This has gone on for too long and I keep forgetting what I was talking about. It’s past time I wrapped it up.
21.
I’ve said it before: ideology doesn’t keep up with reality. Sometimes we’re too set in our ways, and our worldviews too calcified, to make the necessary adjustment when the facts are no longer what they were when we became settled in our convictions. Sometimes the issue is that our language obfuscates the situation, and we fall into dispute and confusion when evolving circumstances imbue a familiar word with an ambiguity or semantic flexibility it lacked even half a century prior. “For the errours of Definitions multiply themselves,” wrote Hobbes, “according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoyd, without reckoning anew from the beginning…”
“Can video games be art?” is a frivolous but fascinating example.
The not- or never-art partisans in the debate granted that something like Ms. Pac-Man was art in the sense that a superhero comic serial, a television ad, or a fashion shoot for Vogue were art. Making any of these things reasonably well requires special technical skills, some measure of talent, and creative vision. But that’s not what anyone having the conversation meant by “art.” The real question was: can video games be high art? Is the medium capable of rising to the empyrean heights attained by Shakespeare, Titian, Tolstoy, Rodin, etc., in their respective media? Or are video games intrinsically playthings, good for an entertaining diversion, but useless as vehicles towards truly sublime aesthetic and intellectual experiences?
It is helpful to understand what the high-culture gatekeepers who dismissed video games really thought they were protecting in the name of art. Even if most of them wouldn’t or couldn’t frame it in terms of pseudo-religious interest, for them a kind of doctrinal or praxic purity was at stake.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, art began assuming certain aspects and functions of religion among a larger and larger share of the educated classes. Though visual art grew secularized in both content and use, the virtuosic painting by a Great Master or a living visionary remained a fetish object, radiating a mysterious power. Taste signified the right recognition of beauty, and the effect of beauty was moral and intellectual cultivation. The poet became a latter-day prophet; “great novels” were vaunted as secular analogues to “wisdom books” like Job and Ecclesiastes, gracefully articulating and confronting the perplexities of the human condition.
Previously, a cult object or inspired text was categorically sacred. A secular aesthete might hold as sacred the poetry of Wordsworth, the paintings of Van Gogh, or the films of Bergman, but the relation of the individual to these objects (and their provenance) participated in a framework in which “sacred” could only have metaphorical meaning. Instead, the great novel or the living master’s painting became autonomous—“separate from the praxis of life.” In a society increasingly governed by utilitarian consideration and bourgeois rationalization, the virtue of art was said to lie in its having no utility. It stood aloof from workaday life; it was beholden not to common opinion, but to its own integrity. The transition went about so naturally that even twenty- and twenty-first-century champions of Art implicitly understand its edifying virtues in terms of its supposed autonomy, often without ever having seen or heard the phrase “autonomous art.”
In Legitimation Crisis, Jurgen Habermas refers to the “autonomy” of art and its use as a surrogate for religion in advanced capitalist societies:
Bourgeois culture as a whole was never able to reproduce itself from itself. It was always dependent on motivationally effective supplementation by traditional world-views. Religion, having retreated into the regions of subjective belief, can no longer satisfy neglected communicative needs, even in conjunction with the secular components of bourgeois ideology (that is, an empiricist or rationalist theory of knowledge, the new physics, and the universal value system of modern natural law and utilitarianism).
“Genuinely bourgeois ideologies” make no provisions for the material, social, and moral lives of their subjects; society is to be envisioned as a coast-to-coast marketplace with the appropriate provisions for protecting capitalists’ property, and all the rest is trivial. People living in states whose organizational logic is predicated upon such a worldview require, as Habermas says, some form of external supplementation:
Only bourgeois art, which has become autonomous in the face of demands for employment extrinsic to art, has taken up positions on behalf of the victims of bourgeois rationalization. Bourgeois art has become the refuge for a satisfaction, even if only virtual, of those needs that have become, as it were, illegal in the material life-process of bourgeois society. I refer here to the desire for a mimetic relation with nature; the need for living together in solidarity outside the group egoism of the immediate family; the longing for the happiness of a communicative experience exempt from imperatives of purposeful rationality and giving scope to imagination as well as spontaneity. Bourgeois art, unlike privatized religion, scientistic philosophy, and strategic-utilitarian morality, did not take on tasks in the economic and political systems. Instead it collected residual needs that could find no satisfaction within the “system of needs.”
In his further remarks on “post-auratic art,” Habermas goes on implying a difference between “avant-garde” and “commercial” art (which is to say “high” and “low” art). It is time we stopped differentiating between them: there is very little in the way of anything like a genuine or effective counterculture an avant-garde can serve today, and mass art has effectively supplanted folk art.
Subversive art, in Habermas’ words, “strengthens the divergence between the values offered by the socio-cultural system and those demanded by the political and economic system”—but when the realization of art’s use-value strengthens the behavioral patterns demanded by the political and economic systems which the art protests, what do those protests really matter?
Video games undoubtedly are art, and without equal in performing those social functions Habermas ascribes to bourgeois art. They don’t just entertain: they provide enchanting simulations of purposeful and constructive behavior. In tandem with the internet, they provide something resembling a community experience. They arouse the imagination and pose satisfying challenges; they’re bullet-train tickets to the celebrated “flow state.” In the moment, the player feels that what they are doing is meaningful, and that their actions matter. To be absorbed in a video game is to experience a supernormal ecstatic cocktail of factitious power, freedom, and optimism of an intensity seldom matched by noninteractive electronic media, and rarely experienced in “real life.”
Of course—what constitutes “real life” in the desert of the real?
22.
It is worth bringing up art here because for our lodestars Huizinga and McLuhan, art and games sprout from the same mysterious taproot in the human character, and followed parallel tracks toward their modern iterations. Homo Ludens abounds with descriptions of sacred games and ritualistic performances in archaic societies. One example:
Passing now from children’s games to the sacred performances in archaic cultures we find that there is more of a mental element “at play” in the latter, though it is excessively difficult to define. The sacred performance is more than an actualization in appearance only, a sham reality; it is also more than a symbolic actualization—it is a mystical one. In it, something invisible and inactual takes beautiful, actual, holy form...It is played or performed within a play-ground that is literally “staked out”, and played moreover as a feast, i.e. in mirth and freedom...But with the end of the play its effect is not lost; rather it continues to shed its radiance on the ordinary world outside, a wholesome influence working security, order, and prosperity for the whole community until the sacred play-season comes round again.
Examples can be found from all over the world. According to ancient Chinese lore the purpose of music and dance is to keep the world in its right course and to force Nature into benevolence towards man. The year’s prosperity will depend on the right performances of sacred contests at the seasonal feasts. If these gatherings do not take place the crops will not ripen.
In Understanding Media, McLuhan gives another example of the ritual game as a cosmic regulator, touches on the role of art in “archaic” festivals, and synopsizes the process by which the dismembered elements of public liturgy came to be enjoyed in private:
Ancient and nonliterate societies naturally regarded games as live dramatic models of the universe or of the outer cosmic drama. The Olympic games were direct enactments of the agon, or struggle of the Sun god. The runners moved around a track adorned with the zodiacal signs in imitation of the daily circuit of the sun chariot. With games and plays that were dramatic enactments of a cosmic struggle, the spectator role was plainly religious. The participation in these rituals kept the cosmos on the right track, as well as providing a booster shot for the tribe. The tribe or the city was a dim replica of that cosmos, as much as were the games, the dances, and the icons. How art became a sort of civilized substitute for magical games and rituals is the story of the detribalization which came with literacy. Art, like games, became a mimetic echo of, and relief from, the old magic of total involvement. As the audience for the magic games and plays became more individualistic, the role of art and ritual shifted from the cosmic to the humanly psychological, as in Greek drama. Even the ritual became more verbal and less mimetic or dancelike. Finally, the verbal narrative from Homer and Ovid became a romantic literary substitute for the corporate liturgy and group participation. Much of the scholarly effort of the past century in many fields has been devoted to a minute reconstruction of the conditions of primitive art and ritual, for it has been felt that this course offers the key to understanding the mind of primitive man. The key to this understanding, however, is also available in our new electric technology that is so swiftly and profoundly recreating the conditions and attitudes of primitive tribal man in ourselves.
The ever-prescient McLuhan somewhat anticipated Baudrillard’s hyperreality in speculating on the effects of the modern world as a museum without walls in “The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment:”
The Balinese say: “We have no art—we do everything as well as possible.” This is not an ironic but merely a factual remark. In a pre-literate society art serves as a means of merging the individual and the environment…Archaic or primitive art looks to us like a magical control built into the environment….we have fashioned for ourselves a world of artefacts and images that are not intended to train perception or awareness but to insist that we merge with them as the primitive man merges with his environment.
“The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and world,” Debord wrote in Society of the Spectacle two years later, arriving by a separate train of reasoning to the same insight McLuhan reached in pondering the effect of living in a museum without walls.
We are not surrounded by art; we are inundated in it. Shall we call it “content” instead? Or “design?” Either would be appropriate. Strictly speaking, a monitor displaying a Starbucks menu and a glamor shot of some goopy iced latte topped with whipped cream and bits of crystallized corn syrup exhibits “art” as much as does a television screen playing the 1953 film version of Julius Caesar, or the ceiling speakers inside of a Sheetz playing the forgotten pop hits of 2006, or a Starry Night canvas tote bag, or an image of Blackpink on a T-shirt, or a Harley Quinn tattoo on a white Millennial woman’s bicep, or the home screen on an Android device. Everything in our world has something to communicate to us—and hexes to work on us.
Insofar as they belong to the general spectacle, we see twenty-first-century games reenacting, after a fashion, their archaic purpose as described by Huizinga and McLuhan above. They help keep the society of advanced capitalism running on track and contribute to preserving its equilibrium. They comprise some of the baling wire and duct tape tenuously holding us together as a culture; they palliate the fear, panic, and malaise of a civilization that has cut its tethers to the past and cares little about continuity, looks to the future without much hope (if it does look to the future), and exists in a present where its members are constantly anxious about missing out, falling behind, securing fewer advantages for themselves, and having less fun than everyone else.
In some respects, there is little need to differentiate video games from Hulu or YouTube, collectible card games from FunkoPops or Labubus, or complicated tabletop games from kayaking, rock climbing, drone photography, or any other pastime requiring an investment in paraphernalia and an abundance of uninterrupted free time. The new kinds of games—as in, games whose names are capitalized and trademarked—are all just product lines in the culture industry, where “something is provided for all so that none may escape,” as Adorno and Horkheimer say. They are things to be purchased and consumed.
What sets them apart is the intensity and depth with which they imbue the spectacle. Video games anticipated the interfaces and mechanisms of social media decades before Facebook was launched, and enthrall players by means which film and television despair to emulate. Collectible card games unite Hermeticism and dramatic competition under a stable and fantastically lucrative pyramid scheme. Sophisticated tabletop games offer moments of collaborative and imaginative release from the electronic spectacle, but in forms that typically emulate involvement in it. The twentieth-century couch potato who narcotized and subjected himself to hypnotic conditioning by watching television for four or five hours after work might occasionally be prone to thinking he might be too idly squandering his free time. Intimations of passivity are rare indeed when playing games, and the brave new world of media synergy and data collection ensures that ads will be flashed in our faces and our future purchases and movements will be determined one way or another.
23.
Two propositions:
I. Everything is games, but nothing is fun
I thought to write something about “gamification” in the spheres of work and consumption—but what is there to say? Anyone who hasn’t huffed paint throughout their formative years has neurons enough to recognize that using digital game mechanics to make employees work harder and shoppers spend more money is manipulative, infantilizing, and depersonalizing, and I’m content to leave it at that.1
Although: if gamification should seep into workplaces and customer/company interfaces, it may spoil the games from which digital training programs, morale boosters, and sales-pushers derive their mechanics. More likely, however, it will accelerate the erosion of “free time” as something distinct and isolated from the hours one labors to create value for some remote and unseen party, and amplify the effects of the “magical controls” that influence our activities in our homes, at work, and everywhere in between. Everything will be numbers go up, EXP to next level bars, quest prompts, promises of bonuses for timely action, and achievements to unlock. I’m not sure “fun” would be the word I’d choose for it—no more than it would be the term I’d use to describe the “Corporate Memphis” aesthetic.
How much more fun are social life and identity since they were gamified? How much did we actually push back against (or even notice) their gamification as it was in progress?
All of the major social media platforms feature point systems and scoreboards. “Playing” them well usually involves something like choosing a class (or specialization), committing oneself to RPG-like grinding by steadily firing out content, jumping on time-sensitive quests (trending topics), finding and availing oneself of allies, getting in fights, etc., all while being operated on by the same dopamine-releasing “numbers go up” reward mechanisms long used by games like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Pokémon, etc. to keep players transfixed. Social media is like a cursed MMORPG whose players cease to exist in real life if they uninstall the game or don’t play it often enough. What happens in the digital public sphere defines social realities (which are in fact matters of perception), and to sit on the sidelines or opt out altogether is to reduce oneself to a supernumerary, an NPC.
Again, spending a year reaching your level cap in Final Fantasy XIV is a sterile endeavor compared to spending a year getting thousands people to follow your Instagram or Twitter or TikTok account. The former makes you a Somebody in a penned-off virtual world; the other makes you into the kind of virtual Somebody for whom real doors may open. Everyone is aware of this, and it contributes to a generalization of the amateur’s inferiority complex which Huizinga addressed with regard to what used to be called “gentleman” players of sports.
What I mean is: how long can the young person with some talent for illustration be content to remain an obscure hobbyist? For how many months or years is it enough that they draw pictures—pretty good pictures—for fun in their free time? When does the accrual of the social validation tokens they earn from sharing their work online (because where else will people see it?) start to promote a sense of dissatisfaction with being a retail worker, Uber driver, or engineer who draws just for the heck of it, when they could make drawing their thing, their social identity, their personal brand? (I’d wager the retail worker and the Uber driver would arrive at that threshold much sooner than the engineer.)
About six years ago, the woman I’d eventually marry began hanging out with a coworker after work. She’d visit that coworker’s home and they’d spend some time in the kitchen, cooking, baking, etc. One day, the coworker floated the idea of starting a kitchen-themed YouTube channel. Yeah, hey, you enjoy cooking, you’re good at it, you have personality, why not? It’d be a fun thing for us to do!
The coronavirus pandemic mooted the idea, and my now-spouse wasn’t entirely sold on it to begin with. But by 2019, was anyone starting a YouTube channel purely for fun, without any expectations, hopes, or desires of growing the thing into a side-hustle? Eventually quitting their day job? Buying a house with ad revenue and sponsorship bucks? Turning the just-for-fun thing into an actually-for-serious thing?
How much time, and how many followers and upvotes are required, before someone who casually posts photos of birds on Instagram starts thinking about spending hundreds of dollars to upgrade their camera, takes weekend trips to places with more birds and more uncommon birds, and commits their account to nothing but bird pics?
Through gamification, social media made possible the real subsumption of even amateur productions and pursuits. It is an incredible development.
Is there a dedicated and talented Magic: The Gathering or Street Fighter or Counter-Strike player who’s never flirted with the idea of, or fantasized about, going pro and bidding farewell to their job at the shop, warehouse, or office? If it becomes a seemingly realizable possibility for them, do you think they have more or less fun playing the game? In the event that they go for it and discover they don’t quite make the grade to compete on the professional circuit, how do they relate to the game afterwards? How serious are they about it? How much fun do they have with it?
Has the internet made classic games like chess and Scrabble more fun or less fun?
What compels somebody to script, record, and edit a 100-minute video essay reviewing, analyzing, and subjecting to a cultural critique a PlayStation 2 game from 2005? What compels tens of thousands of people to watch or listen to it from beginning to end?
I know that’s rich, coming from me—but because of my own history, I have to wonder whether popular games are more or less fun for having been the objects of so much intellectualization. At a certain point, isn’t the fun thing to do after work or school spoiled by excessive critical scrutiny? Is unexamined pleasure a thing of the past?
Ah—but here we come back to Habermas, and to games-as-art’s assumption of cultural functions they were never intended to or really suited for taking on.
It’s such a twenty-first-century mindset, isn’t it—imagining a graph where the X-axis represents intellectualization and the Y-axis represents fun, and wondering where the curve peaks? This is bourgeois rationalism par excellence: the calculated optimization of the pleasure function. We’ve seen this before. We will be seeing more of it.
Rather than rationalism, what our intellectualization of games signifies more clearly is rationalization. Naïve enjoyment having grown practically impossible for the “culturally engaged” after Web 2.0 and the consequent Politicization of All Things and the stagnancy of mass culture, high-intensity, high-commitment, and perhaps not-altogether soul-enriching games must be approached by thoughtful and/or insecure people either with the same detached irony they bring to the workplace, with thought-terminating denial in the form of let me enjoy things, or as something serious—something from which one gets one’s edifying, constructive, empowering, zeitgeist-addressing, virtuosically engineered, politically sophisticated, mind-sharpening, totally invaluable, quantifiably life-improving, seriously fun kicks & yums.
Buy the cards. Roll the dice. Press the button. Share your fun on social media. Join the community. Boost the product. Buy the swag. Represent the lifestyle. Buy the expansion set. Buy the sequel. Unlock the achievements. Follow the creators. Subscribe to the subreddits. Master the lingo and lore. Become an encyclopedia. Absorb the meta-content. Make the meta-content. Draw the fan art, compose the effortpost, launch the podcast, disseminate the memes, engineer the custom emoji, record the video essay series. Talk about how the game is more relevant than ever in light of current events in this country. Connect it to the ideas of Foucault and Butler and Žižek in compressed TikTok dispatches. Buy the collectible figures and wall scrolls. Join the Discord groups. Check Discord fifty times a day. Generate the metadata. See the tailored ads. Follow the suggested community accounts. Edit the wiki. Defend the fandom from criticism. Upload confessional videos about how the game & community helped you to discover yourself as a man/woman/lesbian/trans person/demisexual, etc. Go viral. Greet your new followers. Read the comic adaptations. Watch the television and film adaptations. Watch the trailer for the sequel. Post reaction clips. Argue with detractors and skeptics in the comments. Buy the limited edition version of the sequel. Buy the expansion set. Buy the remaster. Buy the spin-off. Buy the mobile version. Buy buy buy, engage engage engage, fun fun fun.
How much fun are we having? Given that we’re the most entertained people who ever lived, the answer may surprise you.
II. Everything is work, but nothing is serious
In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch speaks of the unprecedented importance of games in the society of advanced capitalism, and ascribes the necessity of intense play to the anhedonia of the workplace:
One the one hand, the degradation of work makes skill and competence increasingly irrelevant to material success and thus encourages the presentation of the self as a commodity; on the other hand, it discourages commitment to the job and drives people, as the only alternative to boredom and despair, to view work with self-critical detachment…
It is not perhaps monotony and routine in themselves that take the enjoyment out of work, for any job worth doing entails a certain amount of drudgery, but the peculiar conditions that prevail in large bureaucratic organizations and increasingly in the modern factory as well. When work loses its tangible, palpable quality, loses the character of the transformation of matter by human ingenuity, it becomes wholly abstract and impersonal. The intense subjectivity of modern work, exemplified even more clearly in the office than the factory, causes men and women to doubt the reality of the external world and to imprison themselves...in a shell of protective irony.
Nearly forty years later, David Graeber’s 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory examines the degradation of work in great detail. It is well-worth reading if you enjoy intelligent anarchists’ social critiques and parades of existential horror. Graeber’s meditations on pointless white-collar work aren’t half as grim as the testimonies of people with firsthand experience of “being trapped in a job where one is treated as if one were usefully employed, and has to play along with the pretense that one is usefully employed”—despite their knowing otherwise.
I’ve had bullshit jobs. At each of them I sat at a desk and had maybe two hours of actual useful work on my plate on a given day. I spent most of my time on the clock pretending to be busy and trying not to think about how fucking rotten it was that the pay and benefits for doing basically nothing were so much better than the jobs where I ran around all day doing something.
To Graeber’s credit, he excludes service work from bullshit jobs. “My own research suggests that store clerks, restaurant workers, and other low-level service providers rarely see themselves as having bullshit jobs,” he writes. “Many service workers hate their jobs; but even those who do are aware that what they do does make some sort of meaningful difference in the world.” True enough—but they hate their jobs for a reason. A floor-level employee at a place like Target, McDonalds, Starbucks, CVS, Foot Locker, Verizon, Panera, etc., gets it from both barrels: the customers treat them as though they were helots, and the company regards them as a disposable resource.
Having spent many years in the service industry, I can say with confidence that the best psychological survival strategy for that kind of employment is to take to heart Ron Livingstone’s famous line from Office Space: “work just hard enough not to get fired.” If you take real pride in what you do, if you become invested enough in the job to think of yourself as a stakeholder in the enterprise, it will hurt all the more when the reality of the situation smacks you upside the head. Wait for the next economic downturn or poor fiscal year reports, when corporate revokes your perks, downgrades your health insurance (assuming they provide it to begin with), indefinitely freezes your wages, or simply eliminates your position to keep the shareholders happy. Or just wait for the really bad day and the epiphany that neither your clientele, your coworkers, or your bosses give a shit when you go the extra mile for anything.
Or—see what happens when you pull your boss aside to point out that some established point of procedure or recently introduced policy is cumbersome, unnecessary, creates more problems than it solves, and was clearly dreamt up by someone who never spent any significant amount of time on the proverbial front lines. You can probably expect one of two replies: your boss will try to convince you (cheerfully or impatiently) why the inane and unproductive thing is not only well-advised, but absolutely necessary to the health of the business—or they’ll tell you they know it’s idiotic and order you to do it anyway because their stupid job is to enforce their bosses’ asinine policies.
But this sort of thing isn’t limited to the service industry. It’s been a cliché of office work even before disgruntled cubicle morlocks started pinning clipped-out Dilbert strips to the walls of their pens. Modern work is hard to take seriously, let alone emplace as a cornerstone of one’s identity. Most people, as Graeber observed in the original “Bullshit Jobs” essay, prefer not to talk much about what they do for a living when they’re out socializing. And on the face of it, this seems bizarre: one’s job is, at least in theory, their principal contribution to society, the role they undertake in the project of civilization.2 It ought to be something they identify with and believe in.
I recall hearing on some NPR program about the early space program (I can’t find it now) that even the janitors employed by NASA were apt to say that they were doing their part towards putting a man on the Moon. This way of thinking, this kind of personal alignment with and belief in the mission of a large institution or enterprise, is practically a thing of the past—except where founders, C-suite occupants, and chameleonic ladder-climbers are concerned, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them are faking it.
For someone fortunate enough to make their living as a musician, a tenured and respected scholar who teaches, researches, and writes about nothing that does not fascinate him, a brain surgeon, or any other career full of challenge and prestige, where smarts and skills truly matter, downtime is for relaxation. If one’s work is pointless and depersonalizing, what one does during their off-hours must not only give them relief, but purpose (provided they’re not tolerably at peace with drinking themselves into a stupor every night).
Perhaps the childless, single adult whose work is devoid of meaning for them will turn to games in their leisure time—video games, tabletop games, trading card games—for recreational pleasure, and for something they can plug their identity into that stands apart from their joyless, stultifying, soul-gnawing job. On the face of it, the choice makes sense: games offer everything the workplace does not. Tension and excitement. Intellectual stimulation. Challenging problems to solve. Intelligible goals. Immediate rewards for earnest participation. A sense of progression. Opportunities for creativity. Direct or mediated social engagement. A less threatening learning curve than, say, learning to play a musical instrument, woodworking, making pottery, taking up a martial art, etc.
This sort of person may play Yu-Gi-Oh with the attitude of a man going into a knife fight, or get into abstruse arguments about Magic: The Gathering at his local game shop when he’s not even playing. He may be a tyrannical Dungeons & Dragons DM, or a supercilious and combative player in a campaign. He may be the kind of person who gets angry at video games—out of frustration with a particularly difficult sequence, after a series of humiliating losses in a PVP game, or maybe because the seventh iteration of a long-running franchise has gone Woke or caters too much to the “casuals” or “tourists.”
The word may is doing a lot of heavy lifting here—but someone with a more or less satisfying work life, a healthy marriage, and a kid waddling around their home is probably less likely to be observed screaming racial epithets into a headset at 1:00 AM on a given night than someone who hasn’t as much going for them.
These unfortunate people turn play into a kind of second (or third) job, expending and sinking into it all the mental and emotional energy that, for the sake of their own sanity, they cannot channel into their actual workday.3 But the seriousness they bring to gaming negates itself: they are aware that nothing at all depends on how well they perform or how much satisfaction they wring out of a game. When the point is brought to their attention, they can usually do nothing but withdraw into the same “shell of protective irony” that holds at bay the existential despair of the workplace if they do not wish to be honest with themselves—and they probably don’t. The overserious gamer is like a spiritual adept who performs sacrifices, chants mantras, and undergoes rituals of self-mortification in devotion to a god whose nonexistence they know in their heart.
While we’ve been talking about games as they are played by laboring proles and the distraught professional class, we should remember that our elite play games, too. I’ll spare you Huizinga’s rather dated assessment of how play becomes business and business becomes play, and instead point to a piece by one Kevin Munger titled “Video Games Cause Elon Musk” and leave you with a block quote.
[Gideon] Jacobs summarizes the role of video games in Musk’s upbringing, connecting them to his oft-repeated belief in the inane “simulation hypothesis” that our reality is in fact a video game being played, in some sense, by an advanced species. This makes sense; that’s actually how video games work. Treating the world as if it is a video game certainly seems like an advantage in “winning” that game; Musk in this sense is simply ahead of the curve in embracing the logic of ubiquitous measurement and ranking explicated in Fourcade and Healy’s phenomenal book The Ordinal Society.
Shivon Zilis, mother of four of Musk’s children, once told him, “I have this feeling that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”
24.
While there’s some area of overlap between McLuhan and Debord, they work in completely different universes of discourse, and are at variance with one another in terms of their concerns and purposes. Each of them sees things the other doesn’t.
Debord, for his part, articulated a fact of the situation McLuhan failed to appreciate in his predictions of a revived tribal/oral modality:
The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.
A favorite 1970s New Age book of mine, Dane Rudiyar’s The Planetarization of Consciousness, predicted a synthesis of premodern collectivism and modern atomization in which unions of “self-conscious and self-determined individual persons” form new communities retaining the most desirable aspects of both tribalism and individualism. Unfortunately, what we got was the worst of both worlds: the lonely crowd, tenuously united by artificial interests and common but individualized experiences, its members distrustful of being asked to perform “emotional labor” for others, and preferring regimented and mediated interpersonal relations (if not the companionship of chatbots) over spontaneity and messy intimacy.
This is to say that the word “community” in the sense of a “Deadlands community,” or “Helldivers community,” “Hearthstone community,” “Wordle community,” etc. is to be understood loosely— even metaphorically. These are communities to the extent that folding a sheet of paper into a small triangle and flicking it across a table with one’s fingers is football. How many of the people with whom you play Magic: The Gathering at your local game shop once a week or two would you trust to watch your child if you had to suddenly leave town for two days? How many of them do you think would say yes if you asked? If you’ve ever met up IRL with acquaintances from a gaming message board or Discord server, were you able to talk about anything but games? And how awkward was it?
And yet, consumer-cult “communities” like these are indispensable today. We take what we can get, even when what we get isn’t enough.
25.
This summer my wife and I made a point of going out dancing as much as possible.
Lasch:
The uselessness of games makes them offensive to social reformers, improvers of public morals, or functionalist critics of society...Yet the “futility” of play, and nothing else, explains its appeal—its artificiality, the arbitrary obstacles it sets up for no other purpose than to challenge the players to surmount them, the absence of any utilitarian or uplifting object. Games quickly lose their charm when forced into the service of education, character development, or social improvement.
In order to achieve the desired results, gamification must camouflage itself—or grow so ubiquitous as to be invisible.
Side note: while United States liberals mock and denounce cultural conservatives’ anger at the loss of a common American identity and a shared sense of purpose based on white Protestant Americanness and national glory, they fail to understand that some alternative to a nationalist raison d’etre is needed to prevent social disintegration in the long term. What they tacitly propose amounts to an endorsement of a neoliberal marketplace of ideas and identities, the pursuit of individual success, and an admonition to remember to “be kind.” That simply isn’t enough.
Postscript: I am increasingly convinced that “play” is the wrong word for what we’re doing when we’ve got a controller in our hands or our left fingers on the WASD keys.
The more you quote from McLuhan the more I think he wasnt rejected in his time (not that Im saying he was; I have no idea how he was regarded, but if there was any rejection... ), but just that everyone around him had no idea or frame of reference to even understand what the hell he was saying. The stuff of his youve quoted is only now finding a social tech reality where it has direct application and context. To people back in his time is would have been complete gibberish.
I have to comment on that Alegria art style, because to me it is clearly derived from Leger.
It was through your article on Leger that I came to know of his art, and once I did I could see its influence literally everywhere in about 30s onward, especially his earlier (probably viewed as his peak phase) when he was doing his inanimate mechanical things like The Disc and The City.
Like, if you took that style of his from then and boiled it in a pot of water until it was limp and pliable youd get the Alegria art style. Kind of like Leger is uncooked brittle noodles and Alegria is a well cooked pasta dish.
I will be honest, and I must say sorry for lowering the intellectual bar on the comments, but I am just sad. All these socioeconomical mechanisms making me feel in a worldwide sublime hopeless scenario that is way beyond my grasp and control, yet having my personal failings pointed at as if they made my life unworthy of being lived. What brings me to read this after quitting my job and on 4 hours of sleep if I already know what to expect? Like a self fulfilling prophecy where the cellphone is making me sad because it says that the cellphone is making everyone sad. I can not put a cool facade of "yeah, I am conscious of all of this yet I will occasionally leave a comment to you about videogames that I think are worthwhile"; they are my main interest; I am sincerely sorry for being dishonest with myself, sorry for being a nihilist and sorry for not being a pretty sight over all; yes, it is an addiction in the sense that I don't want to live the rest of my life measuring how good I am living by how many years of nerd sobriety I have. I can't even think of pursuing creative endeavors anymore because what I want to create would only be liked by other people on the internet.
Yapping like this is not aligned with my interests as I feel I will be featured in a writeup like the subreddit for Monkey Island, emotionally gutted for all to see, but I can't put this anywhere else. Can't explain this to anybody in my family, as I can't articulate it and they like entertainment also. I can't talk about this with my peers, as they don't seem as miserable as me and I could just leave them an emotional wreck like myself. Can't put this on any other forum because that would be being part of the machine and also the internet is now mean. What would I say to a shrink? "Doctor, they are telling me to touch grass on the internet or else life on this Earth will cease to exist but not before being absolutely worthless to be lived". This is the lonelinest I have ever felt in my life.
Like, before the pandemic I tought being a geek wasn't that big of a deal and now I have a whole 6 part essay dissecting how I am an omen of the apocalypse even though I did what society told me all my life to do, I went to college and then I discover that I am alienated to my profession; but I bet kayaking hobbyists don't have to deal with this. (I need to clarify, it is not your fault that I feel how I feel, I got in contact with concerns like this somewhere else, never stopped using the internet but rediscovered one of your old rpg articles and serendipitously found that most of your writings were about these media concerns).
I have run out of steam, I forgot what was gonna be my final paragraph. I am not mad at you, but come on, Musk? That is a low blow, as if most Sillicon Valley bigwigs were gamers. Does it even matter who he is? He is just there because capital amasses more capital and he had a fat heritage.
Gonna read about Shuma-Gorath to regain some sense of normalcy. Never stop writing, but that dance floor better have live folk music.