludic freedom--only to now be reintegrated into the
assemblages of world capital, as a means of inducing the "flexible
personality" [4]
demanded by digital work, war and markets. Yet this ludic
apprenticeship can generate capacities in excess of Empire's
requirements. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual
apparatus generating the bourgeois character required by mercantile
colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and twentieth-century
cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet
screened some of its darkest depictions), so, we suggest, virtual games
are the exemplary media producing subjects for twenty-first century
global hyper-capitalism but also, perhaps, of exodus from it. Let's first
reframe some conventionally celebratory factoids about virtual play.
The global game factory is now a major cultural-industrial complex,
dominated by the console corporations--Microsoft, Sony and
Nintendo--and a cluster of super-publishers, such as EA, Activision,
Konami, Ubisoft and THQ. Control of game finance, licensing and
marketing enables these giants to harvest the creativity of thousands
of game developers, from big third party studios to microenterprises,
all around the world. The global revenues of this industry are about
$57 billion, five times the annual additional expenditures necessary to
provide basic primary education to every child on the planet. [5]
It is often claimed videogames are "bigger then Hollywood," but while
North American sales rival the cinema box office, games lack the film's
ancillary streams from advertising, DVD, and cable TV release, though
advergaming and DLC sales may change this. Game factory revenues are,
however, overtaking those of the music business, and growing faster
than those of both film and music. More significantly, games are
integrated with film, music, and other media: Spiderman, Saw and The Simpsons become games, Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy, films; EA's Madden games are part of the sports-media nexus; Guitar Hero and Rock Band are the new music platform.
Most of the
sales of this "global" media are concentrated in rich planetary
consumption zones: North America, Europe, and Japan, with the US still
the largest single market; some 53% of Americans, 97% of college
students, play; gaming is no longer a youth pastime; and while its
testosterone bias has not vanished, it is declining, as online casual
gaming and the Wii attract more girls and women. [6]
The diffusion of online cybercafé pay-per-play from South Korea--the
most game-intensive culture in the world--to China is opening vast new
player populations in Asia. For the majority of the world's
inhabitants, and especially the 2 billion who subsist on less than 2
dollars a day, a mint copy of Gears of War, let alone the $400
Xbox 360 on which it plays, remains an unthinkable luxury. But the
market in old consoles and computers and mass pirating of game software
give games a wider circulation into Latin America, the Middle East, and
Southern Asia. Nonetheless, access to the game metaverse remains
stratified by wealth, and by energy and Internet infrastructures. A
quarter of the world's population lacks electricity. Meanwhile in Second Life--whose
parallel universe, though free at the most basic level, is populated by
the avatars of Europeans, North American, and Japanese with annual real
life incomes of $45,000 or more--the average resident uses about 1,752
kilowatts of electricity a year, as much as an average Brazilian, and
generates CO2 emissions equivalent to a 2,300 mile journey in an SUV. [7] Virtual play is thus firmly embedded in Empire's unequal, destructive consumption of global resources.
In production,
too, situating games in Empire shatters myths. For millions of young
men (and many aging ones, and some women) from Shanghai to Montreal, a
job making virtual games seems employment nirvana--a promise of being
paid to play. And it is true that for designers, programmers, and
producers the industry offers creative, well paid work involving the
most positive possibilities of "immaterial labour" [8]:
scientific know-how, hi-tech proficiency, cultural creativity, and
workplace cooperation. But just as game development studios typify the
gloss of new media labour they also expose its dark side. The slogan of
work-as-fun legitimates the perpetual "crunch-time" culture whose
revelation in 2004 by the disenchanted partner of a programmer, EA
Spouse, unleashed an industry wide scandal. Game studios, small and
large, stratify permanent employees and a low-paid, precarious testers
and contract workers. Behind these well-known studio labour
flashpoints, however, lies the architecture of the digital play
business organized, as part of Empire, in a "global hierarchy of
production." [9]
What enables
publishers to extract extreme hours is not only internalization of
responsibility, but the threat of outsourcing. The global game factory,
no longer constrained to a 'core,' comprises an increasingly
distributed meshwork of satellite offices, subsidiary studios and
contracted out work. A design team conceives a new game sipping
espresso on the mountain vista patios of EA's Vancouver studio, then
sends elements of the game's design to a World-Bank-funded company,
Glass Egg, in Ho Chi Min City, where programmers earn about $4000
annually, rather than $60,000 in Canada; Lyon-based Infogrames (current
owner of Atari), negotiating the game rights to Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible,
dispatches the graphics work on NPC's to Dhruva, a Bangalore studio,
paying a fraction of North American rates, shrewdly cushioning itself
(but not its Indian workers) when the deal turns sour.
Labour in such
peripheral studios is far closer to the all-too material processes
indispensable to the game factory, though far less glamorous, and less
visible, than studio work. The abyssal depths of this ladder were
glimpsed in the coltan scandal of 2000. Prices for columbite tantalite,
a rare mineral vital for cell phones, computers and game consoles were
driven to extreme heights by the launch of the PS2, setting off a
frenzy of resource grabs on the open pit, child-labour mines of the
Eastern Congo by the armies fighting Central Africa's ongoing
multi-million death war. But the low-cost, no-care human infrastructure
of the play industry has many other rungs: maquiladora plants
where hand-helds are made up by nimble-fingered female labor; the
regimented electronics assembly lines of South China from which Xbox
360s and PS3's pour; and the toxic e-waste sites of Nigeria and Delhi,
where the products of Sony and Nintendo are amongst the most noxious
disassembled by subsistence-wage scavengers.
Perhaps the best single demonstration of the game factory's stratified planetary space is, however, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft (WoW).
Of the 11.5 million participants of its virtual continent of Azeroth,
about 25% play in North America, 20% in Europe and some 55% in Asia,
mostly from Chinese cybercafés. [10] WoW
was brought to Beijing and Shanghai by the partnership of its US
developer, Blizzard, with Chinese game company The9, at once a
neo-colonial penetration and a boost to China's own MMO (Massive Online
Game) industry. Where Empire's inequities transform WoW, however, is via virtual trading. A "ludocapitalism" [11]
by which virtual goods or skills exchange for real currencies generates
an interdependence between North American players and as many as half a
million planetary poor country "gold farmers," the majority probably in
China, for whom looting monsters round the clock is an alternative to
labour on the strike-swept assembly lines of the Pearl River cranking
out the very computers on which WoW is played world-wide. Such migrant avatar-service work [12]
at once sustains the gaming habit of time-stressed North Americans,
incurs their racist antipathy for "ruining the game", and is repressed
by Blizzard to control the property rights to its game world. It thus
typifies the bipolarity of "Chimerica," [13]
the current US-China axis of Empire, virtually replicating a relation
where one side is all play, the other all work. Such are the
biopolitical forces mobilized in the global game factory.
To situate
games in Empire we must, however, discuss not only their political
economy but also the psycho-cultural valences. If virtual games are
implicated in armored globalization, how do they support, or subvert,
the subjectivities such a regime requires? And how can we answer this
question without resorting to notions of hypodermic "media effects" or
at assuming the success of every ideological interpellation? In a
spirit of radical empiricism, we look at the articulation of virtual
and actual practices. That is, we identify concrete linkages between
in-game and real-life activity, examining how virtual play is connected
to and articulated with other institutions, sites and practices,
plugged in to barracks and battle spaces, work cubicles and call
centers, investment banks and stock exchanges to form new
virtual-actual assemblages. Here, we'll quickly examine three nodes in
this imperial gamespace--war, work and finance.
The obvious,
original bond of virtual games with imperial actualities is military.
All the many claimants of the title "inventors of the videogame" --
William Higginbotham, who made a simple tennis game on an analogue
computer in 1958; Steve Russell, who created Spacewar in 1961;
Ralph Baer, who in 1966 devised the TV-connected game console; or Nolan
Bushnell, who founded Atari, the first commercial game company, in
1972--were directly or indirectly employees of the US
military-industrial complex. Game-like simulations were integral to the
"closed world" of Cold War computing, a means of thinking the
unthinkable--thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union--and fighting not
so unthinkable hot wars such as Vietnam. [14]
When Russell and the scientist-students of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club created Spacewar
just for fun, they seemed to liberate computer simulation from this
deadly instrumentality into a joyful world of pure play. But the
get-away was far from clean. As the commercial game industry
commodified hacker invention, it retained close links to the US
military, borrowing technologies such as sideways scrolling display
initially invented for anti-terrorist urban sims, and feeding back
devices such as the tank-crew trainer based on Atari's Battlezone.
By the end of the Cold War, commercial games had advanced to become
superior to the Pentagon's in-house simulations; a briefly frugal
military began to adapt them for training purposes (e.g. Marine Doom)
and contract out work to private-sector studios. The so-called
"Nintendo War"--the smart-weapon, video-bomb-sight slaughter in Kuwait
in 1992--made visible how closely together an informatic Revolution in
Military Affairs had brought the screens of play and war. [15]
9/11 put this
symbiosis on steroids. While commercial game developers rushed to
capitalize on market opportunities created by the invasion of
Afghanistan and Iraq, funds poured into co-designed military-civilian
simulations for the War on Terror. Developers able to cite
collaboration with the military gave their products the cachet of
authenticity that console-warriors craved, while military trainers
capitalized on new generation of recruits familiarity with the Xbox and
PS2. Gaming became the keystone of what James Der Derian terms
"MIMENET"--the "Military Industrial Media Entertainment Network." [16] Today, a manifest continuum connects entertaining anti-terrorist games such as the Xbox Live hit, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, current affairs game, like Kuma War,
whose subscribers re-live recent war events as "playable missions"; the
US Defense Department's multiplayer online shooter--recruiter, America's Army, now entering its third incarnation; civilian-military co-productions such as urban warfare sim Full Spectrum Warrior; released as both commercial game and infantry trainer; and a new generation of therapeutic simulators, such as Virtual Iraq, used in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder for those returning from the actual battlefield.
For a more
futuristic example of how virtual games spawn in and out of imperial
battlespace, we can, however, take DARPA's recently announced "Deep
Green" project. Deep Green is not an ecological conversion, but a khaki
super-computer, intended to generate automatic combat plans for
military field commanders. It has several interlocking components:
"Sketch to Plan" reads a commander's doodles, listens to his words, and
then "accurately induces" a plan, "fill[ing] in missing details."
"Sketch to Decide" allows him or her to "see the future" by producing a
"comic strip" of possible options; "Blitzkrieg" quickly model
alternatives, while "Crystal Ball" figures out which scenarios are most
likely, and which plans optimal. [17]
Skeptics say Deep Green will never work; but even as a multi-million
dollar boondoggle, it will generate innumerable spin-offs for the game
industry. If it succeeds, future wars in Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela or
Kazakhstan will be truly plug-and-play, separated only by a few orders
of computing power from a commercial war game such as the recent Tom
Clancy-scripted Endwar in which Xbox players give voice-commands to armored, air and infantry units deployed in global combat theatres.
Our argument, need we say, is not that "games make you kill," in the sense asserted in moral panics about the play of Doom or Grand Theft Auto.
It is that digital games are systemically incorporated in the
war-fighting apparatus of Empire, in ways that render developers and
players material partners in military technoculture, and Defense
Departments' systemic cullers of gamer subjectivities: this is what
makes virtual play integral to "banal war," the normalized state of
perpetual conflict Empire's global control demands. [18]
Computerized
war is, however, only one aspect of a broader process of virtualization
vital to Empire--the shift from Fordist industrial work to the
post-Fordist computer-mediated organization of labour crucial for
capital's globalization. Gaming's rise from the 1970s to the present
was part of this process, unlimited play that paradoxically apprenticed
generations to a regime of measureless work. At first, virtual games
were on the side of leisure, hedonism, and irresponsibility against
clock-punching, discipline, and productivity, appearing in dubious
masculine refuges from toil, bars and arcades, and then, as the console
entered the home, as machines for children and adolescents, devices on
the border between innocence and delinquency. Game playing on the job
was subversion, a refusal of work. Then a strange reversal occurred. As
the US military followed the tracks of its runaway virtual slave and
re-captured it, other state sectors, from city planners to air traffic
control, explored the possibilities of simulation. In the 1990s,
corporate capital latched onto games as a technology for training an
increasingly digitized labour force. By the turn of the century this
activity had become an industry in itself, and a major focus of an
emergent Serious Games movement; the market for corporate "e-learning"
was estimated at $10.6 billion. [19]
In this virtual
apparatus for the subject-formation of post-Fordist labour, game-like
simulations are integrated with electronic hiring tools, psychometric
personality tests and cognitive skills measures. To competitively
select management candidates from around the world, fashion giant
L'Oréal uses an online simulation linked to a TV game show in which
players invest in R&D, plan marketing and look for ways to cut
production costs. [20]
Canon has repairmen dragging and dropping parts into virtual copiers--a
light flashes and a buzzer sounds if they get it wrong. Cisco prepares
its teams for on-call crisis management by gaming repair of a network
in a virtual Martian sandstorm. A California ice cream chain has
trainees game scooping cones and perfecting portion control against the
clock; "It's so much fun," says one manager, "I e-mailed it to everyone
at work." Games engage the affective dimensions of labor too. Minerva
Software (formerly Cyberlore) is making service workers empathetic, in
a virtual store complete with point-of-purchase display, where they
cultivate sale skills; the basis of this simulation is Cyberlore's
earlier game Playboy Mansion, in which players had to "persuade" models in a lavish Hugh Hefner-esque pad to pose topless. [21]
Yet more
complete subsumption of games by work is offered by schemes such as
Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, which create an on-line, on-demand
precarious workforce for tasks such as transcribing podcasts and
labeling photos, processed on a piece-rate basis "in lieu of watching
TV or fooling around on MySpace" [22] -- or, playing games. In the so-called ESP Game
a player, gaming with either a human or AI, strives to agree on words
that match images within a set period of time to optimize search
engines indexing on-line pictorial content. [23]
Meanwhile, Stanford University spin-off, Seriosity promises to "steal
sensibilities from games and virtual worlds and embed them into
business." Observing people in MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies
"spend countless hours carefully doing what looks like a job" not only
battling Empire troops but also "building pharmaceutical manufacturing
operations and serving as medics" the company is testing the
possibility of "having players view real medical scans inside the game
to find signs of cancer" which, it says, "gamers could do as well as an
actual pathologist." [22]
The current corporate enthusiasm for virtual play extends, however, beyond training simulations and serious games. It is all games
-- silly games, time-wasting games, fantastic orc-slaying and
alien-blasting games--that are seen as beneficial for the bottom line.
As Steven Poole recently observed, whether playing an elf or a gangsta,
many videogames follow the "employment paradigm" of career progression,
asset management and monetary accumulation. [24] Now hipster management theorists, [25]
drawing on serious cognitive studies of gameplay, argue that the
content of games, be it car-jacking or dragon-slaying, is merely the
occasion for intensive skill acquisition in multi-tasking, flexible
role play, risk evaluation, persistence in the face of set backs,
inventive problem solving, and on the fly decision making--all, of
course, precisely what corporate employers claim to want. Now a
high-score at Space Giraffe is de rigueur for the up-and
coming careerist. Games have turned their coat, transforming from
workplace saboteur to the perfect managerial snitch for an imperial
production machine, flexibilized and redistributed to a global
cyber-precariat across networks running 24/7 around the planet. Virtual play rose not only out of the era of information war and immaterial work, but also the casino economy. In his Empire of Indifference Randy Martin links the informatic risk management strategies of war and finance capital. [26]
Video games are part of this conjugation. Their Golden Age was the time
not only of Reagan's first strike nuclear options, but of deregulated
banking, junk bonds, debt escalation and stock market populism. Making
a financial play is a perennial theme of early video and computer
games: Wall Street Kid, Inside Trader, Wall Street Raider, Speculator: The Futures Market Game, and Black Monday
all gamed actual investment practices that were themselves becoming
virtualized as global money circulated in networks second in
sophistication only to the Pentagon's. On one side, these games blend
seamlessly with software tools abetting the "financialization of daily
life" [27]: as Atari created its hits it also made "Bond Analysis" and "Stock Charting." [28]
On the other flank, these trading games form a continuum with the
commercial empire-building "Tycoon" play genre; with the world of The Sims,
where consumption proceeds divorced from work in the perfect virtual
parable for the invested classes of long-boom America; and with the
fully monetized economies of MMOs built around the fictive capital of
digital platinum, gold and Linden Dollars. It is, we suggest, no
coincide that in the early twenty-first century "virtual trading" means
both on-line stock market speculation and the buying and selling of
digital game goods. Meanwhile
finance capital, ramping through the dot-com spree, the Internet
bubble, and on to the great housing splurge, was, like the military,
hot on games. In 1997 a junior trader training in the game-like
simulator of a German finance house posted 130,000 bond futures
on-line, believing the sale was just an exercise. But the play was for
real. He had "pressed the wrong button," creating a financial Ender's Game scenario; his firm took a loss of some $16 million. The stockbroker Ameritrade created Darwin: Survival of the Fittest,
a game distributed free to teach customers online trading just in time
for the 2001 crash. Undeterred, by 2004 trading houses working rapid
market fluctuations "easily missed on a bank of computer screens filled
with fast moving explicitly" said "'it is unlikely that we would hire
someone who didn't show good proficiency at a Game Boy or online poker
or similar video-type game.'" [29]
On the brink of their great fall, the "quants" on Wall Street were
using video game graphics processing units to speed options analytics
and other math-intensive applications necessary for derivatives and
mortgage-backed securities. [30]
They also prepared the future subjects of financialization. In 2008, at the moment of the crash, the annual cycle of The Stock Market Game was
beginning in North American schools. The game, sponsored by Wall
Street's largest trade group, the Securities Industry and Financial
Markets Association, provides a "curriculum" for a "scholastic contest"
in which players get "a hypothetical $100,000 to invest in stocks,
bonds or mutual funds," and access to a computer system that executes
the simulated trades, ranking teams for "bull and bear trophies." As
the Dow Jones hit the worst week in its history, some 700,000 players
from grades four through twelve tried to pick winners, time the market,
and sell short. Two of the game's national sponsors, Merrill Lynch and
Wachovia, were annihilated in the financial firestorm. They had bet
virtual play would "prime the next generation of customers". Some
students learned a different lesson; a thirteen year old confessed:
"Before all this, I asked my mom to get me stocks for Christmas," but
after experiencing the carnage of The Stock Market Game "told her not to do it" and "asked for a parakeet instead." [31] Millions who didn't go for the bird lost to a ludocapitalism that apparently can't find "Resume Game."
Do Mario and
Princess Toadstool still have a chance for liberation from banal war,
endless work and monetized life? We approach this possibility through
Hardt and Negri's concept of "multitude," a term we think conveys,
better than any alternative their many critics can offer, the positive
component of complex contemporary movements against capital. [32]
Appearing in the turn of the century anti-globalization protests, this
"movement of movements" only a few years ago seemed decisively defeated
by the shock and awe of neoliberal war on terror. But today economic
crisis, deepening ecological catastrophe and military quagmires
vindicates its activism and analysis, which were revived in however
refracted, reformist mode in the global support for the Obama election
campaign. Even as this present crisis incubates nationalism, racism,
retro-fascism and ultra-militarism, it also makes new radical openings
to exit Empire. There is no blueprint for this process; many would say
it defies schematic planning. But there are multiplying, thoughtful
sketches of what a post-capitalist society might look like; less free
market, more decentralized, democratic public planning; less
commodification, more commons; less wage labour, more self-management,
less precarity, more universal provision of basic life-needs. Virtual
play's production of subjectivities for Empire is easy to see: are
there also Games of Multitude?
Such potential
exists because Empire is a contradictory system, cultivating the very
creative, cooperative capacities it must repress and contain, not least
of which is the innovation power of immaterial labour. Gamers are
amongst the most eager of this sorcerer's apprentices. As we saw, games
originated in the excess playfulness of military science workers. As
this hacker innovation was captured by the game factory, it has
continued to generate surplus know-how that escapes complete capture in
the commodity form. Ever more sophisticated game editing tools, the
rise of modding and machinima, flash authorship, and MMO
participation have all generated within virtual play culture a powerful
drive towards user-generated content created in an intensely
collaborative and networked milieus. Some commentators see such
"autoludic" activity as automatically empowering and democratizing. [33] We, however, insist on what Paolo Virno terms "the ambivalence of the multitude." [34]
Radical analysis post-2001 can no longer just applaud so-called
"indymedia." Rather it must recognize conditions of "immaterial civil
war" [35]
in which Web 2.0 applications, social software, the blogosphere and
virtual games are both the terrain and the prize of a pitched battle,
fought across a medley of devices and platforms, between two sides of
the multitude's collective subjectivity: creative dissidence and
profitable compliance. The turn to
user-generated content stands in an equivocal relation to corporate
control. It arises in part from digital capital's drive to cut costs,
exploit a knowledgeable fan-base, and make modders, MMO players, PSP
home-brewers and Xbox DNA developers into farm teams of unpaid
"playbour." [36]
But it also, simultaneously, effects a devolutionary socialization of
the means of production, generating conflicts between gamers and game
capital and lines of flight from imperial themes and practices. Games
and gamers do get out of the control of their corporate-military
sponsors, and although many of these departures are recouped by game
capital, and others are black holes of pointless or destructive energy,
all persuade us that it isn't quite "game over" yet. So now we look at
three assemblages of games and multitude, around piracy, protest and
planning.
Piracy is as
widespread in games as in music and films. Nothing better illustrates
the virtual dilemmas of Empire than the attempt by EA (reminiscent of
the "terminator seed" exploits of Monsanto) to shackle Spore,
Will Wright's game of do-it-yourself species-being development, with
draconian DRM measures--attempts sabotaged by a gamer multitude that
downloaded the games via file sharing networks more than 171,000 times
within days of its release. In much of Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin
America game piracy rates run, by an admittedly dubious corporate
calculus, as high as 80-90%. It affects PC games most, but consoles are
far from immune. The game factory wages war on piracy by technological,
judicial and police measures, ostensibly targeting big criminal
software bootleggers. Industrial-scale game piracy is a reality, part
of the transnational crime networks that are the shadow of neoliberal
globalism. Nonetheless, the game industry crusade occludes many of the
complexities, and all the politics, of piracy. We call
attention to just four points. First, not all piracy is for profit:
much involves gamer cultures of swapping, sharing and "warez"
accomplishment that are specifically anti-commercial. Second, piracy is
the only way many people in, say, Brazil or the Philippines, or Egypt
can afford games. [37]
Third, virtual piracy is (alongside the smuggling of drugs, guns,
exotic animals and maritime piracy) just one of the many avenues by
which immiserated planetary populations make a de facto
redistribution of wealth away from the bloated centers of consumer
capital. Fourth, mass levels of piracy around the planet indicate a
widespread perception that commodified digital culture imposes
artificial scarcity on a technology capable of near costless cultural
reproduction and circulation. These points
suggest digital piracy is a classic example of the criminalized social
struggles that have always accompanied enclosures of common resources,
responding in this case not to capital's "primitive accumulation" of
land enclosures, but to its "futuristic accumulation" fencing-in
digital resources. Though we sympathize with small game developers
whose livelihood PC piracy threatens, we also agree with James Boyle's
suggestion that corporate efforts to control digital copying are
analogous to feudal lords and clerics contemplating tithe-rates for
industrial threshing machines. [38]
While the overt politics of game piracy range from anti-imperialism to
the nihilism, the practice is a clandestine front of struggles whose
liberal wing is "creative commons," and whose longer-range versions
envisage new forms of open-sourced culture and public support for
digital creation. Ongoing conflict over Intellectual Property Rights
and Digital Rights Management in games is symptomatic of a bona fide
contradiction between relations and forces of production, an antagonism
of progressive technological capacities to the reactionary property
rights into which they are forced. A new culture,
however, does not just copy, but creates. The diffusion of game-making
know-how and easy-to-use authoring tools has allowed activists, artists
and dissident game designers to produce games that challenge virtual
play's alignment with Empire. Feminist gamers such as Anne-Marie
Schleiner were pioneers, hacking new skins and pacifist interventions
to challenge the sexism and militarism of the game factory. Since 2001,
however, radical game-creations have proliferated. These include ludic
anti-war protests, like Gonzalo Frasca's September 12, showing the inevitability of "collateral damage," and the famous flash game Gulf War 2 which, six months before the invasion of Iraq, predicted the consequent chaos; projects linked to migrant struggles, such as Escape from Woomera, a prototype mod exposing Australian detention camps, and The French Democracy, using machinima to replay Paris riots from the banlieusard side;
O.U.T., "a live action wireless gaming urban intervention" in street
demonstrations against the 2004 Republican New York convention; and
even game cartographies of Empire itself in the work of Eastwood Real
Time Strategy Group, whose Civilization IV: Age of Empire
includes on its map "the military-entertainment complex," "immaterial
labor," the "net economy," "surveillance mechanisms," and
"governmentality."
For a
sustained instance of game-multitude assemblage we should, however,
look at Molleindustria, a Milanese collective of media activists and
self-described "videogame detractors" who in 2004 emerged from a milieu
crosscut by prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's monopolization of
Italy's communication system, and the activist digital media of the
counter-globalization movement. With a slogan, "Radical games against
the dictatorship of entertainment," operating out of a social centre
self-managed by and for activists, Molleindustria has a catalogue of
small but hilariously effective web-based games sardonically addressing
Empire's crimes and misdemeanors: Tubo-Flex, gaming the predicament of the post-Fordist precariat, part of the media promotion of EuroMayDay Parades; The McDonalds Game, satirizing the labour, nutritional and environmental consequences of fast-food empires; The Free Culture Game ("a playable theory") liberating digital resources from corporate capture; and, most recently, Oligarchy,
making the player CEO of a petro-corporation: "explore and drill around
the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase
the oil addiction. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to
deplete." [39] Perhaps a Molleindustria financial crisis game -- Bailout? -- is in the works.
Such tactical
games, with characteristic stripped-down graphics and rudimentary
production values, teeter between brilliant ludic alienation-effects
and blunt didacticism. But, as Alexander Galloway observes, such
"counter gaming" is about more than overlaying alternative imagery in
established genre conventions; building "radical action" in game
culture requires the creation of "alternative algorithms." [40]
Or, as Molleindustria says: "We often claim that it is important for us
not to produce games to entertain radical people, but (to make) radical
games." [41]
Is it possible
to go beyond agitprop games of virtual protest to games of exodus that
actively help constitute a society beyond Empire? All game development
is about designing alternative worlds, all game play about learning
what can be done in these worlds. "Another world is possible" is thus a
gamer slogan. Twenty years ago Bill Nichols in his study of "the work
of culture in an age of cybernetic reproduction," suggested video games
could be emancipatory because they made the player engage with
"systemic principles" of world design, inciting a glimpse of "the
relativism of social order." [42]
Since then, moreover, this world-building has become collectivized in
MMOs and virtual social spaces coevolved between initial programming
parameters and the activities of player populations numbered in
millions. Given the imbrication of virtual play in actual Empire, it is
no surprise the dynamics of these worlds frequently merely replicates
and amplifies political economic premises of the world market: the
basic formulae for MMOs, however fantastic their setting, is
accumulation backed by force. Nonetheless the creation of such communal
virtual laboratories allows social experiment simulating worlds with
different rules. For example, agoraXchange is
an alternative MMO project devised by political theorist Jacqueline
Stevens and game artist Natalie Bookchin. This is a virtual world
clearly influenced by the new wave of writing about "life after
capitalism." Inheritance of personal wealth, as a mechanism sustaining
class privileges over time, has been abolished; it will be redirected
to international institution whose mandate is global redistribution to
ensure basic human needs for resources like clean water are met.
Borders have been opened to the flow of people, not just commodities.
Private property has gone, too. Land will be in the trust of the state,
leased to individuals and businesses. This is artist-activist
collaboration in advance of the recent claim by an eminent computer
scientist in the journal Science that online games enable
large-scale studies of alternative governmental regimes, including
explorations of "how individuals can be induced to cooperate in
producing public goods." [43]
It may,
moreover, be feasible to link such simulations to new political
institutions. Many radical activists agree that a global-commons
alternative to the world market requires processes of participatory
planning and democratized economic decision making. Game-like virtual
worlds can be part of such processes. In 2008, The Institute of the
Future launched Superstruct, the "first massively multiplayer
forecast game." Set in the year 2019, it postulates that a Global
Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has forecast human self-destruction
by the year 2042 as the result of five simultaneous "super-threats":
Quarantine, a result of "declining health and pandemic disease";
Ravenous, the global collapse of the world food system; Power Struggle,
"as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for
alternative energy solutions"; Outlaw Planet, covering increased
surveillance and loss of liberties; and Generation Exile, which a "
massive increase in refugees." [44]
The aim is for players to collaborate, communicating not only in-game,
but across email, blogs and social networks, to devise solutions to
these problems. We don't necessarily hold any brief for the answers Superstruct
comes up with--as we've already indicated, the global demographics of
game play promises plenty of scope for class bias. But the basic point
remains: if the Pentagon and Wall Street can use virtual worlds to plan
the Empire, why should not communards use them to think through their
escape routes? Academic
writing on virtual games often alludes to the "magic circle" of play
proposed by the conservative medieval historian, Johan Huizinga, who in
his famous Homo Ludens wrote of games as an "autotelic"
activity, engaged in for their own sake, segregated in space and time
from the hurly-burly of everyday life. [45]
Such accounts set play well apart from the turmoils of global markets,
preemptive militarism and street protest. Yet Huizinga himself, writing
in the shadows of a recently concluded World War I and of the
approaching European fascism that eventually took his life, was well
aware of what Ian Bogost describes as "a gap in the magic circle," an
inescapable relation between "magic circle" and "material power." [46] This recognition, subtly present in Homo Ludens, is paramount in Huizinga's less well-known study of decaying feudal order, The Autumn of the Middle Ages,
where he shows how jousts and tournaments cultivated the skills of
chivalric elite, whose supremacy his account, despite its romanticism,
unmistakably reveals as based in military barbarism and armed
expropriation. The medieval "magic circle" of play, with all its visual
pageantry and elaborate rules, is firmly set in the context of
declining empires convulsively gripped by plague, war, emptying
treasuries and peasant revolt, with the game-theoretician's eye
"trained on the depth of an evening sky, a sky steeped blood red,
desolate with threatening leaden clouds, full of the false glow of
copper." [47] It is such a light that we examine virtual games in today's age of Empire.
"Gamers against
Empire" is, we acknowledge, an optimistic concluding slogan to this
somber examination, and an apparently unlikely one--but not, perhaps,
as implausible as it may first seem. We ask of digital play what Félix
Guattari asked of collective humanity: "how can it find a compass by
which to reorient itself?" His response, by "remaking social
practices," was grounded in a reading of transformations already
underway. To speak of games of multitude is to assert that the
possibilities of virtual play exceed its imperial manifestations, and
the desires of many gamers surpass marketers' caricatures of them.
Games of multitude are, in Guattari's conceptual terms, a "molecular
revolution" involving "the effort to not miss anything that could help
rebuild a new kind of struggle, a new kind of society." Not missing
anything includes virtual games. "Strange contraptions, you will tell
me, these machines of virtuality, these blocks of mutant percepts and
affects, half-object, half-subject," Guattari mused, perhaps, who
knows?, contemplating a video game console--yet potentially, he
insisted, such "strange contraptions" were "crucial instrument[s]" to
"generate other ways of perceiving the world, a new face on things, and
even a different turn of events." [48]
Notes
-------------------
This essay draws on our Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming in 2009.
[1] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire, Cambridge: Harvard, 2000, p. 413.
[2] See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II, London: Continuum, 2002.
[3] For contending views on the relation of the technological and ontological virtual, see Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, New York: Plenum, 1998, and Brian Massumi, Parables For the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University, 2002.
[4] Brian Holmes. "The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique," https://www.geocities.com/CognitiveCapitalism/holmes1.html, 2002. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[5] GI: Game Industry Biz, "Industry revenue $57 billion in 2009, says DFC" https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/industry-revenue-57-billion-in-2009-says-dfc, 2008. Accessed May 13, 2009. UNESCO Press Release. "Education for All," https://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=41371&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html, 2007. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[6] Pew Internet & American Life Project. Teens, Video Games and Civics. https://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Teens-Video-Games-and-Civics.aspx, 2008. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[7] Nicholas Carr, "Avatars Consume as Much Electricity as Brazilians." https://www.roughtype.com, 2006, accessed May 13, 2009; Julian Bleeker, "When 1st Life Meets 2nd Life: The 1685 Pound Avatar and the 99 Ton Acre," https://interactive.usc.edu/members/jbleecker/archives/007420.html, 2007. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[8] Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 289-294.
[9] Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 288.
[10] Gamasutra. "World of Warcraft Reaches 11.5 Million Subscribers Worldwide," https://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21654, 2008. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[11] Julian Dibbell. Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Struck It Rich in Virtual Loot Farming. New York: Perseus, 2006.
[12] See Nick Yee, "Yi-Shan-Guan," https://www.nickyee.com/, 2006. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[13] Niall Fergusson and Moritz Schularick. "'Chimerica' and the Global Asset Market Boom", International Finance, December 2007. p. 1.
[14] Paul Edwards. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT, 1997.
[15] See Ed Halter. From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games, New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2006.
[16] James Der Derian. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media Entertainment Network. Boulder: Westview, 2001.
[17] Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA). "BAA 07-56 Deep Green Broad Agency Announcement (BAA)," 2007, p. 3.
[18] Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 12.
[19] David Michael and Sande Chen. Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform. Boston: Course Technology, 2006, p. 146.
[20] Marjo Johne. "Prize for Playing the Game: A Career." The Globe and Mail, 26 April, 2006.
[21] Reena Jana. "On-The-Job Video Gaming," Business Week, https://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977062.htm, 2006. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[22] Robert Hof. "The End of Work as You Know It," Business Week, https://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047426.htm, 2007. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[23] Gwap.. "About Gwap." Gwap web site. https://www.gwap.com/gwap/about/, 2008. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[24] Steven Poole. "Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames," https://stevenpoole.net/trigger-happy/working-for-the-man/, 2008. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[25] John C. Beck and Wade Mitchell. Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. Boston: Harvard Business School, 2004.
[26] Randy Martin. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham: Duke University, 2007.
[27] Randy Martin. The Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University, 2002.
[28] See Eric Kaltman."Financial Woes" https://www.stanford.edu/group/htgg/cgi-bin/drupal/?q=node/377, 2008. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[29] Logan, Tracey. "Gaming Helps Traders Score Big-Time," https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3723922.stm, 2004. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[30] Ivy Schmerken. "Trading Desks Turn to Video Game Technology to Speed Analytics," https://www.wallstreetandtech.com/data-management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208700219&pgno=3, 2008. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[31] Jennifer Levitz. "Playing the Market, these Kids are Losing a Lot of Play Money," https://online.wsj.com/article/SB122523644863577999.html, 2008. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[32] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin, 2004.
[33] Celia Pearce. "Productive Play: Game Culture From the Bottom Up," Games and Culture 1: 1, 2006, p. 19.
[34] Paolo Virno. Ambivalencia de la multitud: entre la innovacion y la negativdad. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2006.
[35] Matteo Pasquinelli. "Immaterial Civil War: Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism," https://www.rekombinant.org/ImmCivilWar.pdf, 2006. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[36] Julian Kücklich. "Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry," https://journal.fibreculture.org/, 2005. Accessed May 13, 2009.
[37] See Pedro Franco, "A Nation of Pirates," and Ryan Sumo, "Piracy and the Underground Economy," both in The Escapist, February, 2009, and October 2008.
[38] James Boyle. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard, 1996.
Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism
Global Game Factory
Empire Plays
Banal War
Measureless Work
Financialized Life
Games of Multitude?
Pirate Games
Protest Games
Planning Games
Conclusion: Magic Circles, Strange Contraptions
