Games People Play

[luka]

It's interesting now I think about it how much people use "game" to refer to things that are anything but leisurely and ludic - like "rap game hard but the dope game easy" or Omar in The Wire - "it's all in the game, yo." Emphasising your cool, nihilistic detachment, like the drugs money and death don't mean anything to you.

it allows you to cut off the acts from their larger ethical and emotional ramifications. eg you are the Sacklers and you are flooding the world with opiates

 

[luka]

in song cry on one level jay-z is pretending to show remorse for the bad things he did to get to the top but really it is a boast and also a manual for getting ahead. you have to decondition yourself from 'normal' human sentiment and loyalites. this is why so many leaders have sacrrificed their first born eg gordon brown

 

[luka]

i suppose being fixated on success leads people to conceptualise life or aspects of life (love, career, social climbing etc) as a game

 

[WashYourHands]

i suppose you could read barry lyndon has a cautionary tale about trying to beat the house. or about a gamblers luck always running dry
at the end. or indeed about the pitfalls and shortcomings of treating life as a game (one with prizes)

also, Barry’s war service curses and compromises everything that follows for him, or as the Dubs put it

Hark a marshall sound is heard
The march of soldiers fife and drumming
Eyes are start and hearts are stood
For bold recruits the brave are coming
Ribbons flaunting feathers gay
The sound and sights are surely thrilling
Dazzle village youths the day
Who're proud to take the Saxon Shilling
Peace of spirits will not bow
And peace to parish tyrants longer
Ye who wear the villian brow
And ye who pine and hope asunder
Fools without the brave man's face
Are slaves and starving who are willing
To sell themselves to shame and death
Except the fabled Saxon Shilling
Go to find the crime and toil
That doom to which such guilt is hurried
Go to leave on Indian soil your bones
To breach accursed and buried
Go to crush the just and brave
Whose wrongs with wrath the world are filling
Go to slay each by the slave or
Spurn the blasted Saxon Shilling
Irish hearts why should you bleed
To swell the tide of British glory
Aiding their spots in their needs
Whose chains are green so often gory
None say those who wish to see
The noblest killed the meanest killing
And the true hearts of the risen free
Will take again the Saxon Shilling
Irish youths reserve your strength
Until an hour of glorious duty
When freedom smile shall cheer at length
The land of bravery and beauty
Bribes and threats so heed no more
Let not but justice make you willing
To leave your own dear Ireland shore
For those to send as Saxon Shilling

My favourite scene is Leonard Rossiter‘s comedy dance, the rituals of courting as another form of gaming

 

[luka]

There was an interesting-sounding essay on video game addiction I recently came across, which I should read. Anyway, these trends of ever more effective incentive capture, seem to fuel the addictivity.

For this reason, the most popular games today do not contain, at their heart, “fun.” What they most resemble, what they seem to dream about, is twenty-first-century work.




“Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work,” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer declared in 1944. The mechanization of labor, the Frankfurt theorists thought, had so enmeshed itself with human “leisure and happiness” and so “profoundly” determined the “manufacture of amusement goods” that entertaining diversions were “inevitably after-images of the work process itself.” Following this lead, game theorist Steven Poole observed in 2008 that modern video games “seem to aspire to a mimesis of the mechanized work process.” We learn—or are disciplined by—the game’s rules and receive positive feedback for following them efficiently. “You didn’t play the game,” Poole writes, much less “beat” it. Rather, “you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour.”


Single-player games with plenty of weapons to upgrade, skills to gain, and currencies to spend are perhaps the archetypal iteration of this phenomenon, but almost all contemporary games contain some mimetic elements of work and market exchange. They don’t offer fantasies of escape, of imaginative play for its own sake; they offer a fantasy of rules—a rationality otherwise missing from the contemporary wage labor process. Vicky Osterweil has called this type of game a “utopian work simulator”; it doles out rewards at predictable intervals in exchange for our disciplined effort. These rewards can make the game easier, allow us to purchase in-game adornments, signal our achievements to others, and progress in a logical and satisfying trajectory toward an achievable goal. Games remain a form of diversion, but what they divert us from is not our labor, but our disappointment with its volatility, its arbitrariness, its cruelty and unfairness.


In its most acute form, journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio writes, workers use “video games to perform the ghosts of [their] daily labors.” A long-haul trucker spends his week off grinding in American Truck Simulator; chefs leave their kitchens at midnight to play Cook, Serve, Delicious! before bed. In the game world, unlike our own, D’Anastasio writes, “productivity is quantifiable and discernible.” Games compensate for an absence of control, reliable feedback, clear goals, and fair rewards in our working lives. In this way, games remain a kind of wish fulfillment, one in which the ideological fictions of capitalism are realized. It’s a paltry dream, reconciling us to falsehoods we must otherwise accept.

All Work and No Play - Dissent Magazine

Video games, like any creative product, reflect and refract the conditions of their production. Today, what they most resemble is twenty-first-century work.

www.dissentmagazine.org

 

[Clinamenic]

I would agree with some of those points, but I see right through the dystopian spins on it. This fixation on dystopian outcomes somewhat reminds me of that quote I've seen attributed to Hegel but haven't looked into it, "Evil resides in the eyes of those who see evil everywhere."

One of the reasons I'm opposed to this "cancelled future" standpoint. It seems largely self-fulfilling to me.

Anyway, Minecraft strikes me as an exception, as an experience of more or less pure creation.

 

[Clinamenic]

That kind of dystopianism is comparable to self-pity on a societal scale, with society locking itself into its own dreadful prognosis, in a manner macrocosmic to that of an individual protracting their own depression.

 

[WashYourHands]

Compare to sex workers

I’ve worked with a range of people in vulnerable situations all the way to 1£k an hour lasses. Their ability to work on a punter’s own vulnerabilities never ceases to amaze. How they weigh up john’s weaknesses and body language in seconds, but it always goes wrong

Where does that fit?

 

[luka]

this is something i go back and forth on. critique seems to be the dominant mode of all academic thought and i agree it can seem pathological but at the same time you dont want to end up being a dupe or useful idiot, a cheerleader for the big boss man

 

[WashYourHands]

@Clinamenic How do you empower that type of person?

 

[luka]

i think modern life is bad and getting worse and analysing the ways in which it is bad, why it is bad, and what we might want instead all seem fairly useful tasks

 

[Clinamenic]

I just listened to a professional dominatrix interviewed as a guest on a podcast (loosely) about architecture, and she painted an interesting picture about her line of work and that sort of milieu. It actually seems profoundly healthy in certain respects, provided the parties involved uphold a mutual respect.

 

[WashYourHands]

Is this why/where alcohol is important

 

[WashYourHands]

I just listened to a professional dominatrix interviewed as a guest on a podcast (loosely) about architecture, and she painted an interesting picture about her line of work and that sort of milieu. It actually seems profoundly healthy in certain respects, provided the parties involved uphold a mutual respect.

It varies, a lot

As a drug worker, what’s your take on the opioid epidemic and the US.?

 

[Clinamenic]

i think modern life is bad and getting worse and analysing the ways in which it is bad, why it is bad, and what we might want instead all seem fairly useful tasks

I agree, but how far can we go demanding more fulfilling existences that don't comply with capitalism, without kidding ourselves? It seems like the majority of the academic left is kidding itself. My suggestion is that we reforge a notion of capitalism that takes our values into account, i.e. triple-bottom line, circular economy, "passion economy", constellation of niche content producers, etc.

Granted there are some on the left who already have a financial literacy and a business acumen, but I think their efforts could be substantially aided by the sort of leftist academia that this forum, itself, follows in the wake of.

 

[Clinamenic]

It varies, a lot

As a drug worker, what’s your take on the opioid epidemic and the US.?

I wish I was informed enough to give a real opinion here, but I'm not familiar enough with the industries involved to identify the pain points, or any potential remedies. Don't know about the processes/practices of the FDA, or how the FDA is itself regulated, or what the lobbying looks like, or even how much is public knowledge about such things.

 

[Clinamenic]

That kind of dystopianism is comparable to self-pity on a societal scale, with society locking itself into its own dreadful prognosis, in a manner macrocosmic to that of an individual protracting their own depression.

As much as I respect Fisher, who was the reason I turned up here to begin with, he does seem to be the quintessence of this.

 

[WashYourHands]

Seems the perfect smash and grab raid model by atypical corporate pharma

Slow justice, incompetent govt, complicity, how do you weed out greed? The never enough pathology

 

[luka]

As much as I respect Fisher, who was the reason I turned up here to begin with, he does seem to be the quintessence of this.

very much so. the epitome.

 

[Clinamenic]

My lofty answer is to formulate ethical approaches that speak to financial incentive, rather than ethical approaches that expect other incentives to yield to ethics, however obvious those ethics may be to us.

edit: If social/environmental justice remains financially illiterate, it will continue to be relegated to academia and marginal protesting, as far as I can tell.