Response work

Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification

Patrick Jagoda

Experimental

Games

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

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3

Introduction

Society of the Game What does the world look like from the point of view of gaming? Eric Zimmerman, “Gaming Literacy”

Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game. Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google)

Games are the most elevated form of investigation. Albert Einstein

Games took on a new importance in the United States during a Cold War mo- ment awash in economic game theory, military simulations, and geopoliti- cal competition. In his book Serious Games, published in 1970 during the Cold War’s détente period, engineer Clark C. Abt argued that games had become ubiquitous across both !gurative and literal registers. He observes, “the wide use of ‘game’ as a metaphor for many social, economic, political, and military activities shows how much we assume about the formal similarity between games and real- life activities.” Abt then enumerates areas in which game logic could be made operative: “Every election is a game. International re- lations are a game. Every personal argument is a game. And almost all busi- ness activity is a game.”" Games, he insists, are more serious than the frivo- lous pastimes for which they are frequently mistaken. Moreover, the growing metaphorical reach of games gestures toward unrealized potentials of games as a medium for intervening in social, political, and economic issues.

What Abt still introduced with some quali!cations in 1970, building on limited observations in order to prescribe a suggested shift in perception toward game- based thinking, has in subsequent decades developed into a norm. For economist Ken Binmore, writing in 2007, economic game theory points to a world that bene!ts from being modeled as a game. “Drivers ma- noeuvring in heavy tra#c are playing a driving game,” he writes. “Bargain- hunters bidding on eBay are playing an auctioning game. A !rm and a union negotiating next year’s wage are playing a bargaining game.”$ Binmore de-

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4 INTRODUCTION

ploys this expanded language of games from a world in which the expansion of !nance has made stock trading games an even more central aspect of eco- nomic life. In the contemporary media ecology, the coverage of political elec- toral contests is often rhetorically and structurally indistinguishable from the coverage of professional and collegiate sports, even if the consequences are of drastically di%erent kinds. Moreover, in culture, games have become a more prominent form than ever before. Since the initial airing of Survivor in 2000, reality television series have proliferated, entangling participants with game rules and objectives. Across popular novels, !lms, and television series such as Westworld (1973 and 2016–), Ender’s Game (1985, 2013), Game of Thrones (1996–, 2011–2019), The Hunger Games (2008, 2012), Black Mirror (2011–), Ready Player One (2011, 2018), and Kiss Me First (2018), we see the centrality of games of competition and chance to contemporary society.&

By the early twenty- !rst century, the metaphorical cachet of games has been supplemented by games as a material form that increasingly pervades everyday life, especially in American culture. While Binmore’s list echoes Abt’s earlier enumeration, it takes on a di%erent meaning from the context of the early twenty- !rst century, within a world characterized by the in- creased production, distribution, and reception of video games and virtual worlds. It is worth noting that Abt’s pronouncement regarding the cultural rise of game form preceded even the !rst commercial video game arcade ma- chine: Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney’s Computer Space that they shipped in 1971, just prior to establishing Atari, Inc. in 1972. Since that time, the video game industry has come to achieve faster growth than either the !lm or music industries. As of 2019, digital games engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide, absorbing vast quantities of human money, attention, and time.' Consider just a few other developments. Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto V (2013) grossed $1 billion in its !rst three days, making it the fastest selling work of entertainment in history up to that point. Pokémon GO (2016) was downloaded 550 million times within the !rst three months after its re- lease. In the !rst forty- !ve days after its release, Call of Duty Black Ops (2010) gamers logged approximately 600 million hours of gameplay (the equiva- lent of over 68,000 years). Even as these titles represent mainstream video- games, independent games have also seen parallel successes, with Limbo, for example, selling just over 892,000 total units within its !rst two years. These astronomical numbers begin to suggest the scale of a cultural medium that demands ongoing analysis.

The importance of games exceeds the admittedly remarkable quantita- tive measures of their growing centrality to contemporary life. At a qualita- tive level, the position of games has also been elevated above the status of

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 5

pastimes and entertainments. This underlying sense of signi!cance is regis- tered, however playfully, through a variety of cultural works, such as Ernest Cline’s Armada (2015). In this novel, high school student Zack Lightman dis- covers that his beloved massively multiplayer online game titled Armada is actually a simulation created to train and track the most successful gamers in order to fend o% an ongoing yet secret alien invasion. The novel imagines a vast conspiracy in which the video game industry has collaborated with the international “Earth Defense Alliance,” since the late 1970s, in order to prepare Earth’s population for a coming war. As Zack’s father puts it, in one of countless references to 1980s culture, “Wax on, wax o%—but on a global scale!” (29). In many ways, the novel is a mashup of earlier works such as The Last Star!ghter (1984) and Ender’s Game (1985) that also imagined games as training simulations for real- world struggles. The novel’s fantasy aligns with other later cultural productions, such as the !lm Pixels (2015), in which videogame skills are similarly required to defend against an alien attack, and the television series Westworld (2016– ), in which visitors to a live- action game park !nd themselves feeding an unprecedented corporate data collec- tion scheme and facing fatal consequences. In all of these cases, video games operate as a crucial interface with the world. By analyzing speci!c games, this book will attempt to elaborate how we might understand the interface between games and the world in the twenty- !rst century.

“Just a Game”

In the early twenty- !rst century, games have exceeded the circumscribed realm of entertainment and touched every aspect of life. Admittedly, the serious use of games has a longer history that dates back to uses of chess as a way of teaching military strategy in the Middle Ages and to the Prussian war games of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.( The twentieth century saw a substantial expansion of this tradition of thought- provoking and applied games. In 1939, historian Johan Huizinga wrote in his classic book Homo Ludens that games and sports are “played in profound serious- ness” and that gameplay should be treated as a fundamental element of cul- ture.) In 1954, still prior to the emergence of digital games, RAND Corpora- tion analysts Alexander McFarlane Mood and R. D. Specht described gaming as “a technique of analysis” that could be applied to areas such as warfare.* As I noted, elaborating on the domains that games might impact, in 1970, Abt coined the term “serious game” and argued that “a game is a particular way of looking at something” and of solving problems.+

The cultural saturation of games and gamelike thought has already been

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6 INTRODUCTION

observed by a number of scholars, particularly in the !eld of game studies. The extension of game mechanics to traditionally nongame activities across busi- ness, education, marketing, psychology, and war making goes by the name of “gami!cation.”, A number of alternative terms exist for varied approaches to integrating games into everyday life, including “gamespace,” “ludo!cation of society,” “ludic society,” “ludic century,” and “gameful world.”"- This im- brication of games and reality is a historical development. But this devel- opment cannot be reduced to the narrative of technological progress that is coterminous with the development of digital computers, networked con- nectivity, and video games as a new cultural medium. Instead of introducing yet another term for this phenomenon, this book seeks to delve even deeper into this state of a%airs, exploring the ways that games, as metaphors and forms, alter our understanding of contemporary social, political, and eco- nomic systems in the United States. In the realm of video games alone, we see this interface between games and the world clearly, for example, in the ways that !rst- person shooting mechanics in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (2018) support militarism and prompt engagement with the future of warfare or in the ways in which in- game rewards and the leveling- up system in Stardew Valley (2016) promote neoliberal values.

Before turning to in- depth examples of speci!c games in the following chapters, it is helpful to look back to the discipline of economic game theory— though it may seem distant from contemporary video games—as an impor- tant historical development for thinking about the intersection of games and reality. Essentially, game theory approaches economic phenomena via models or experiments that are structured as games. The prisoner’s dilemma (to which I return later in the book) is perhaps the best- known game experi- ment that emerged from the exploration of this theory. In this scenario, !rst imagined by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at the RAND Corporation in 1950, two prisoners (!gured as players) are separated from one another by a prosecutor and forced to make a decision. They can either remain silent (in cooperative solidarity with one another) or defect (and betray the other) in order to receive di%erent deals from a prosecutor that beget variable prison sentences. Through the latter half of the twentieth century, this scenario was repeated through theoretical and experimental variations, yielding di%erent insights into competition and cooperation among actors.

During the early Cold War, economists gradually began to adopt nonco- operative game theory, believed to be the optimal strategy from the stand- point of rational self- interest, especially as it was described within the Nash equilibrium solution. Economic historian Philip Mirowski describes the Nash equilibrium as revealing “the rationality of the paranoid” who occu-

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 7

pied the Cold War’s encapsulated world in which strategic thinking and noncooperation were elevated from a particular theoretical game model to an absolute way of life. John Forbes Nash Jr. was himself eventually diag- nosed with paranoid schizophrenia. But game theory itself already revealed a structural paranoia within which games could be used to model anything. Admittedly, economic game theory takes “game” to refer to only one kind of game: namely, a simulation of real- world con.ict, utility, and decision- making. Nevertheless, as I will explore in chapter 1, there are historical links between the abstractions of game theory and the concrete development of actual playable games during the Cold War period. Even prior to that transi- tion, however, game theory already posits a logic, which dictates that every- thing can be !gured as a game. “When confronted with discon!rmations,” Mirowski writes, “the !rst inclination of the paranoid is always to enlarge the conspiracy: that is, expand the de!nition of the ‘game’ to encompass con- siderations previously external to the formal speci!cation of the game.” Even within a multiplayer contest, game theory does not imagine the player com- municating with other players, but instead requires the isolated simulation of possible moves. A player engages in “the complete and total reconstruc- tion of the thought processes of the Other—without communication, without interaction, without cooperation—so that one could internally reproduce (or simulate) the very intentionality of the opponent as a precondition for choos- ing the best response.”"" And, insofar as all players are aware of the structure and rules of the individualistic economic “game” that exceeds the particular theoretical scenario, everyone—from the common citizen to the Cold War warrior—becomes a player.

Game theory produces an epistemology grounded in games, even as it does not do justice to the experience of actual games in the world, including analog games from chess to Pandemic and digital games from Pong to Fortnite. To delve deeper into the relationship between games and reality, we might consider literary critic Mark Seltzer’s concept of “the o#cial world” that de- scribes “a self- inciting, self- legislating, and self- depictive form of life” that characterizes the modern world, particularly in the wake of systems theory and cybernetics in the mid- twentieth century. Though Seltzer does not ana- lyze speci!c games, he !nds, in game structures, the formal properties for ap- proaching a dominant contemporary mode of thought. “As in the extremely formal conditions in the playing out of a game,” he writes of this contem- porary thought type, “it is necessary to frame, demarcate, and report it— and in this sense see through it and re.ect on it—in order to play the game, and to mark its distinction from the world that it, at the very same time, models.” In other words, Seltzer does not imagine an absolute confusion of

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8 INTRODUCTION

game and world, or a virtualization of the world through game rules and mechanics—a common fantasy imagined in !lms such as The Matrix (1999) and eXistenZ (1999) and television shows such as Black Mirror (2011– ). What such a collapse misses, or underemphasizes, is the mediation of a game that is designed to produce a “doubling” (after all, even denizens of the Matrix construct are reminded, through occasional glitches, of the nonidentity of the virtual world and reality). Furthermore, a game introduces “contin- gency,” “self- conditioning,” and “deliberate self- complication.” Games are not merely alternative realities that become, by the early twenty- !rst cen- tury, coextensive with the world; importantly, they are “at once models of the world and in it.”"$

In a sense, this reminder of the separation of games from reality—that they are not merely “of” the world but also “in” it—does not make a game any less complicated as a form. To remind oneself, via an occasional sidebar, that something is “just a game”—a pickup basketball game that has become too physically intense or an online game that has gradually colonized the bulk of one’s social time—does not necessarily reduce the intensity of the doubling that the game has already introduced into one’s experience. Moreover, the arbitrariness of a designed game’s rules is not worlds away from the arbitrari- ness of moral systems, social norms, and even laws that make up the ground- work of the so- called reality that stands outside of the particular game in question. None of this should imply that arbitrary rules, whether determined by a biased judge or an idiosyncratic game designer, cannot have material consequences. As anthropologist Thomas Malaby observes, it is in part the contingency of games that “allows them both to mimic and constitute every- day experience.”"& In other words, if games can serve as models of real- world systems, they can also in.uence the experiences, attitudes, habits, and be- haviors of players. This is by no means to echo, for instance, the crude and empirically dubious arguments—common to the moral panics surrounding video games that erupted in the 1990s or the aftermath of mass shootings in the 2010s—that violent games cause real- world violence. Even without this deterministic belief that a game such as Mortal Kombat can program a player for violence, we can take games seriously as hypermediated interfaces and participatory processes. Games can realize (in the sense of make real) designed worlds that in.uence the social world—or, more accurately, a world that is perpetually changing in ways that undermine the grammatical work per- formed by the de!nite article “the.”

This book explores various ways that games make realities, through par- ticular design decisions, formal properties, and modes of play. Before focus- ing on games, including what I see as their crucial experimental qualities, I

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 9

!rst turn to the broader context in which we encounter games: that is, the particular dominant social, political, and economic form that reality has taken during the era from the 1970s onward during which video games entered into popular consciousness and developed into a prominent cultural form. Context, I would like to argue, means everything in the case of games. To stage this context for games in the late twentieth century with adequate precision and the necessary quali!cations, I now turn to the much- discussed periodizing concept of neoliberalism.

The Neoliberal Paradigm

Instead of treating media aesthetics as an isolated domain, I would like to ground the formal novelty of video games, from the outset, within a socio- political context. In the theoretical framework of this book, gami!cation (the term I use to signal a cultural development that exceeds a narrow design strategy of importing games into nongame activities) operates as a formal and cultural counterpart to neoliberalism. Beginning in the 1970s, we see the alignment of the rise of neoliberalism as an economic and political form and video games as a prevalent cultural form. To better understand the intersec- tion between these forms, it is !rst necessary to establish the coordinates of neoliberalism. Without question, neoliberalism is a heuristic, and the con- stellation that this term names has changed since its inception. This poly- valent concept is often used to describe both an economic policy and a phi- losophy of governance, which has varied genealogies that stretch back to Friedrich Hayek’s writing and the growth of the Mont Pèlerin Society since the 1940s, Chicago school economic theories and concrete international ex- periments of the 1970s, Anglo- American “free market” political reforms by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and concurrent leftist critiques of market- based policies and privatization that gave the concept greater coherence. In general, the term marks an observed departure from the policies of the Great Depression and the planned economy of World War II, amidst a growing crisis of liberalism. More constructively, it signals a sub- stantially increased emphasis on the entity of the free market, individual entrepreneurship, private property rights, !nancialization, and practices of deregulation that transitioned from a marginal scholarly argument to a guid- ing societal principle in the late 1970s."' Though supporters of neoliberalism often adopt a position of opposition to the regulatory state and in favor of free markets, an increased body of research has demonstrated the centrality of government intervention to the implementation of neoliberal policies."(

Political theorist Wendy Brown, building on insights made by Michel Fou-

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10 INTRODUCTION

cault in the late 1970s, elevates neoliberalism to a normative order of reason that encompasses these speci!c historical developments but also points to a broader phenomenon that crosses previously distinct categories of thought and policy. As Brown explains in her much- discussed account, “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activi- ties—even where money is not at issue—and con!gures human beings ex- haustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomi- cus.” This economization of everything and everyone stands in distinction to classical models of liberalism that still tolerate zones of life—the political, moral, and ethical, for instance—that maintain autonomy from economic concerns.") Even if neoliberalism represents an expansion of the market model into all domains of life, it is not categorically worse, for all people, than previous movements within capitalism. Neoliberalism can be said to colo- nize all of life, for the majority of the world’s population, all the way down to microlevel and nonconscious interactions, through an expansion of the market model. Even so, earlier forms of capitalism already impacted every aspect of life for large parts of that population—including enslaved people under the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economy and colonized subjects under European colonization and imperialism. Nevertheless, even as it is undergirded by longer histories and more extensive world systems of capitalist accumulation, neoliberalism names a speci!c and historically dis- tinct form of economic organization and political governance, one that reso- nates particularly well with game form, especially as it has developed during the rise of digital games."*

Beyond its economic and political periodization, the term neoliberalism also names a new social project and order of subjectivity. As numerous crit- ics have argued, neoliberalism has had its most substantial everyday impact on the ways in which it has economized the social and created an interface between subjectivity (including that of the upper and middle classes in the US) and economics. Perhaps the pithiest and most famous articulation of this point is Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement, in her 1981 interview with Ronald Butt, that “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.”"+ What was a political aspiration for Thatcher has developed into a more generalizable principle of neoliberalism. Beyond wage labor, workers are increasingly encouraged to become entrepreneurs of themselves or, in the phrase popularized by Gary Becker beginning with his 1964 book of this title, “human capital.”", As the sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato observes, the concept of “human capital” describes a double and simultaneous process of “subjection and exploitation” that asks every subject to draw “on all its ‘im- material,’ a%ective, and cognitive resources of the self in all its activities” in

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 11

order to become its “own boss and own slave, capitalist and proletarian.”$- Becoming one’s own boss, of course, also requires taking on forms of risk that have been to a greater degree distributed and mitigated by forms of collective insurance provided, for instance, by the Keynesian welfare state and other socialist forms of government. Even so, it is important to emphasize that the expansion of the category of human capital does not describe a radically new economic development so much as it marks a change in tone or emphasis, a strategy for sustaining alienation and class warfare by other means.$"

In the neoliberal scheme, workers are increasingly !gured as entrepre- neurs who must develop themselves and their own value—through con- tinued education, generation of new quali!cations, self- promotion on social media, and creative work that is subsumed within a free labor economy. One is expected to develop one’s own value, often without being paid a wage and while undertaking this self- development on one’s own dime. Thus, unem- ployment becomes more than a time that is !lled with job seeking; it trans- forms into a period of intensi!ed shaping of human identity, habits, choices, and behaviors. Of course, previous forms of capitalism shape subjectivity in countless ways. But within neoliberalism, as Lazzarato puts it, “The produc- tion of subjectivity, of forms of life, of forms of existence, is not part of a superstructure, but rather of an ‘economic’ infrastructure.”$$ In sum, neolib- eralism expands “economic impoverishment” through new forms of precari- ous labor and an unprecedented control of wealth by the top 1 percent of the population, but it also entails “an impoverishment of subjectivity, a reduc- tion in its existential intensity.”$&

The coherence and continuity of neoliberalism has been called into question with the rise of rightwing nationalist governments and populist movements in the 2010s, including the election of Donald Trump as Presi- dent of the United States, Narendra Modi as Prime Minister of India, Recep Tayyip Erdo/an as President of Turkey, and Vladimir Putin as President of Russia. Despite the political and economic instability that these develop- ments have caused, the return to more overt forms of racism (including anti- immigration policies) is compatible with earlier neoliberalism, particularly in its emphasis on the rational actor’s engagement in constant competi- tion. In his writing on neoliberalism, Michel Foucault already identi!es the persistence and indeed centrality of racism within biopolitical governance and the logic of security that are so central to neoliberal management (and frequently its neglect or overt elimination) of life.$' Moreover, as Lazzarato observes in his account of neoliberalism, “Hypermodernity and neoarcha- isms are not contradictory processes but the two complementary faces of the same mode of governing our societies.”$( Similarly, social theorists such

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12 INTRODUCTION

as Silvia Federici have pointed out that the neoliberal period brings with it new forms of “primitive accumulation” and “labor exploitation” that intro- duce new gender regulation and sexual discrimination across “every aspect of the reproduction of labor- power.”$) Later critics have also argued that the global COVID-19 crisis in 2020 has complicated neoliberalism and opened up possibilities for fundamentally new forms of governance, even with ample evidence of familiar disaster capitalism.

As this brief overview suggests, neoliberalism names an economic orien- tation, a governance philosophy, a response to a cultural legitimacy crisis, and a worldview for the social. In the present context, I will argue that games simultaneously index and drive the development of neoliberalism. The com- petition, repetition, and quanti!ed objectives that make up gami!ed de- signs, in both entertainment and applied games, correspond with some of the most pernicious aspects of advanced capitalism. To be clear, though my emphasis in this book is on neoliberalism, video games can also be under- stood through dimensions of economic production and consumption that are marked by terms such as Taylorism, post- Fordism, postindustrialism, and advanced capitalism.$*

Gami!cation, I argue, marks a condition of seepage or doubling through which game mechanics and activities in.uence work, leisure, thought, and social relations—key ways people interface with reality today. The games that inundate the present are action- oriented mediations that shape every- day experience through neoliberal principles. Before continuing this theo- retical analysis of the conjunction of neoliberalism and games, I turn to the other part of my method that is informed by the humanistic approach of media aesthetics. The question I address in the following section is this: If neoliberalism can be described as a new social, political, and economic paradigm that emerges in the late twentieth century, can video games be described as a new medium in this same period?

The Society of the Game (or, The Work of Art in the Age of Gamification)

A medium- speci!c framework for understanding the cultural importance of video games in our time cannot be separated from the sociopolitical con- text within which these games emerge and which they help to shape. As Frankfurt school critic Walter Benjamin maintains, economics and culture are both vital for making sense of any historical period. Putting this point in Marxist terms, he contends that the economic infrastructure or base is no more important than the cultural superstructure for understanding histori-

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 13

cal conditions of production.$+ Attending to “the developmental tendencies of art can therefore contribute to the political struggle in ways that it would be a mistake to underestimate.” Perhaps the most important role of an art form has to do with the ways that it resonates with the human “mode of per- ception” that is contemporaneous to it. Within Benjamin’s historicist frame- work, the ways in which this perception is organized and conditioned are neither naturalized nor static; they are contingent and change over time. For example, the “reception in distraction” produced by a mass medium such as !lm is a historically speci!c mode of perception, rather than simply a de- graded form of concentration.$,

For Benjamin, and many Marxist and cultural theorists after him, modes of perception that coemerge with particular media are inherently political and historical. In the mid- 1930s, the politics of aesthetics points, for Benja- min, in the opposed directions of fascism (which engages in an “aestheticiz- ing of politics”) and communism (which responds by “politicizing art”).&- Of course, in a variety of ways that I explore in this book, video games depart formally, and therefore also politically, from !lm and other media on which he focuses.&" Nevertheless, Benjamin’s framework, alongside related methods emerging from the Frankfurt school, o%ers a useful starting point for ap- proaching this newer medium. In other words, just as !lm both signals and conditions modes of reception that help people understand and intervene in politics in the early twentieth century, video games play a similar role in the late twentieth and early twenty- !rst centuries in part because of their reso- nances with neoliberalism. The high- level di%erences between the medium of the video game and that of !lm are important and can be abstracted to clarify the broader cultural !eld of gami!cation.

The novelty of gami!cation comes into relief if we set it in contrast with the concept of “spectacle” that Guy Debord developed to describe not merely !lm, but also television and all of image culture in the late 1960s society within which he was writing. Spectacle, for Debord, did not merely take the common meaning of “a collection of images.” Instead, it organized a socio- political theory of mediation that described “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”&$ Most of all, spectacle generated the image of the apparent uni!cation of a global society to cover over the under- lying fragmentation and alienation that it produced. A direct experience of life, Debord argued, was increasingly being replaced by representations. Spectacle relied, in the mid- twentieth century, on mass media communi- cations that were “essentially one- way” and depended on “the monopoliza- tion by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue

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14 INTRODUCTION

their particular form of administration.”&& Much like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s earlier theory of the “culture industry,” spectacle described the ideological dimensions of cultural forms such as !lm, magazines, and television.&'

If spectacle conveys “the total practice” of the “particular economic and social formation” of late 1960s capitalism, then gami!cation expresses the equivalent formation in the present.&( Games unquestionably have a history that long precedes the late twentieth and early twenty- !rst centuries, but they achieved the status of cultural prominence (arguably even a kind of pre- ponderance) only during the late twentieth century.&) If !lm and television were still, in the 1960s of Debord’s society of the spectacle, the quintessen- tial mass media, then video games have (especially since the 1970s in hubs such as the United States and Japan but reaching a global scale beginning in the twenty- !rst century) ascended to an analogous cultural status. Scholars such as McKenzie Wark, Mary Flanagan, Alexander Galloway, and Nick Dyer- Witheford were a few of the earliest thinkers to explore the joint aesthetic and sociopolitical signi!cance of digital games for thinking through our contemporary historical moment.&* Games, for these critics, are not merely vapid entertainments or corrupted cultural objects that follow in the wake of the novel or cinema. Instead, they are paradigmatic forms that mediate the contradictions and dissonances of postindustrial life. Games, in this sense, serve as an organizing principle and novel commodity form. They are, as spectacle was for Debord, “both the outcome and the goal of the domi- nant mode of production” and “not something added to the real world—not a decorative element.”&+

Despite some conceptual a#nities, a society of the game di%ers sub- stantially from the society of the spectacle. In contrast to the “mass media” that composed that midcentury global culture that Debord (and before him Adorno and Horkheimer) denounced, video games and virtual world gaming environments are fundamentally procedural, interactive, participatory, and increasingly networked. While the society of the spectacle was founded on separation and hierarchy, our networked world is predicated on a material infrastructure of interconnection in which media are not merely reproduc- ible but “spreadable” and broadly distributable.&, In place of the one- to- many communication characteristic of spectacle (and traditional propaganda), the world depends increasingly on many- to- many communication. Digi- tal media technologies encourage a novel mode of consumption predicated on so- called user- generated content and customization. To put this point in more technical terms, since the mid- twentieth century, we have moved gradually from a dominant paradigm of “broadcasting” (e.g., the Big Three

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 15

network television channels intended for a mass audience) to “narrowcast- ing” (e.g., the proliferation of cable television channels intended for special- ized audiences organized around individual identities) to “pointcasting” (e.g., Net.ix media categorized by personalized algorithms and intended for particular a%ects, moods, and situations).'- These shifts in technological platforms and communications models have corresponded with comparable changes in social, political, and economic life. If an earlier stage involved a transformation from “being into having,” and the society of the spectacle entailed, for Debord, a movement “from having to appearing,” then our mo- ment suggests another notable movement from appearing to acting, in which action, interaction, enactment, expression, participation, and interpellation within an algorithmic environment are paramount operations.'" As even the briefest look at the proliferation of televisual content to streaming formats or the growth of online meme culture demonstrates, images remain essential to the media ecology of the present. Yet something profound has changed in our relationship to those images.

In the 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer were still able to celebrate the telephone, which “permitted the participant to play the role of subject,” in distinction to the culture industry’s radio, which “makes everyone equally into listeners” and o%ers “no mechanism of reply.”'$ Yet, today, the prevail- ing aesthetic and cultural ideology—often captured through the ubiquitous and far- reaching term “design”— provides myriad mechanisms of reply. This ideology depends more and more on activity enacted by users, players, or interactors within computational environments that operate as possibility spaces that both constrain and invite that activity. The quality of action, which is so central to games, di%ers from the society of the spectacle, in which the activity of capitalist production promotes consumer inactivity.'& Today, technology guides people not toward idleness or passivity but into a milieu of constant engagement. In the broadest sense, “interactivity” al- ready plays a role in the novel and the !lm, both of which invite readers and viewers to engage in a cognitive interactivity of interpretation. Digi- tal media, however, supplement such meaning making with new material forms of interactivity that take place across a wide spectrum that includes, on the one hand, minimal clicks, taps, swipes, or voice commands to Siri that lead down predetermined hyperlinked paths and, on the other, nontrivial choices made available through practices such as modding, remixing, con- tent creation, metagaming, and networked relations with other users. While there are many forms of media art that might be dubbed interactive—from hypertext !ction to responsive installation environments—digital games have become the most popular and widely available. Earlier art forms open

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16 INTRODUCTION

up to various activities and a%ects, but digital games are distinctive insofar as they can only be enacted, as Galloway has observed, through a combination of player and machine actions (even as video games also include myriad non- human and machine acts that do not depend on player input and sometimes do not even make themselves apparent to human players).''

To further emphasize the departure of the society of the game from the so- ciety of the spectacle, in the terms of media aesthetics, we can now turn mo- mentarily back to Benjamin and his account of !lm to contrast this medium with the video game. As he contends, !lm’s reception amidst distraction rep- resents an antithesis to the concentration demanded by certain nonrepro- ducible artworks, such as paintings or sculptures, which preserve an “aura” within a particular space and time. By distinction, video games do not belong entirely to either mode of reception but can instead be read as a formal and experiential synthesis. On the one hand, video games are frequently experi- enced in chaotic settings, from the bustling 1970s arcade or the 1980s multi- player home console setup to the chaotic 2010s Twitch .tv online multiplayer chatroom or the e- sports tournament arena. Beyond the distracting spaces of contemporary video games, the preoccupied reception of games is evident if one thinks of the onscreen anarchy (at least for amateur players) of a !ghting game such as the four- player Super Smash Bros.; the distraction- inviting, side- scrolling hijinks of a hand- to- hand arcade brawler such as Teenage Mutant Ninja "urtles II: The Arcade Game; or the busy visual heads- up display (HUD) of a massively multiplayer online game such as EVE Online (!g. 0.1). Beyond environments of hyperattention, there are also incremental and idle games, such as Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes, whose processes persist, without harm to the player’s score, even when one is busy or preoccupied.

On the other hand, many video games require focused attentiveness and activity. Though there are exceptions, most games cannot be experienced ambiently, as if they were television sitcoms or police procedurals that can be taken in, even amidst domestic chores. Video games are demanding and often punitive in response to the smallest inattention. In an immediate sense, concentration serves the moment- by- moment running and jumping of a platformer such as Sonic the Hedgehog; the precise hand- eye coordina- tion of a !rst- person shooter such as Destiny 2; the accelerations and turns of a racing game such as Super Mario Kart; and the complex menu manipula- tion of a time- bound simulation game such as Stardew Valley. In longer term play, concentration is needed to gather resources, build military units, de- velop technologies, and construct cities in a turn- based strategy game such as Civilization VI; to form and execute a military plan in a real- time strategy game such as Age of Empires; or to develop an avatar and character relation-

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 17

ships in a role- playing game such as Persona 5. In all of these cases, immer- sion and contemplation are prerequisites for continuation and success. In Chris Chesher’s formulation, a video game player adopts neither a cinematic “gaze” nor a televisual “glance” but a ludic “glaze” that entails a paradoxical condition of immersion that nonetheless promotes hyperattention among multiple focal points.'(

Beyond their medium- speci!c qualities to which I will return throughout this book, video games alter the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape. Consider the myriad gami!ed apps that promise to make typically boring tasks fun by transforming labor into an action- oriented and inter- active game. An app like Habitica uses points and in- game rewards to increase user productivity, while Nike+ deploys quanti!cation and avatars to promote exercise. Admittedly, it is not unreasonable to object that gami!ed products are, properly speaking, not “games” at all. Moreover, even many video games that operate as stand- alone entertainment products rely on similar game mechanics and incentive structures that promote a neoliberal and econo- mized relation to the world. Media critic David Golumbia has suggested that “we have simply and in some cases uncritically accepted the views that all video and computer games are games and that what we do when we use them is to play.”') Golumbia is most critical of role- playing games (RPGs) and !rst- person shooters (FPS) for their lack of genuine choice, fun, complex charac- terizations, and meaningful social engagements.

Figure 0.1. EVE Online (CCP Games, 2003) game interface. Screenshot taken by Bryan Ward, “Fitting UI Concept Eve,” January 5, 2015, https:// www ..ickr .com /photos /rixxjavix /01231450300.

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18 INTRODUCTION

To build on Golumbia’s point, we can turn to the popular fantasy- themed massively multiplayer online role- playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). This game blurs labor and games (the economic and the cultural) in ways that are exemplary of our historical moment. At its height, the gaming en- vironment of WoW claimed a community of approximately twelve million monthly subscribers who inhabited its space for an average of twenty to thirty hours a week.'* High though these numbers may seem to nongamers, they feel far less surprising to players who have spent time inside WoW’s vir- tual environment (not to mention, in di%erent ways, to players of later games such as Overwatch or League of Legends). In order to reach the maximum level, these players engage in the game’s repetitive mechanics—combat proce- dures that the game industry aptly calls “grinding” or “treadmilling”—that often prove addictive and are reinforced through the satisfaction of progress in this open- ended world. In WoW, a labor model so similar to the grind of workplace production becomes central to a virtual world that exists, presum- ably, as a leisure activity. Participants in this world play at consumption and work to create opportunities for ongoing fun.

My examples of both gami!ed apps and online role- playing games appear even less anomalous if we take into account the increased importance of so- called immaterial production in the twenty- !rst century. In this period, homo faber and homo ludens—maker and player—lose their distinct characteristics. As a number of critics have observed, within a regime of so- called “imma- terial labor,” work and play blur.'+ Particularly in the contemporary condition of ubiquitous computing and always-on networking, users are invited to run a game app while taking a break from composing an email, waiting for a Lyft, or liking Instagram posts. Gami!ed apps, for instance, enclose di%erent forms of training, labor, and behavior modi!cation within a gamelike form. To re- turn to WoW, this game exacerbates such tendencies by actively coproducing the contemporary subject. The game generates, in the player, a heightened experience of a dominant economic situation that it does not simply repre- sent but to which gameplay centrally belongs. The game privileges mechan- ics that train players to become entrepreneurs of themselves who accultur- ate to its virtual space (at lower levels) by aspiring to a higher rank, following instructions, engaging in war making, and accumulating private property, and (at higher levels) by team building, managing a guild, optimizing combat strategies, and administrating resources. To be a player, in this world, means to be, !rst and foremost, a laborer and then possibly a manager.',

Even with this reduction or lack of playfulness in many so- called games, the form and metaphor of games has established a cultural centrality. This centrality can be explained, at least in part, through the resonance of games

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 19

with neoliberalism and the broader development of economic thought fol- lowing World War II (a trajectory that I track in greater detail in chapter 1). To repeat: games both index and drive the development of neoliberalism. In this context, the di%erences between !lm and games become particularly im- portant.(- I explore some of the medium- speci!c qualities of what I call the “video game sensorium”—including game mechanics, procedural manipula- tion, navigable spaces, emphases on decision- making, and interactions with arti!cial intelligence systems—in chapter 2. In the remainder of this intro- duction, I collate my previous discussions of neoliberalism and the video game medium to demonstrate some of the ways that video games align with neoliberalism, but also, more importantly, how they might be positioned to complicate and transform the world- building program of neoliberalism from the inside out. Of course, games cannot serve as a solution to the major sys- temic and infrastructural problems that yield exploitation and alienation. Even so, I will argue that they o%er unprecedented cultural means to experi- ment, pursue change, and play within the historical present and its speci!c technoscienti!c constraints.

Neoliberal Games: Action, Competition, and Worldmaking

In order to introduce the precise conjunctions of neoliberalism and games, I would like to foreground three concepts that are central to both of these forms. Though this book develops several other key conceptual intersection points, I see these three concepts—action, competition, and worldmaking— as foundational to the argument that follows.

The !rst of these concepts, action, is a central quality of all games. As Galloway observes, in a fundamental sense, “video games are actions.” As he adds: “Without action, games remain only in the pages of an abstract rule book. Without the active participation of players and machines, video games exist only as static computer code. Video games come into being when the machine is powered up and the software is executed.”(" If video games require speci!c actions and enactment of mechanics, from moment to mo- ment, they also encourage ongoing activity. Consider that, in its !rst year after release, players of the competitive battle arena online game League of Legends (2009) collectively logged nearly 1.3 billion hours (or over 148,000 years) of gameplay.($ Between 2012 and 2018, players of the hit mobile game Candy Crush Saga engaged in a total of 1.1 trillion rounds of gameplay (212 billion in the United States alone).(& These two examples—of a multiplayer online game and a mobile casual game that invite very di%erent types of actions—point to genres that are commonly reported for accumulating in-

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20 INTRODUCTION

credible time investments. However, it is additionally worth highlighting the considerable duration of even single- player video games. Though video game play times are variable, depending on play style and expertise, websites such as howlongtobeat .com o%er averages based on player contributions. For comparison, a !lm typically lasts approximately two hours and a television season may last between ten and twenty- four episodes (somewhere between !ve and eighteen hours total, not counting commercials, depending on the episode duration). To be sure, one can !nd numerous shorter video games that fall within, or even below, this same time span. However, the average times for some of the most popular video games from the 2010s reveal the di%erence from !lm and television: BioShock In!nite (main story: 11.5 hours, completionist: 26.5 hours), Super Mario Odyssey (main story: 12 hours, com- pletionist: 57 hours), Grand Theft Auto V (main story: 31 hours, completionist: 78.5 hours), Fallout 4 (main story: 26 hours, completionist: 150 hours), Per- sona 5 (main story: 95.5 hours, completionist: 164 hours), and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (main story: 46 hours, completionist: 176 hours). Be- yond a single completion of a game, players will often play their favorite games multiple times to the exclusion of other games or seek to master a replayable game (we might not call these players “gamers” so much as Over- watch enthusiasts, Candy Crush Saga addicts, or Fortnite professionals). Other players engage in open- ended multiplayer modes after they have completed a comparatively linear single- player story mode. Through all of these forms of time investment, games ask the player to act and make decisions for hours at a time.

Given such long durations that depend on ongoing player participation, it is worth asking: What kind of subject do video games interpellate? Though the answer would be incomplete, we could o%er the provisional answer: an acting subject. The major quali!cation would be that an immense number of people watch expert gamers playing video games—on YouTube, Twitch, and other streaming services—more often than they play them. To o%er just one example, a few months after its release, God of War gameplay videos reached an estimated one billion views on YouTube in mid- 2018.(' However, in many cases, even a spectatorial audience participates actively by typing comments and questions in associated online chats. For both players and viewers, video games !ll free time with both focused actions and ambient activities.

The perpetual engagement that unfolds in the cultural space of video games resonates with a broader sociopolitical context. As Lazzarato empha- sizes, “the objective of neoliberal policies is ‘full activity’” instead of “full em- ployment” that is continuous and organized by “the permanent contract.” Wage labor comes to be replaced with “the precarious full activity of a grow-

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 21

ing section of the population and all age categories.” Crucially, much of that activity exceeds employment and unemployment itself becomes “the time emptied of employment that intermittents !ll with things other than job seeking.”(( If we combine these demographic questions with the points about gameplay duration raised above, it becomes clear that video games provide an experience of activity for the unemployed and for precarious or intermittent workers: a tendency that has accelerated since the 2008 economic crisis.() Far from random activity, so many games and gami!ed apps train players to be- come managers (World of Warcraft), soldiers (America’s Army), runners (Nike+), friends (Animal Crossing: New Horizons), and general entrepreneurs of them- selves (Stardew Valley). Regardless of the success of these games in achieving these particular ends, almost all video games condition players to be more familiar with and interested in digital and networked media, requiring them to analyze information, multitask across crowded hypermediated interfaces, develop hand- eye coordination, discover operational e#ciencies, and sub- mit to management techniques organized around digital rewards and pun- ishments. A small number of gamers also become stars of streaming ser- vices who make a living from audiences (one 2017 report found that YouTube gaming video content had reached 666 million viewers, exceeding audience numbers of “HBO, Net.ix, ESPN, and Hulu combined”).(* But most players must pay for games, downloadable content, and viewership subscriptions, settling for unpaid activity or (in cases of game beta testing) even free labor.

The second concept that is foundational to both neoliberalism and con- temporary video game play is competition.(+ To emphasize a key point at the outset: not all games are competitive. Roger Caillois, for instance, proposes four key categories of games that foreground not only competition but also chance, role- playing, and vertigo.(, Though I return to these other categories later in this book, it is important to acknowledge that the majority of popu- lar contemporary video games sort out winners and losers. Beginning in the 1970s, arcade games provided intense challenges to push players toward a steady expenditure of quarters. Even with the proliferation of video game consoles in the 1980s and 1990s, the challenge of games remained generally high. The expansion of the game industry in the early twenty- !rst century led to a growth in inclusive casual games available for nongamers.)- Despite a diversi!cation of game genres and levels of access, competition remains the central mode of gameplay across categories of casual and hardcore games. Competition manifests in a variety of ways. Amidst casual games, Candy Crush Saga (2012) encourages asymmetrical competition through leader- boards, whereas Clash Royale (2016) focuses on real- time competition be- tween players. Many single- player games such as God of War (2018) do not

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22 INTRODUCTION

set players in opposition to one another but nonetheless introduce a range of win and loss conditions. Such games incorporate frequent possibilities for death, as well as challenging puzzles that yield collectibles and trophies, encouraging degrees of accomplishment that culminate in “completionist” and “speedrun” playthroughs that exceed the game’s primary interactive nar- rative. In the most overt way, a multiplayer and networked game such as Fortnite (2017) pits groups of players against each other in intense real- time competition.

This proliferation of competitive games has not occurred in a vacuum. Though competition is by no means a social relation unique to the period beginning in the late twentieth century, it takes an unprecedented centrality during neoliberalism.)" Whereas an earlier classical liberalism espoused by thinkers such as Adam Smith treats trade as an element of natural market re- lations, neoliberalism imagines a market that is actively created by rational subjects. Within this worldview, it is “not trade but competition [that serves] as the organizing principle of the market, and most notably competition be- tween !rms and workers.” Notably, Lazzarato even deploys game language in order to mark this distinction: “in the neoliberal conception, competition is not the result of a ‘natural play’ of appetites, instincts, and behaviors. It is rather a ‘formal game’ between inequalities—a game that must be insti- tuted, and continually maintained and sustained.”)$ To sustain competition, numerous processes, from the economic to the political to the cultural, must come into play.

At the level of the individual subject, neoliberalism encourages perpetual competition as the way to develop one’s own human capital. To be an entre- preneur of oneself means to be a competitor. As in the prisoner’s dilemma that I described earlier, the game transforms the other into a rival with whom one does not communicate directly but rather, via playful or preda- tory means, defeats in order to maximize self- interest. If liberalism seeks to mitigate (if not eliminate) a state of nature in which homo homini lupus (“man is wolf to man”) then neoliberalism pursues a di%erent end, altering the naturalist is of this famous saying into a new constructivist imperative in which man must become wolf to man in order to thrive. Even during periods of unemployment—including part- time, intermittent, and precarious labor— the !gure of the entrepreneur must remain competitive, actively investing in her own knowledge, skills, and social networks. No mere consumer, the entrepreneur works to maintain a competitive edge and sharpen an appetite for victory. Even outside of full employment, this subject competes to build her brand, raise his status, and collect on their investment at a later date. The neoliberal subject strives to become a successful Instagram in.uencer,

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 23

a YouTube star, a Kickstarter entrepreneur, a sponsored Twitch streamer, a podcaster with reach, or a competitive gamer on the e- sports circuit.

If we combine this second concept of competition with the !rst concept of activity, it is now possible to contend that neoliberalism and video games both promote competitive activity. Depending on one’s tastes, regular partici- pation in head- to- head strategy games or multiplayer battle royale games maintain levels of competitive activity, even during periods of unemploy- ment or underemployment. Beyond explicit games, gami!ed apps and loy- alty programs also encourage competition for status or paltry rewards.)& As we will see in the discussion of behavioral economics in chapter 1, games can also serve as designed correctives that help convert irrational into ratio- nal subjects who compete to maximize their utility. Even if violent video games do not cause physical violence in their players, there is nonetheless an abstracted violence of competition, enforced inequality, and individual risk (that is not socially shared and distributed as with earlier systems of social welfarism).)'

The third concept that is central to both neoliberalism and video game play is worldmaking. As I have already pointed out, the competition espoused by neoliberalism is not natural but created. This point extends to the broader global project or world- building program of neoliberalism. Though neo- liberal theory often pro%ers a theory of unregulated and natural markets, neoliberal practice reveals frequent top- down interventions. For Mirowski, the quality of constructivism is arguably the single most important political innovation of neoliberalism: “The starting point of neoliberalism is the ad- mission, contrary to classical liberal doctrine, that their vision of the good society will triumph only if it becomes reconciled to the fact that the condi- tions for its existence must be constructed, and will not come about ‘natu- rally’ in the absence of concerted political e%ort and organization.” Contrary to the laissez- faire attitude central to liberalism, he adds, “The injunction to act in the face of inadequate epistemic warrant is the very soul of ‘construc- tivism,’ an orientation sometimes shared with the !eld of science studies, and the very soul of the Neoliberal Thought Collective.”)(

The longer history of neoliberal thought reveals a .exible approach that relies on constructivist opportunism. We already see a foundational regula- tion in the Chicago school’s move from Keynesianism to a partial monetar- ism (a viewpoint that encourages centralized regulation of the money supply by banks). This regulation extends to further opportunistic constructions through international economic interventions by Western powers, such as the US support of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, the formation of supranational organizations such as the European Union, and the growth

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24 INTRODUCTION

of nongovernmental entities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This trend continues into the twenty- !rst century with doctrinal contradictions (e.g., continued advocacy for deregulation along- side advantageous government reregulation during the Great Recession), unprecedented governmental interventions (e.g., the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that enacted a massive bailout of Wall Street), and ideologically inconsistent alliances (e.g., the truce between US neoliberals and the extreme right in the form taken by the Tea Party in 2009). In these cases, neoliberal thought has chosen adaptability over fundamentalism, con- structing multiple versions of itself for di%erent audiences—what Mirowski calls neoliberalism’s “double truth.”)) In all of these cases, the market does not operate naturally or spontaneously; it is made, built, and managed.

Games, perhaps better than any cultural form, capture processes of on- going construction within formal rules—a point reinforced by Foucault’s usage of the phrase “games of truth” to describe protocols for the construc- tion of truth.)* Indeed, the literature on business applications of gami!cation frequently invokes this power of games to create worlds that are made real and meaningful through play, spatial models, networked relations, and other medium- speci!c qualities. Gami!cation advocates Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, for instance, invoke historian Johan Huizinga’s notion of the “magic circle” that captures the singular space- time of a game that suspends and changes the rules of everyday life: “Think of the power of the magic circle in a business context. You create a ‘world’ to serve your strategic objectives . . . and it becomes meaningful to other people such as visitors to your website or sta% in your call center.”)+ Thus, games and business enterprises both create worlds that encourage action and play demarcated by rules.

With the arguable exception of abstract puzzle games, most video games create navigable spatial worlds using lines of code and pixels on a screen. Some popular AAA games aspire to graphical photorealism.), Worldmaking extends to other realities with open world role- playing games such as Skyrim and sandbox games such as Minecraft. In addition to worldmaking through game design and development, video game play depends on a conditioned resonance with arti!cially constructed systems. Video game play is not natu- ral. Players learn rulesets anew, often rapidly, with each new game or genre. With the planned obsolescence of each generation of video game consoles and gaming laptops, players adapt to new controllers and master new hot keys or button combos. As the communication scholar David Myers observes, “video game rules and relationships undermine and deny conventional ex- perience in much the same manner that poetic language undermines and denies conventional language.”*- In order to play a video game, players must

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 25

quickly learn and internalize rules, objectives, button con!gurations on a controller, and conventions of social play. As we will see in cases such as the video game Stardew Valley, constructed worlds built atop overtly neoliberal values can become quickly naturalized during gameplay.

Even as I will explore many instances in which video games participate in and feed the neoliberal program, my argument is not that the form is cate- gorically complicit with this way of thinking. Beyond a critical diagnosis, I am interested in the more challenging question of how immersive and inter- active game worlds can enable players to experiment with the reality of both the neoliberal subject and a world that is perpetually in .ux.

Computational Feelings and A!ective Machines

If we are to elaborate how video games are and might become experimental technologies that are not mere technologies of neoliberalism, one more con- nection is unavoidable: the relationship between video games and computa- tion. Though it might su#ce to observe, in shorthand, that video games are software that is run on computational hardware, the two are far more inter- connected—to some degree, even codependent. A narrative about inventor Charles Babbage, one of the key visionaries of the digital programmable com- puter, helps to illustrate this point. In the nineteenth century, long before the advent of video games, Babbage already realized the power of games. In his home, Babbage allegedly had on display two objects: the “silver lady” (an automaton that he purchased and which could mimic a simple human movement) and a part of his “di%erence engine” (a computational machine that he created for calculating polynomial functions). To Babbage’s surprise, visitors to his home regularly preferred to see the automaton, even as the di%erence engine was a far more complex and technically impressive tech- nology. As Mirowski summarizes, “This experience convinced [Babbage] that hoi polloi would only be impressed with machines if they suitably mimicked some activity that an average human would recognize as resembling their own. What could that be for a device essentially devoted to calculation? After some rumination, Babbage decided that the most humanlike thing that a thinking machine like his Analytical Engine could conceivably do was—play a game!”*"

Though Babbage never followed through on his ideas to use games from tic- tac- toe to chess to garner interest in computing machines, his vision, described in 1864, took a material form nearly a century later in 1962 with Steve Russell’s development of what is commonly considered the !rst mod- ern video game: Spacewar! *$ As a graduate student at MIT, Russell created the

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26 INTRODUCTION

game on a PDP- 1 minicomputer that was available to him through a labo- ratory, supported by the US Department of Defense, for which he worked. Though it might have appeared frivolous by comparison to the lab’s core re- search, this game produced more excitement than most mundane academic or military projects created on early computers. Stewart Brand recognized this point in his Rolling Stone article, written nearly a decade later in 1972, when the game had become a phenomenon and video games were just be- ginning their !rst major decade. “Reliably,” Brand writes, “at any nighttime moment (i.e., non- business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are e%ectively out of their bodies, locked in life- or- death space combat computer- projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their !ngers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers’ valuable computer time.” He adds, “Something basic is going on.” Indeed, even more than other early computational “killer apps” and demos, video games o%ered something basic through aesthetic and embodied experiences that were viscerally compelling. These experiences brought the possibilities of computers to life for a broad public, transforming them from complex calculation devices to the expressive media that we know today.*& The prom- ise of this game was enough for Brand to announce, regarding a technology that had previously been reserved to specialists, “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.”*' In the years that followed, personal computing took o% and, in our time, has !nally become something basic.

Digital games were not merely window dressing that attracted people who might otherwise be uninterested in computers. From the beginning, these games also mirrored, animated, and experimented with fundamen- tal a%ordances of computation. To an unprecedented degree, they made computers palpable and palatable as major technologies with which anyone might think. As game studies scholar Aubrey Anable puts it, videogames such as Spacewar! operated as “demonstration programs” and served as “com- puters’ ambassadors to the general public; they were used to make the ma- chines seem friendly and accessible in an era before they became ‘personal.’ In this way, at their origin, video games were a%ective interfaces between computational processes and users, proxy systems that metaphorized in real time the cybernetic imbrication of mind, body, and code.”*( Whereas early video games often served as an a%ective means to the end of making com- puters acceptable to the mass public, they have since blossomed into a wide- spread and signi!cant medium in their own right.

In conjunction with contemporary scholarship on emotion and a%ect in video games, Experimental Games seeks more fully to understand and to pro-

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 27

pose ways to intervene in a society increasingly in.uenced by games.*) As art historian Jennifer Doyle observes, emotion and a%ect are “where ideology does its most devastating work. . . . where we come to know the contours of our selves, our bodies, our sense of soul—and this zone is always under con- stant policing and negotiation.”** In terms of emotion, games can produce annoyance, anxiety, or rage quitting. They inspire everything from delighted curiosity to deep compulsion. They can condition orientations of .exible optimism. They can captivate players with creative feelings of apophenia or darker entanglements of paranoia. They can allow participants to think through complicated circumstances and to experiment with unfamiliar ex- periences. Game critics such as Miguel Sicart have argued for the centrality of “emotional designs” that create environments that surround us with “ob- jects created with the intention of appealing to our senses and feelings.”*+ Such emotional design can reinforce the ideological status quo but can also open up ways of navigating it.

Though most existing scholarship in this area has focused on emotion and feeling in video games, beginning in chapter 2, this book also attends to the nonrepresentational dimensions of a#ect that video games open up.*, While emotion carries a subjective and personal content that can be !xed via psychological categories and narrativized via biographical and !ctional accounts, a%ect is an experience of intensity that is nonconscious and rela- tional. Philosopher Brian Massumi describes emotion as the most intense “capture and closure of a%ect” that recognizes its residue consciously and identi!es an aspect of it linguistically.+- By contrast, a%ect captures the viscerality of abstraction as it moves through lived bodies and everyday ex- perience. The ways in which video games channel such intensities o%er op- portunities to access, even play with, !elds of a%ective .ow that are enabled by digital and networked environments that often operate at subconscious and nonconscious scales. Even as I make local distinctions across this book among feeling, emotion, and a%ect, I do not rely entirely on the strain of af- fect theory developed by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and Erin Manning (by way of Baruch Spinoza). These scholars often maintain a sharp di%erence between emotion and a%ect. By contrast, what Donovan Schaefer calls the “phenomenological traditions” of a%ect theory foreground “embodied histories” and draw less !rm boundaries between conscious and nonconscious registers.+" This other strain—especially as it has unfolded in feminist and queer theory through the writing of scholars such as Eve Kosof- sky Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Kathleen Stewart—need not be opposed completely to the !rst. In fact, video games, with their reliance on computational abstraction and aesthetic concreteness,

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28 INTRODUCTION

rational structures and embodied processes, operate as an ideal medium for bringing these strains of a%ect theory into conversation with each other. They demonstrate the many ways that digital media can move us, includ- ing through processes of sociopolitical subject formation as it unfolds under neoliberalism.

Experimental Games

In the broadest sense, this is a book about the ways that digital games can and do operate as experiments. This may seem like a simple statement, but as I hope to show, the key terms in this proposition—“digital games” and “ex- periments”—are far from conceptually or historically simple. Various writers have already described games as promoting experimental ways of thinking. In the 1968 special volume Game, Play, Literature, which came out of Yale’s French Studies, the philosopher Eugen Fink announces that “each game is an attempt at existence, a vital experiment that encounters in the plaything the essence of unyielding reality.”+$ In 1970, Clark C. Abt makes a similar point that games “provide a mode of experimentation with alternative strategies and tactics in a competitive and constantly changing environment.”+& Mov- ing from games in general to video games in particular, the literary critic Colin Milburn argues, in 2018, that “the logic of experimentation is inher- ent to video games at every level, the procedures of exploration, testing the capacities of the game, discovering its laws and limitations, even if trying to break them.”+' Versions of this observation regarding the experimental quali- ties of games appear across writing about video games, but they are rarely ex- amined in detail. This exploration of experimentation (a term that I deploy in ways that are not reducible to the more common scienti!c uses of the term) is the one that I will be conducting across the following chapters. To be clear, though I discuss a number of avant- garde and art games through this book, I mean “experimental” to signal qualities that inhere in all games, not just ones inspired by modernist and postmodernist aesthetics or by political art.

To put it directly up front, games operate as experiments insofar as they combine a stable foundation of starting conditions, rules, and objectives on the one hand with the contingency and possibility of play on the other. This balance encourages the provoked observation that is experiment: a designed repetition that produces di%erence. Most commonly, this repetition- with- a- di%erence that characterizes video games is translated into the consumer category of “replay value.” Nevertheless, this quality also gestures toward the more profound pedagogical value of games, insofar as they enable encoun- ters with possibility or potential. If video games are co- emergent with neo-

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 29

liberalism, they also point, through their own artifactual construction and arti!cial con.ict, to the constructedness of that worldview. I would like to ar- gue that learning not only how to play but also think with games makes one more sensitive to nondeterministic potentials that inhere in each situation and each body at every moment.+( As a%ect theorist Erin Manning observers, potentiality is “the insertion of di%erence in a moment of certainty” and an exposure of inherent “di%erence in systems that appear to be organized and unchanging.”+) Gameplay is a virtual activity, then, insofar as it entails the generation of potential and dwelling within possibility spaces.

It is possible to begin thinking about games as experimental either from a formalist or play- centric standpoint. To begin with formalism, games might be treated as models that enable experimentation that better demonstrates something about the operation of the world outside of the game. Of course, this idea of games as models applies more readily to certain types of games (e.g., simulation games, gami!ed apps, or games for change) than to others (e.g., many commercial games belonging to genres such as platformers, !rst- person shooters, or action/adventure games). Perhaps in a broader sense, all games can be approached as interactive models. After all, games reduce the complexity of systems and invite players to interact with those systems at a more manageable scale. To di%ering degrees of realism, Street Fighter II is a model of combat, SimCity is a model of urban construction, and Virtua Racing is a model of Formula One racing. In each of these cases, players can experi- ment with their avatar, the environment, and game mechanics, within the parameters of the game’s designed rules and objectives. Players engage in explorative trial and error. Across these trials, they have recourse to the safe failure that is built into most games. Moreover, in some of these cases, de- signer ambitions of visual and procedural realism provide some degree of real- world mimicry.

A formalist perspective that approaches video games as models or toys, however, limits a recognition of the type of experimentation that they might enable to the predesigned a%ordances that players might discover through probing or reverse engineering. This version of trial- and- error experimen- tation with a designed system remains important but brings with it serious limitations. An alternative approach treats games as processes or occasions for play. Both game studies scholars and game designers have elaborated a process- oriented or play- centric approach in recent years.+* Taking a social perspective on games, anthropologist Thomas Malaby argues that games are “grounded in human practice and as fundamentally processual.” Instead of reducing a game to determinative rules and !nite goals, he adds, “as it is played, [a game] always contains the potential for generating new practices

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30 INTRODUCTION

and new meanings, possibly re!guring the game itself.” Play, like experimen- tation, is an inherently uncertain activity that acquires its intensity and .ow from contingency. Unlike the experimental logic of a !nite game that in- vites experimentation until one has enacted all substantive preset permu- tations, the contingency that play mobilizes, and to which it responds, cre- ates knowledge of “that which could have been otherwise.”++ Every session in front of a screen need not be an adoption of habit, but rather an opportunity to discover or generate di%erence. Instead of a formalist model, a play- centric approach invites us to think of any game (to borrow Kurt Squire’s term) as a possibility space.+,

It would be too easy to celebrate playful experimentation as the abso- lute alternative to a neoliberal paradigm of gami!cation. For this reason, this book remains cautious about a wholly romanticist impulse that would ele- vate play to a utopian status or celebrate games as critical objects of non- instrumental play that achieve distance from the social world.,- We see re- lated modernist and postmodernist inclinations among game critics who leave open space for particular games that operate through a mode of cul- tural resistance or opposition—for example, Galloway’s “countergaming,” Mary Flanagan’s “alternative” or “radical” games,” Nick Dyer- Witherford and Greig de Peuter’s “counterplay against Empire,” and even the more broadly adopted category of “serious games.”," To be clear, I am not opposed to any of these terms—as a game designer I create games that belong to these cate- gories and as a critic in this book I analyze such games as well. Even so, my own organizing concept of experiment introduces a somewhat di%erent way of thinking about games that is more ambivalent (which is not to say apathetic). Experiment is less totalizing and systematic than “utopia” and at least sometimes less partisan than “resistance.” An experimental game lacks the rhetorical certainty inherent in game designer Jane McGonigal’s conviction that “reality is broken” but that, fortunately, games can “make us better” and can “change the world.”,$ Arguably, some games can achieve such ends and resolve certain well- de!ned problems. But experimental games, in my conception, are more modest, .exible, and exploratory. They can be as ephemeral as Rita Raley’s “tactical media”—though not always as pointed in their interventions.,& They can also be long- lasting and coterminous with one’s everyday life, as with large- scale alternate reality games that last for months or years and blur the outlines of the ludic magic circle.

Regardless of scope, experiments usually occur in a series that condi- tions the world and a researcher’s observations through designs that ques- tion, scale, and con!gure—but also disrupt and create. Experiment is never entirely impartial; it involves the experimenter in a temporary interruption

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 31

in the world that would not have occurred without designed intervention. Though positivistic science may separate experiments from the surround- ing environment or world, seeking to “control” extraneous variables that interrupt the acquisition of knowledge, experiment is always a feature of the world that can never fully control emergent contingency. To be fair, any design requires a situational sovereignty. Even so, one can liken experimen- tal design, in my sense, to a “teleonomic” tendency of context- speci!c goal- directedness in which the process of exploration and feedback leads to regu- lar reformulations of the goal, rather than a “teleological” commitment to an absolute and predetermined !nal cause. In other words, experiment can be vigilantly purposeful without being dogmatically purposive.,' In this sense, experiment need not impose an external will to control the world. To be sure, experiments are arti!cial and constructed, much like games that depend on arti!cial con.ict. But in this very constructedness, experiment reveals the non- natural and created qualities that inhere in the concept of “world” itself. For these reasons, this book is more aligned with positions taken by artistic collectives such as Fluxus and the Situationists, social scientists from Johan Huizinga to Thomas Malaby, and game designers such as Jane McGonigal and Mary Flanagan who treat games as experiments that are integrated with everyday life.,( While thinking through designed form, I also take seri- ously empirical practices of play that are central to social scientists such as T. L. Taylor or to Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s “metagaming” ap- proach.,) Experimentation can happen when people build their own games on top of existing ones, but also when they experiment through the enact- ment of and interpretation of games.

A historical problem that this book faces head- on is that both neolib- eralism and gaming draw on the a%ordances of experimental method. As I argue in chapter 2, since the late twentieth century, experimentation has transitioned from an activity once practiced by socially marginalized !g- ures—scientists or avant- garde artists—to a dominant principle of contem- porary life.,* To think about how important the form of the experiment has become in our time, not only as an abstract form but also as an operational protocol, we need only think of the centrality of research and development to postindustrial capitalism and of playful experimentation to the culture of Silicon Valley. Within the periodization of this book, neoliberalism in par- ticular has adopted an experimental bearing from its beginnings to such a degree that we might consider experimentation as one of its de!ning prin- ciples. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s created uncertainty about the future of the world economy. Though neoliberalism emerged from this vacuum as the dominant order—quickly naturalized as

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32 INTRODUCTION

a system without alternative—its history reveals a nimble and probing ap- proach to worldmaking that built on earlier colonial modes of experimenta- tion. Such “trial and error” included the US supported coup by Pinochet in Chile that David Harvey describes as “a brutal experiment carried out in the periphery [that] became a model for the formulation of policies in the cen- tre.”,+ Such opportunistic and (only partially) controlled neoliberal experi- ments built upon earlier settler colonialism through forced nation- building projects such as the Iraq War and responses of systematic neglect such as state inactions during Hurricane Katrina.

Beyond a series of seized historical opportunities used to create and test techniques of governance, neoliberalism can also be said to be inherently ex- perimental in its relationship to virtuality, in the sense of potentiality. Funda- mentally, an experiment exceeds mere observation: it is an intervention into and reformation of a contingent space of possibility. To put this in a more polemical way, experiment is not discovery but an act of creation that in- cludes hypothesis generation and the shaping of a !eld of potentiality prior to its actualization.,, As Lazzarato observes, drawing from Deleuze, the stan- dardization of money in the nineteenth century already amounts to “a capi- talist appropriation of virtuality insofar as it amounts to power over pos- sibilities.” By the late twentieth century, this relationship to virtuality has reached a heightened state in which we enter into “an economy of possibili- ties, an economy in which !nance assumes the power to name, delimit, and circumscribe the possibilities for a society and an epoch” and in which “a pro- liferation of choices, options, and possibilities [is] o%ered to consumers.”"-- Beyond !nance and consumer culture, the privatization at the core of neolib- eral restructuring centralizes power over the !eld of possible actions taken by contemporary subjects.

If neoliberalism already experiments with possibility !elds, games in our time have the potential to be machines that tap into those potentials and en- gender change. As Manning again explains, “Engendering takes place in the magic moment between potentiality and actuality, where what is exposed is the actuality of the virtual and the virtuality of the actual.”"-" Without prom- ising utopian alternatives, games can remind us that the virtual is real and can become actual—and therefore that the world is inherently changeable. They do so, importantly, not through cerebral exposition but in visceral and a%ective ways. Digital games, in particular, take the stakes of this form to an even higher level as they enable experiments with life in a historical moment characterized by digital media, deep learning algorithms, and telecommuni- cation networks—as well as the forms of distributed cognition and a%ective labor that these technologies occasion. Maintaining a critical ambivalence,

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 33

we can characterize computational media as virtuality machines in multiple senses. As Katherine Hayles argues, such media carry with them an unprece- dented capacity for change:

In these terms, computational media have a distinct advantage over every other technology ever invented. They are not necessarily the most important for human life; one could argue that water treatment plants and sanitation facilities are more important. They are not necessarily the most transformative; that honor might go instead to transportation technologies, from dirt roads to jet aircraft. Computational media are distinct, however, because they have a stronger evolutionary potential than any other technology, and they have this potential because of their cognitive capabilities, which among other function- alities, enable them to simulate any other system."-$

For Hayles, computational media introduce an unprecedented possibility for evolutionary change, both via computer technologies themselves and via the e%ects of those systems on human beings, in varied relations of symbiotic mutualism, unidirectional commensalism, and harmful parasitism.

Though computational developments such as arti!cial intelligence or neural networks might indeed have a greater ultimate impact on the future of human life, the cultural saturation of video games makes them a more powerful exemplar of the period from the 1970s through the 2010s. We can add to Hayles’s formulation that the evolutionary potential and virtuality of computational media both augments and threatens neoliberalism. The duality is of course not unique to contemporary media. Speaking about tech- nology as such, Martin Heidegger already observed, in his well- known read- ing of Hölderlin, that technology entails both a saving power and a danger. In analyzing video games, this book holds onto this simultaneity—this in- tense ambivalence—as a way to question the present. As Heidegger writes, “The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For ques- tioning is the piety of thought.”"-& Video games, with their dangers and sav- ing powers, expand the !eld of questioning, but as we will see in the chapters that follow, they also invite an active and uncertain experimentation that demands great care.

Level Guide

If, as Hayles suggests, computational media carry with them the potential for change, they also have the capacity to generate new concepts. Concepts

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34 INTRODUCTION

can operate as constructivist mechanics—in the specialist sense of “game me- chanics,” the verbs or actions that a player enacts and experiments with in order to participate in and alter the state of play. Admittedly, video games are more commonly treated as works of entertainment, culture, or even art than as philosophical or political machines that yield concepts. But games are also platforms for generating combinations of moves, a%ects, tactics, strategies, rule variations, mods, and indeed concepts that did not exist prior to play."-' The chapters that follow are organized according to single- word concepts that are central to the framework of neoliberalism but also serve as internal pressure points that suggest ways to exploit that worldview. These concepts include gami!cation, experimentation, choice, control, di#culty, failure, im- provisation, and joy.

Though I discuss video games that date back to the beginnings of digital game design, the more sustained cases through which I explore each of the book’s main concepts are all selected from the early twenty- !rst century. This emphasis has to do with a noteworthy change in the production, circulation, and reception of video games that took place around 2007. This period saw the introduction of a wide range of new cultural, technological, and institu- tional practices that included the phenomena of “indie games,” “art games,” and “DIY game making,” in part because of the adoption of online distribu- tion platforms such as Steam (2003, with Steam Community launching in 2007) and PlayStation Network (2006). These categories opened up many previously unavailable experimental avenues for games that exceeded merely economic motivations."-( Thus, this period saw the growth of an emergent game scene through, for example, a new focus on auteur game designers, the proliferation of game- oriented art exhibits, and the growth of independent game conferences."-) As Felan Parker notes, the years between 2007 and 2009 also gave rise to a number of widely recognized art games, including Passage (2007), The Marriage (2007), The Graveyard (2008), Braid (2008), Flower (2009), and Every Day the Same Dream (2009) (!g. 0.2)."-* This period also saw the ex- pansion of mobile games, virtual reality, and augmented reality that made digital games even more important and formally diverse. At the end of this !rst decade of the twenty- !rst century, game studies emerged as a viable academic !eld that expanded game pedagogy, supported by earlier work by scholars such as Espen Aarseth, Mary Flanagan, Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, Noah Wardrip- Fruin, and Mark J. P. Wolf. This range of changes makes the video game a completely di%erent cultural object in 2020 than it was in 1970.

To be clear, while this is a book about the ways in which video games are and can be experimental, it does not focus exclusively on the types of “ex- perimental games” that we might call “avant- garde games.”"-+ Given the cur-

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 35

rent popularity of video games, it is not uncommon to encounter formally experimental games within what might previously have been considered a mass market media ecology. For example, Stardew Valley, about which I write in chapter 1, is an independently produced game with a number of experi- mental qualities that nonetheless sold more than 3.5 million units during 2016 and 2017. Similarly, Journey, a formally experimental networked video game, became the fastest selling game ever on the PlayStation Network in the US in 2012."-, Other games that I analyze are easier to categorize: an easy- to- learn mobile game like Candy Crush Saga is unquestionably “commer- cial” and an inherently frustrating game with complex thematic qualities such as Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic is undeniably “avant- garde” in its formal and sociopolitical orientation. Regardless of these taxonomic di%erences, throughout my selected cases, I hope to do justice to the diversity of forms that digital games have taken, especially in the early twenty- !rst century. Along with varying degrees of visibility, I explore numerous genres includ- ing single- player, multiplayer, and networked real- time strategy, platformer, simulator, !rst- person shooter, role- playing, puzzle, and alternate reality games. Beyond genres, each chapter o%ers close readings of speci!c cases as a way of foregrounding the experimental processes that are immanent to speci!c games and the modes of play they enable.

The chapters in this book unfold in an arc but have also been written to be read in a modular fashion, allowing readers to focus on the game con- cepts that most interest them. Part 1 of the book, which includes this intro- duction, chapter 1, and chapter 2, o%ers an economic history and political framework for understanding contemporary video games and their experi- mental dimensions. Chapter 1 gives an overview of gamification as a histori- cal paradigm that brings games to the forefront of social, political, economic, and aesthetic thought, particularly during the period of neoliberalism. This chapter insists that though the term gami!cation, and the design practice to

Figure 0.2. Every Day the Same Dream (Molleindustria, 2009).

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36 INTRODUCTION

which it refers, can be located squarely within the twenty- !rst century, this paradigm has its roots in an earlier moment in the second half of the twen- tieth century. I extend the history of contemporary gami!cation from the 2010s back to three US contexts from the mid- twentieth through the early twenty- !rst century. These contexts, which critics rarely discuss in conjunc- tion with one another, include the economic method of game theory, the world- building program of neoliberalism, and the theories and applications of behavioral economics. Following this historical and conceptual argument, at the end of the chapter, I analyze two video games—King Digital Entertain- ment’s mainstream mobile game Candy Crush Saga (2012) and Eric Barone’s independently designed simulator Stardew Valley (2016)—that demonstrate how these historical contexts yield contemporary gami!cation. This analysis of gami!cation serves as the basis of my critique of how most people have come to frame or understand games in our time.

Following this critique, chapter 2 turns to the concept of experimentation in order to establish a constructive foundation for the remainder of the book, which contends that video games enable experiments with life in a historical moment characterized by digital media and networks. Games can be under- stood as experimental in ways that accord with both earlier experimental art forms (such as the modernist novel or avant- garde cinema) and with forms of scienti!c hypothesis testing (such as the randomized controlled trial). The unique experimentality of video games has much to do with the ways they condition experience and modulate a%ect as part of what I call the video game sensorium. This chapter builds toward an engagement with two cases: Bliz- zard’s popular real- time strategy game StarCraft (1998) and Jonathan Blow’s independent platformer game Braid (2008). This concept of experimentation also informs my analysis of all of the games in the chapters that follow.

Part 2 of the book, which includes chapters 3 through 6, explores four cen- tral concepts in game studies, attending in particular to how they have been informed by neoliberal thought and how experimental games can compli- cate them. Chapter 3 takes up the concept of choice that is central to contem- porary economics and the medium of video games. Rational choice theory bases all economic activity on decision- making undertaken by a rational sub- ject. However, nonconscious decision- making informs everything from rela- tions on social media to trades across !nancial markets. Video games serve as an ideal medium for exploring this concept, insofar as the central operation of video game play is decision- making, which becomes formally accessible via preset branching choices in an interactive narrative game or via the more open- ended exploration and goal setting within a sandbox game. This chap- ter delves into the limits and possibilities of choice in a digital era by ana-

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 37

lyzing the varied theories of choice that underlie video games that include the !rst- person interactive meta!ctional game The Stanley Parable (2013), the networked game Moirai (2013), and the role- playing game Undertale (2015). My reading of these games moves from a model of rational decision- making to one of experimental construction of freedom.

Chapter 4 explores the concept of control that is signi!cant to both video game interfaces and to contemporary systems of political power. In a variety of ways, video games train players to expect, enjoy, and explore systems of control through modes of rationalism, individualism, and e#ciency. Along- side this impulse toward sovereignty (a term that I use to address both per- sonal and political forms of control), digital games also make available alter- native dynamics of nonsovereignty. In analyzing medium- speci!c ways that video games can complicate a dominant concept of control, this chapter ana- lyzes three queer and trans games. First, it attends to the interactive nar- rative techniques of Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia (2012), an autobiographical browser- based assemblage of minigames that explores processes of gender transition. Next, the chapter analyzes the formal properties of Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic (2013), another autobiographical yet considerably more abstract platformer game that explores power and powerlessness as they relate to identity. Finally, I analyze Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn’s avant- garde, touchscreen video game Luxuria Superbia (2013), which uses multisensory stimulation and opaque feedback in a hands- on exploration of sexuality that challenges conventional control schemes.

Chapter 5 examines how video games serve as an instructive focal point for analyzing the concept of di!iculty in our time. From a neoliberal per- spective, experiences of di#culty are frequently approached as the a%ec- tive residue of competition. As an alternative way of encountering the his- torical present, I propose three discrete types of di#culty that video games bring to the forefront: mechanical, interpretive, and a%ective di#culty. All three forms of di#culty, which are not reducible to competition, demand continued analysis, but I argue especially for the importance of attending to the third category of di#cult a%ects and emotions. A%ect allows us to think of video games not simply as solvable or resolvable experiences, but as pro- cesses of ongoing sociopolitical experimentation that cannot be reduced, as they often are, either to their representational or technological dimensions. This chapter includes close readings of two independent platformer video games: Jason Nelson’s Game, Game, Game, and Again Game (2007) and Alex- ander D. Ocias’s Loved (2010). These games demonstrate ways of approaching di#culty as an a%ective !eld that exceeds the narrow scope of competition.

Chapter 6 turns from di#culty to the closely related concept of failure.

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38 INTRODUCTION

This chapter analyzes games that challenge the victory- oriented form of gami!cation while also foregrounding the failure perpetuated by neoliber- alism. The three games that I analyze include the Urban Ministries of Dur- ham’s browser- based role- playing game SPENT (2011), Jörg Lukas Matthaei’s alternate reality game Thresholdland: An Expatriation in Ten Days (2010), and Tomorrow Corporation’s puzzle game Little Inferno (2012). These games shift attention from neoliberalism’s systems of choice and control to the every- day precarity, fragility, and structural inequality across intersecting zones of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and ability. Together, they compli- cate the value and potentials of the failure states that undergird most games.

Part 3 of the book, which includes chapter 7 and the coda, turns most explicitly from an analytical to a practice- based register to explore what it means to experiment through game design. Chapter 7 turns to the concept of improvisation. This term has become popular across several domains, ranging from comedy improv to jazz performance, martial arts, and even business practice. I argue that games open up new ways of thinking about contin- gency, responsiveness, and performance, particularly within the digital en- vironments that are now ubiquitous in many parts of the US. This chapter departs from exclusively screen- based games and considers the mixed reality form of alternate reality games, which invite improvisational storytelling across digital and analog media. Further departing from the previous chap- ters, this !nal chapter considers a single case of a large- scale alternate reality game, the parasite (2017), that I codesigned and executed at the University of Chicago. Drawing from methodologies such as critical making and emergent frameworks such as the experimental humanities, I contend that both game- play and experimental game design may encourage improvisational and un- expected responses to neoliberalism. More than any other part of the book, this !nal chapter o%ers my design alternative of experimental games that stand in distinction to gami!cation.

Finally, a short coda complicates the idea of fun that is omnipresent in discussions of game design. Here, I introduce the concept of joy, adapted from a%ect theory, to gesture toward an alternative approach to making games. Without dismissing fun altogether, I argue that the intensi!cation signaled by joy—a maintenance of contrasts that cannot be resolved—might help us think beyond the economic concepts of pleasure, satisfaction, and grati!cation.

All of these concepts seek to demonstrate how games can help not merely solve problems but also to make problems that are better de!ned and under- stood. The medium- speci!c ways in which games make problems are a cen- tral and active concern throughout this book. I approach video games as not

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SOCIET Y OF THE GAME 39

only a technological medium or artistic form but also, more profoundly, as machines for constructing new concepts in the early twenty- !rst century. These concepts have the potential to create new ways of being, acting, and experimenting within (and perhaps beyond) our digital and networked present.

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291

Notes

Prologue

1 Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 80. Katie Salen’s later work can also be found under the name Katie Salen Tekinba6.

2 Westworld, season 2, episode 7, “Les Ecorches,” dir. Nicole Kassell, originally aired on June 3, 2018.

3 Though I do not elaborate this reading here, both The Game and Westworld play out paranoid cultural fantasies of emerging threats to the privilege of white cis masculinity. Both works borrow elements of mid- to- late twentieth- century conspiracy !lms and explore them in the context of an increasingly digital and networked world. For more on the conjunction of masculinity and video game culture, see Carly Kocurek, Coin- Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kocu- rek’s book explores how videogames and arcades in the 1970s and early 1980s enabled a speci!c form of American masculinity. Admittedly, the early twenty- !rst- century video game market has increasingly expanded beyond the narrow demographic of white male players. However, these roots continue to inform the inequities and ongoing lack of di%erence across game culture and particularly among large studio AAA and popular video games.

4 Johan Huzinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play- Element in Culture (Boston: Bea- con Press, 1955).

5 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The present book is strongly inspired by Wark’s conceptual approach to video games. In Gamer Theory, she thinks through concepts such as allegory, boredom,

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and complexity in and through games. For an estimate of the number of gamers worldwide (of which there are many versions), see Tom Wijman, “The Global Games Market Will Generate $152.1 Billion in 2019 as the US Overtakes China as the Biggest Market,” Newzoo, June 18, 2019, https:// newzoo .com /insights /articles /the - global - games - market - will - generate - 052 - 0 - billion - in - 2307 - as - the - u - s - over takes - china - as - the - biggest - market/.

6 The lack of diversity in games has been widely documented through numerous surveys and studies, including not only in terms of video game players but also video game designers, developers, and journalists. For one key scholarly account of inequality in video games, see Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard, Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018).

7 Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the "wenti- eth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), 2.

8 Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1993), xix, 3, and 4.

Introduction

1 Clark C. Abt, Serious Games (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 5, 9.

2 Ken Binmore, Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2007), 1.

3 In addition to popular examples, game metaphors have also made their way increasingly into the discourses of various academic disciplines. The centrality of games to economics is a chorus that recurs throughout this book, but it’s worth noting that this language appears in the !eld of game design itself. Tracy Fullerton, for instance, writes that “Games are everywhere, from how we man- age our money to how we form relationships. Everyone has goals in life and must overcome obstacles to achieve those goals. And of course, there are rules. If you want to win in the !nancial markets, you have to understand the rules of trading stocks and bonds, pro!t forecasts, IPOs, etc. When you play the mar- kets, the act of investing becomes very similar to a game. The same holds true for winning someone’s heart. In courtship, there are social rules that you must follow, and it’s in understanding these rules and how you !t into society that helps you to succeed” (Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games [Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2008], 7–8). This lan- guage is also visible in a seemingly more distant !eld such as literary criticism. Rita Felski, for instance, uses games to understand a central methodology of literary criticism and humanistic thought: “Critique, in other words, is a form of addictive and gratifying play: a language game in a quite literal sense. Like most games, it combines rules and expectations with the possibility of unexpected moves and inventive calculations. To read in this way is to maneuver against an imagined opponent, to engage in determinate and precise calculations of strategy, to perform a role equipped with certain requirements. Such gamelike qualities do not void other dimensions of reading, but they are often especially salient in an academic context, where scholars are rewarded for ingenious forms

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of puzzle- making and puzzle- solving” (The Limits of Critique [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015], 110).

4 Tom Wijman puts the number of worldwide gamers at 2.5 billion: “The Global Games Market Will Generate $152.1 Billion in 2019 as the US Overtakes China as the Biggest Market,” Newzoo, June 18, 2019, https:// newzoo .com /insights /articles /the - global - games - market - will - generate - 052 - 0 - billion - in - 2307 - as - the - u - s - over takes - china - as - the - biggest - market/. For another estimate, see: Dean Takahashi. “Newzoo: 2.4 billion people will game in 2019, thanks to mobile,” March 5, 2019, https:// venturebeat .com /2307 /38 /35 /newzoo - 2 - 9 - billion - people - will - game - in - 2307 - thanks - to - mobile/.

5 For a thorough history of early war games and serious applications of games, see Jon Peterson, Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantas- tic Adventures, from Chess to Role- Playing Games (San Diego, CA: Unreason Press, 2014).

6 Johan Huzinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play- Element in Culture (Boston: Bea- con Press, 1955), 6.

7 Alexander McFarlane Mood and R. D. Specht, “Gaming as a Technique of Analy- sis” (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp., 1954), 5.

8 Abt, Serious Games, 5.

9 For “gami!cation,” see numerous design texts, including Robert Hunter, The Gami!cation Handbook: Everything You Need to Know about Gami!cation (Brisbane, Australia: Emereo, 2011). Also see Byron Reeves and J. L. Read, Total Engage- ment: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Busi- nesses Compete (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009); Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder, Game- Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010); and Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham, Gami!cation by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2011). For a more critical exploration, see Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart E. Nacke, “From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: De!ning ‘Gami!cation,’” in Mind"rek ’11: Proceedings of the 15th International Academic Mind"rek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (2011): 9–15; and Patrick Jagoda, “Gami!ca- tion and Other Forms of Play,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 40, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 113–44. For an extensive history and analysis of gami!cation and its many rhetorical deployments, also see Sebastian Deterding, “The Ambiguity of Games: Histories and Discourses of a Gameful World,” in The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, ed. Ste%en P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 23–64.

10 For “gamespace,” see McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For “ludo!cation of society,” see Ste%en P. Walz, Toward a Ludic Architecture: Framing the Space of Play and Games (Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press, 2010). For “ludic society,” see Stenros Jaakko, Montola Markus, and Mäyrä Frans, “Pervasive Games in Ludic Society,” in Proceedings of the 2007 conference / Future Play (New York: ACM Press, 2007). For “ludic century,” see Eric Zimmerman and Heather Chap lin, “Manifesto: The 21st Century Will Be De!ned by Games,” Kotaku, September 9, 2013, https:// kotaku .com /manifesto - the - 20st - century

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- will - be - de!ned - by - games - 0245855239. For “gameful world,” see Ste%en P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding, eds., The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

11 Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 343, 359, 343–44.

12 Mark Seltzer, The O$cial World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 1, 9, 92, 93, 97.

13 Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Culture 2, no. 2 (2007): 107.

14 The properties of neoliberalism are of course more numerous and varied than my brief gloss allows. For a fuller de!nition of neoliberalism and accounts of the historical transition at which I gesture here, see David Harvey, A Brief His- tory of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Pierre Bour- dieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the "yranny of the Market, trans. Richard Nice (New York: The New Press, 2006). Also, S. M. Amadae o%ers a succinct account of this movement’s features in the following gloss: “Neoliberalism has a num- ber of agreed- upon facets. All value is commodi!ed and !nancialized. Work and gradual wealth accumulation are replaced with speculation, risk management, and casino !nance. Elite institutions spread the ethos of neoliberal agency and public policy. Citizens experience an increasing disparity in access to resources, income, and wealth. Consumers accept the inevitability that there are winners and losers, counter to the belief that markets will bring progressively improv- ing living conditions for everyone. Experts denounce the possibility for collec- tive action and meaningful democratic will formation, or even the existence of a public interest. Government and business incentivize compliance with perfor- mance metrics and regulations formulated to achieve social order. Individuals experience responsibility in terms of pay- as- you- go access to conditions neces- sary to sustain life. Entrepreneurs accept predatory practices to promote pro!t, circumventing mutual exchange. New practices of coercive bargaining are resolved through binding arbitration and debt bondage instead of public courts of justice and normative conduct oriented toward mutual exchange and recip- rocal respect” (Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015], 7). Several of these features inter- sect with the ethos of both competitive games and games of chance. Though I am using the term neoliberalism as it describes a recurring set of beliefs and practices, I take seriously Philip Mirowski’s historical caution that the para- digm emerged piecemeal across numerous institutions and is “a living, mutat- ing entity,” which “makes it hard for people who are not historians to wrap their arms around the phenomenon, and prompts those seeking a three- by- !ve card de!nition to throw up their hands in defeat” (Machine Dreams, 51–52).

15 For a historical text that emphasizes the integration of political and economic forces to neoliberalism, see Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Beyond either governments or corporations, other research has also emphasized the centrality that bottom- up forces have had in shaping neoliberalism and intro- ducing variations across national contexts. See, for instance, Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

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16 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 20, 31. Though Brown argues that neoliberalism is “norma- tive” and extends “everywhere,” she does not claim that this order of reason is homogeneous or identical in all places. In another article, she clari!es, “A para- dox, then. Neoliberalism is a distinctive mode of reason, production of subjects, ‘conduct of conduct,’ and scheme of valuation. It names a historically speci!c economic and political reaction against Keynesianism and democratic socialism as well as a more generalized practice of ‘economizing’ spheres and activities heretofore governed by other orders of value. Yet in its di%erential instantiation across countries, regions, and sectors, in its di%erential intersection with extant cultures and political traditions, and above all, in its convergences and uptakes of other discourses and developments, neoliberalism takes diverse shapes and spawns diverse content and normative details, even di%erent idioms. It is glob- ally ubiquitous yet disuni!ed and nonidentical with itself, in space and over time” (“Sacri!cial Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Austerity Politics,” Constellations 23, no. 1 [2016]: 4).

Other critics have also argued that neoliberalism exceeds a purely economic register. Cultural critic Elizabeth Povinelli, for example, treats neoliberalism (or as she calls it “late liberalism”) as “a pragmatic concept” or “a tool” that activates “a series of struggles across an uneven social terrain” that produces “the condi- tions for new forms of sociality and for new kinds of markets and market instru- ments.” Shifting from economic to cultural terrain, this period entails “the gov- ernance of social di%erence in the wake of the anticolonial movements and the emergence of new social movements” (Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 2011], 19 and ix). Povinelli’s term “late liberalism” names “a belated response to the challenge of social di%erence and the alternative social worlds and projects potentially shel- tered there” that unfolds beginning in the 1970s (25). Late liberalism operates as a governance strategy that must take the place of laissez- faire liberalism in the face of increased social resistance. Though I agree with this cultural reading of the period, I retain the term “neoliberalism” because of its more common usage.

17 It is worth noting Sarah Brouillette’s argument that many accounts of neoliber- alism ignore or minimize the longer history of capitalism, as well as the impor- tance of the “labor- capital relation” within neoliberalism (280). Rather than dismissing the usefulness of the term altogether, Brouillette emphasizes the importance of historicizing it within a broader history of capitalism. For more see “Neoliberalism and the Demise of the Literary,” in Neoliberalism and Contem- porary Literary Culture, ed. Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith (Balti- more: Johns Hopkins Press, 2017).

18 Margaret Thatcher, “Mrs. Thatcher: The First Two Years,” interview with Ronald Butt, Sunday "imes, May 3, 1981.

19 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). For an expan- sion of the mechanisms by which neoliberalism shapes human capital, see Maurizio Lazzarato, “Neoliberalism in Action,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 109–33.

20 Maurizio Lazzarato, Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neo- liberal Age, trans. Arianna Bove, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Go%ey, Mark Hayward, Jason Read, and Alberto Toscano (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 33.

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21 One critique of Wendy Brown’s version of neoliberalism unfolds precisely on this point. As Annie J. McClanahan observes, “Theories of human capital, unlike theories of, say, alienation, are themselves profoundly capitalist, insofar as they remake the subject in capital’s image. They thus do little to capture either labor on a global scale or the condition of the US under- and unemployed. More- over, ‘human capital’ is not a critical category. Exploitation and alienation and class, by contrast, are meant not only to describe a historical condition, they are also meant to serve as a way to ruthlessly critique them—and in the case of class, also a way of actually acting outside dominant conditions” (“Becoming Non- Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos,” Theory & Event 20, no. 2 [2017]: 514).

22 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 34.

23 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 149. There are countless books about wealth inequality under neoliberal capitalism. For one extensive and broadly circu- lating account of excessive wealth concentration in this period, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the "wenty- First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

24 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975– 1976 (London: Penguin, 2003).

25 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 62. As he further puts it, “Racism (internal, toward immigrants, and external, toward other civilizations) is one of the most potent phenomena of ‘repugnance’ and ‘malevolence’ that contributes to the constitution and the !xing of the territories, the ‘identities,’ and the ‘values’ that ‘capital’ lacks. In practice, the government of conduct today in all the capi- talist West is structured by this phenomenon, which emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, has undergone an explosion and a neoarchaic recon- !guration with the growing power of neoliberal economic policies” (64). It is worth adding that neoliberalism interacts with older religious systems in com- plex ways. For example, for an account of how neoliberalism and evangelicalism interrelate in the United States, see William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Chris- tianity, American Style (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

26 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2014). For a later analysis that considers feminism and gender within an anticapitalist framework that includes an understanding of neoliberalism, see Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Femi- nism for the 99%: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2019).

27 For an account of the relationship between Taylorism and gami!cation in regard to labor productivity, see Jennifer deWinter, Carly A. Kocurek, and Randall Nichols, “Taylorism 2.0: Gami!cation, scienti!c management and the capitalist appropriation of play,” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 6, no. 2 (2014): 109–27. For an account on post- Fordism, postindustrialism, and gami!cation, see P. J. Rey, “Gami!cation and Post- Fordist Capitalism,” in The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). This chap- ter explores the ways in which gami!cation (as a design practice) appropriates economic activity at the levels of production and consumption in order “to accumulate wealth for the capitalist” (281). Rey brie.y considers the “.exible

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strategy of subjecti!cation” and the “.uid mechanism of disciplinary power” that gami!cation employs (279). Building on this frame, I consider in greater detail the role of neoliberalism as it extends to the social, political, and cultural levels. Several texts also explore the relationship between gami!cation, labor, and play. See, for instance, Julian Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry,” Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005). For an exploration of games and global capitalism, see Nick Dyer- Witheford and Greig De Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). For a broader exploration of game politics, including their role in contemporary capitalism, see Liam Mitchell, Ludopolitics: Video- games against Control (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018).

28 This approach has been expanded upon by theorists belonging to both the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools, as well as the contemporary !eld of cultural studies.

29 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc- ibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–20, 23, and 40.

30 Ibid., 42.

31 Though I am taking a comparative media approach and emphasizing di%erence here, as a way of highlighting what is unique about video games, there are also various ways of thinking about !lm and video games in continuity. For instance, as Benjamin notes, far from an inherently alienating or comprehensively dehumanizing operation, !lm can enable insight and open up unprecedented room for play: “On the one hand, !lm furthers insight into the necessities gov- erning our lives by its use of close- ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected !eld of action [Spielraum]” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 37). Play is a key concept that comes up throughout this book and is of course not unique to games—let alone video games. For an extended discussion of Benjamin’s relations to play that opens up ways of thinking about cinema and video games together, see Miriam B. Hansen, “Room- for- play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 1, no. 109 (2004): 3–45.

32 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. Debord actively resisted the term media, especially in his later Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London: Verso, 1988), as a popular replacement of the more politically charged spectacle. Media, for Debord, describes a unilateral strategy of propaganda used to communicate orders. Drawing from later work in media studies, I treat media in a more multilateral, archaeological, and epistemological fashion. For this sense of the term, see W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). As Mitchell and Hansen have observed, “Media form the infrastructural basis, the quasi- transcendental condition, for experience and understanding.” They “make knowledge possible in a given historical moment” and “broker the giving of space and time within which concrete experience becomes possible” (vii).

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33 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 19–20.

34 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophi- cal Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Horkheimer and Adorno use the term “culture industry” to emphasize the top- down management of a system that does not yield a true mass culture. They argue that !lm spectators experience a “wither- ing of imagination and spontaneity” through a passive engagement with a cul- tural product that “positively debars the spectator from thinking” (100).

35 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 17.

36 The culturally dominant status of video games is linked in large part to their economic success. Taking into account the combined growth of console, PC, portable, and online games, estimates suggest that games were already a $56 bil- lion business in 2010. In late 2010, a single game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, earned approximately $360 million in a single day, breaking the all- time record for one- day sales across all entertainment media. For more, see “All the World’s a Game,” special report, Economist, December 10, 2011, htttp:// www .economist .com /node /20590019. Estimates for 2019 put video game revenues at $152.1 billion world- wide (Tom Wijman, “The Global Games Market Will Generate $152.1 Billion in 2019 as the US Overtakes China as the Biggest Market,” Newzoo, June 18, 2019). It is worth noting that given the vast quantity of free- to- play games, sales revenue is only one marker of the cultural reach of video games.

37 As McKenzie Wark puts it in Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), “Games are our contemporaries, the form in which the present can be felt and, in being felt, thought through. From this vantage point, the whole of cultural history can be rethought” (225). Also see Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Nick Dyer- Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

38 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 13.

39 Interconnection is far from an unproblematic idea that automatically yields col- lectivity. I explore the myriad tensions and internal contradictions of the net- worked dimension of contemporary society in greater detail in Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For one account of the early twenty- !rst century distribution environment that is made possible both by a web infrastructure and by media culture, see Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

40 To insist on di%erences between the earlier moment of radio, !lm, and broad- cast television and the era of video games is not to claim that the latter are absolutely new or that they wholly replace the earlier obsolete forms. In fact, it remains a critical and ongoing task to problematize the “newness” of so- called new media—a quality that too often goes assumed, fetishized, or celebrated without adequate attention to the precise continuities and discontinuities sug- gested by the digital. I take the term “pointcasting” from Tiziana Terranova, Net- work Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

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41 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 16. I use interacting here as shorthand for a broad range of activities that include interfacing with new media, enacting soft- ware, creating or customizing digital environments, and engaging in networked relations with other people.

42 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stan- ford University Press, 2002), 95–96. That digital media, including video games, introduce new means of participation does not mean that they lack the ideo- logical dimensions of the earlier culture industry. Even so, the ways in which that ideology is di%erent from what preceded it is one of the key issues that this chapter takes up.

43 As Debord explains, “There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activity is banned—a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle” (The Society of the Spectacle, 21–22).

44 Galloway, Gaming, 2.

45 Chris Chesher, “Neither Gaze nor Glance, but Glaze: Relating to Console Game Screens,” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 4, no. 2 (August 2007). A compa- rable conceptual tension arises when we return to Benjamin’s aura itself. At face value, video games may appear as an extension of !lm’s technological reproduc- ibility. Video games, after all, take the form of reproducible software that has, across their history, been conveyed to a mass market via video game ROM car- tridges, .oppy disks, compact discs, game cards, downloadable !les, and other storage formats. In this sense, similarly to !lm, video games lack an aura and, given their digital and computational genesis, lack reference to any original that has an indexical relationship to the physical world. On the other hand, if we treat a video game not as a !nite quantity of code but as an object that has meaning only upon enactment, then every playthrough of a game is unique, at the very least a repetition with a di%erence. Given that a video game, like a basketball game or a tennis match, unfolds through real- time play, it can be said to capture the “here and now” that Benjamin attributes to an artwork’s aura (Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc- ibility,” 21).

46 David Golumbia, “Games without Play,” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 179.

47 The data about usage time di%ers across surveys and studies but falls in the range of twenty to thirty hours a week. The top player of the expansion WoW: Cataclysm reportedly played 149 hours in the !rst week of its release in 2010.

48 I use the term “immaterial labor” to name a change in emphasis in labor, rather than a lack of materiality or embodied e%ects that such labor entails. For more on this term and related concepts, see for instance Maurizio Lazzarato, “Imma- terial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Michael Hardt, “A%ective Labor,” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 89–100; and Tiziana Terra- nova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33–58.

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49 Along with Golumbia’s “Games without Play” essay, see Hilde Corneliussen and Jill W. Rettberg, Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A “World of Warcraft™” Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). In particular, Rettberg’s essay, “Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft,” explores this blurring of work and play. Also see Alexander Galloway, “The Unworkable Interface,” New Literary History 39, no. 4 (Autumn 2008): 931–55. While I agree with the substance of these critiques of WoW, I also believe that virtual world spaces are open- ended enough to enable meaningful play and sociality that are not absolutely recuperated by the capital- ist logics that structure their core game designs. In my experience, once players have proven themselves by acquiring enough experience and property, they have greater freedom to engage in the more creative and complex aspects of gameplay. Of course, this model of development and progress is itself a feature of contemporary capitalism. Nevertheless, I would suggest that in a game space that includes millions of players and their creative energies, this structure is not totalizing. For a broader exploration of the blurring of work and play in contem- porary knowledge work, especially in digital media contexts, see Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

50 For Benjamin, one of !lm’s greatest discoveries is of what he calls the “opti- cal unconscious.” The camera, in conjunction with editing techniques, brings with it “resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretch- ing or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object.” In this way, !lm can reveal deeper structures and features of reality: “With the close- up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.” Such expansion and enlargement “brings to light entirely new structures of matter,” and slow motion “discloses quite unknown aspects” of movements. Video games might borrow some of these techniques of !lm, but they also open up a completely dif- ferent set of tools and modes of experience. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 37.

51 Galloway, Gaming, 2. A possible exception to this point would be a limit case such as video game like David O’Reilly’s Mountain, which allows observation but essentially no interactivity or meaningful actions. For a fuller account of this game, see James J. Hodge, “Sociable Media: Phatic Connection in Digital Art,” Postmodern Culture 26, no. 1 (2015).

52 It is worth nothing that this number does not include the substantial quantity of additional people who watch League of Legends and other e- sport games rather than playing themselves.

53 Carly Stern, “Sweet! Candy Crush reveals that users have played 1.1 TRILLION rounds of the popular game since it launched—with 70,000 MILES swiped every day,” Daily Mail, March 23, 2018, http:// www .dailymail .co .uk /femail /article - 550: 788 /Candy - Crush - Saga - statistics - total - games - played - highest - score .html.

54 Shabana Arif, “God of War on Track to Become Fastest Game to Reach 1 Billion Views on Youtube,” June 1, 2018, http:// www .ign .com /articles /230: /31 /30 /god - of - war - on - track - to - become - fastest - game - to - reach - 0 - billion - views - on - youtube.

55 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 28, 101.

56 See, for instance, Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Ko! Charles, and Erik Hurst,

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NOTES TO PAGE 21 301

“Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men,” Working Paper Series 23552 (Stanford: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017), https:// scholar .princeton .edu /sites /default /!les /maguiar /!les /leisure - luxuries - labor - june - 2304 .pdf. This paper contends that a work decline among men between ages twenty- one and thirty correlates with the increased organization of leisure time around video game play in the early twenty-!rst century.

57 Zarmena Khan, PlayStation Lifestyle, October 21, 2017, http:// www .playstationlife style .net /2304 /03 /20 /gaming - content - audience - reaches - 111m/. Here, I appre- ciate Anne J. McClanahan’s point that an account of neoliberalism such as the one o%ered by Wendy Brown foregrounds the experience of privileged sub- jects, including tenure- track university professors. As she writes, “I still worry that entrepreneurialism and !nancialization are not the best ways to describe the experience, or the consciousness, or the actual material status of what I would take to be the more exemplary subject of the present: an underemployed part- timer, probably working in the service sector, buying her groceries on her credit card and cashing her paychecks at a check cashing service, renting rather than owning her home, barely able to survive day to day and thus unlikely to see any of this precarity as an interest- bearing investment in her own future” (“Becoming Non- Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos,” 513). I am arguing that, especially post- 2008, the under- employed part- timer and the gamer have a higher likelihood of being the same subject, increasingly not merely in the United States or Europe, but worldwide. Later in this book, I also focus on issues of precarity, fragility, and failure that are more central to McClanahan’s account than Brown’s writing. In di%erent ways, and for di%erent subjects, video games can represent a temporary escape, an intensi!cation, and a complication of precarity.

58 I am focusing here on the centrality of games of competition within neoliberal- ism. However, this is not the only historical context in which this convergence has occurred. As Sebastian Deterding remarks regarding a very di%erent social- ist context, “Looking for a way to motivate workers without capitalist monetary incentives, Lenin proposed ‘socialist competition’: individual workers, groups, and whole factories were awarded points for their performance, earning com- mendations, banners, and orders for surpassing certain point thresholds or beating other groups” (“The Ambiguity of Games,” 27).

59 Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961). Among these other three categories, only games of chance remain economically dominant in the early twenty- !rst century, as evidenced by the success of slot machines and other forms of gambling in places like Las Vegas. Even so, most video games that incorporate chance still maintain some dimension of compe- tition and di#culty that requires player skill. Important scholarship on the pri- macy of games of chance in the broader contemporary culture has come largely from anthropology, including Thomas M. Malaby, Gambling Life: Dealing in Con- tingency in a Greek City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), and Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

60 Jesper Juul, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), and Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathu- kal, Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

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302 NOTES TO PAGES 22!24

61 Competition also plays a central role within game theory. For more on this point, see S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 74. I develop the rela- tionship of game theory and neoliberalism in greater detail in chapter 1.

62 Lazzarato. Experimental Politics, 7.

63 For more on this form of competition within gami!cation, see Gabe Zicher- mann and Joselin Linder, The Gami!cation Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game Mechanics to Crush the Competition (New York: McGraw- Hill Education, 2013).

64 Beyond gameplay itself, the video game industry has frequently gone under !re for promoting excessive competitive activity among its designers and other employees, demonstrating how vulnerable even the most sought- after mem- bers of the creative class are within neoliberalism. See, for instance, the anony- mously posted and infamous “EA: The Human Story,” November 10, 2004, https:// ea - spouse .livejournal .com /249 .html. For an analysis of this document and its implications for video game industry labor, see Nick Dyer- Witheford and Greig de Peuter, “‘EA Spouse’ and the Crisis of Video Game Labour: Enjoyment, Exclusion, Exploitation, Exodus,” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 599–618. For a critique of digital labor that encompasses but also exceeds video games, see Nick Dyer- Witheford, Cyber- proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London: Pluto Press, 2015).

65 Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013), 53.

66 For a longer list of ideological contradictions, see Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 51. For a discussion of “double truth,” see 68–83.

67 See, for instance, Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as Prac- tice of Freedom,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and "ruth, Volume 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), 281–302. Though it would require an extended his- torical approach to expand this argument, it is worth at least suggesting that from a historical perspective, games produce a synthesis between two modes of thought that were dominant, though often opposed, in the period following World War II: neoclassical economics on the one hand and operations research and systems analysis on the other. Games, in other words, combine a respect for rules that appeal to economic theory and a constructivist and action- oriented approach that characterized postwar military operations—and came to charac- terize neoliberalism, as it developed from a heterodox theory to a mainstream practice.

68 Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolution- ize Your Business (Philadelphia: Wharton Digital Press, 2012), 39.

69 These big- budget productions have grown less pro!table and less central to the video game industry in the 2010s. Consider, for instance, that despite past prof- itability of such games, particularly single- player AAA games have seen dimin- ished pro!ts. See, for instance, Dave Their, “Yes, AAA Single- Player Games Are Dying, and That’s Fine,” Forbes, October 18, 2017.

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NOTES TO PAGES 24!27 303

70 David Myers, “The Video Game Aesthetic: Play as Form,” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 52. Video games can be said to construct reality in a way that extends to all media. For example, Mark Hansen follows Friedrich Kittler to argue that “media conditions our situation” by “giving the empirical- technical infrastruc- ture for thought” and “specifying a certain technical materiality for the possi- bility of thinking” (“Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 [2006]: 298). Video games shape technical materiality through dimensions of their hardware, soft- ware, and design.

71 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 34.

72 There were computer games prior to Spacewar!, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing’s parallel work with a computer that could play chess in 1950, as well as Christopher Strachey’s checkers program MUC Draughts (1951), A. S. Douglas’s tic- tac- toe game OXO (1952), William Higinbotham’s Tennis for "wo (1958), and MIT student experiments such as Mouse in the Maze (1959).

73 I draw this underlying point from a longer study of intersections among media studies, visual studies, and aesthetics. Tara McPherson, for example, argues that “computation has long been deeply intertwined with visuality, aesthetics, and the sensory” (Feminist in a Software Lab: Di#erence + Design [Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press, 2018], 17). For an extended analysis of how video game aes- thetics promote and work in concert with hardware used for military and other ends, see Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, The Military- Entertainment Complex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

74 Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Com- puter Bums,” Rolling Stone 7 (December 1972), 50–57.

75 Aubrey Anable, Playing with Feeling: Video Games and A#ect (Minneapolis: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 2018), 24.

76 The !eld of a%ect studies often turns to literary texts and visual media but less frequently to the medium- speci!city of video games. Similarly, both popular and scholarly criticism about games tends to be attentive to areas such as game aesthetics, narrative, and mechanical di#culty, but less often to a%ect. Some of the existing work on games and emotion includes Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Aki Jar- vinen, “Understanding Video Games as Emotional Experiences,” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (New York: Rout- ledge, 2009); “Ico: Creating an Emotional Connection with a Pixelated Damsel,” in Well Played 1.0: Video Games, Value, and Meaning, ed. Drew Davidson (Pitts- burgh: ETC Press, 2009); and Doris C. Rusch, “Emotional Design of Computer Games and Fiction Films,” in Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Games without Frontiers, War without Tears, ed. Andreas Jahn- Sudmann and Ralf Stockmann (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Much of the work on games and emotion has come from game designers and has also concerned the space of sports spectatorship. There has been less scholarship that concerns the intersection of games and a%ect (as opposed to emotion), but some of this work includes Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Anable, Playing with Feelings; and Patrick Jagoda and Peter McDonald,

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304 NOTES TO PAGES 27!30

“Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and A%ective Play,” in Routledge Compan- ion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Rout- ledge, 2018).

77 Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Di$culty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Dur- ham: Duke University Press, 2013), xi.

78 Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 20. In Beyond Choices, Sicart also describes games as “emotion- making devices” ([Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013], 39).

79 I am drawing this account of a%ect from several sources. For an extended dis- tinction among feeling, emotion, and a%ect, see Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, A%ect,” M/C Journal 8 (December 2005), journal .media - culture .org .au /3502 /38 - shouse .php. For fuller overviews of contemporary a%ect theory, see Brian Mas- sumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, A#ect, Sensation (Durham: Duke Uni- versity Press, 2002), including his distinction between emotion and a%ect (28). Also, see several discussions in The A#ect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

80 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 35.

81 Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious A#ects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 40.

82 Eugen Fink, “The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play,” in Jacques Ehrmann, Game, Play, Literature (New Haven: Yale University, 1968), 23.

83 Abt, Serious Games, 89.

84 Colin Milburn, Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

85 As a humanist and an artist, I am not arguing for the empirical version of this claim. Though a great deal of research already exists regarding the educational bene!ts of particular games, the pedagogy of potential inherent in games would be more di#cult to document. Even so, I try to point to particular moments where this pedagogy becomes possible and palpable, particularly in chapter 7 where I attend to the parasite alternate reality game that I cocreated.

86 Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 2007), 6.

87 For a play- centric critique of formalism in video game theory, see for instance Miguel Sicart, “Against Procedurality,” Game Studies 11, no. 3 (2011), http:// game studies .org /0038 /articles /sicart _ap. For a robust account of practices of play in video games, see Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, "rading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). For a play- centric approach to game design, see Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Cre- ating Innovative Games (Boca Raton: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2014).

88 Thomas M. Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Cul-

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NOTES TO PAGES 30!31 305

ture 2, no. 2 (2007): 96, 102, 106. Instead of treating them as contained pas- times, Malaby likens games to social life: “games are, like many social processes, dynamic and recursive, largely reproducing their form through time but always containing the possibility of emergent change” (104).

89 Kurt Squire, “Open- Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age,” The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, ed. Katie Salen, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 171. To be clear, Squire uses the term “possibility spaces” to describe open- ended simulation games in particular. However, insofar as all games can be played in numerous ways or engaged via metagaming practices, I use Squire’s term in a more expan- sive sense here.

90 For an account of games as utopian forms, see Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978). For an account of the modernist position regarding games, see Sebastian Deterding’s discussion of the “liminoid” position in “The Ambiguity of Games: Histories and Discourses of a Gameful World,” in The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applica- tions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 26.

91 For these concepts, see Galloway, Gaming, 107–26; Dyer- Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 193; and Flanagan, Critical Play, 1, 15. For analyses of game- based resistances by marginalized players and designers, see Woke Gaming, ed. Gray and Leonard.

92 I am drawing here from the title of Jane McGonigal’s book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011).

93 Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

94 An early use of the term “teleonomy” comes from Colin Pittendrigh, “Adapta- tion, Natural Selection, and Behavior,” in Behavior and Evolution. ed. A. Roe and George Gaylord Simpson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 390–416. I borrow the term here to emphasize a di%erence from “teleology” but do not intend to translate this article’s biological context, wholesale, into my own dis- cussion of games. For a discussion of “purposive” versus “purposeful” behavior, see Hayne W. Reese, “Teleology and Teleonomy in Behavior Analysis,” Behavior Analyst 17, no. 1 (1994): 75–91. In his discussion of self- organizing systems, Wil- liam Connolly also analyzes the related concept of “teleo- dynamic” organiza- tion. For him, a “teleo- dynamic” element “exceeds blind causality without being tethered either to simple intentionalism or to ontological !nalism” (The Fragility of Things: Self- organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism [Durham: Duke University Press, 2013], 8).

95 In particular, see Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play- Element in Cul- ture (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950) and Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” in Games and Culture 2, no. 2 (2007): 95–113.

96 See T. L. Taylor’s work from Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006) to Watch Me Play: "witch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Of the social sciences,

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306 NOTES TO PAGES 31!34

anthropology has arguably been most attentive to play practices across both analog and digital games. Also see Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming.

97 Mark Seltzer uses this historical frame to proclaim that “the experiment is the de!ning form of observation, and the observation of observation, in the modern age” (The O$cial World, 28).

98 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 9.

99 I explore this idea in greater detail in chapter 2 through the thought of Gaston Bachelard.

100 Lazzarato, Experimental Politics, 25.

101 Ibid., 90.

102 N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 33.

103 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Con- cerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 35.

104 I am expanding here on Alexander Galloway’s proposal for building “conceptual algorithms” that can contribute to “thinking about video games” (Gaming, xi). I also elaborate the conceptual potential of video games in my “Introduction: Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 1 (2018): 130–36.

105 A broader cultural debate about games as “art” became widespread in both popular and scholarly discourse in the 2000s. For popular entries, see Jack Kroll, “‘Emotion Engine’? I Don’t Think So,” Newsweek, March 6, 2000, http:// www .newsweek .com /emotion - engine - i - dont - think - so - 051145; and Roger Ebert, “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” Roger Ebert’s Journal, April 6, 2010, http:// www .rogerebert .com /rogers - journal /video - games - can - never - be - art. For scholarly contributions, see Ernest W. Adams, “Will Computer Games Ever Be a Legitimate Art Form?” Journal of Media Practice 7, no. 1 (2006): 67–77; and Aaron Smuts, “Are Video Games Art?” Contemporary Aesthetics 3 (2005), www .contempaesthetics .org /newvolume /pages /article .php ?articleID ; 277. For a taxonomic overview of art games, see John Sharp, Works of Game: On the Aesthet- ics of Games and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

106 See Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Ama- teurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012). Also see Emma Westecott, “Independent Game Development as Craft,” Loading . . . 7, no. 11 (2013), http:// journals .sfu .ca /loading /index .php /loading /article /view /027.

107 See Felan Parker, “An Art World for Artgames,” Loading . . . 7, no. 11 (2013), http:// journals .sfu .ca /loading /index .php /loading /article /view /007 /01.

108 For more on the formal and sociopolitical qualities of these types of games, see: Brian Schrank, Avant- Garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture (Cam-

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NOTES TO PAGES 35!43 307

bridge: MIT Press, 2014). As Schrank explains, “Avant- garde games are distin- guished from mainstream ones because they show how the medium can mani- fest a greater diversity of gameplay and be creatively engaged in more kinds of ways by more kinds of people. They rede!ne the medium, breaking apart and expanding how we make, think, and play with games. The avant- garde democ- ratizes games and makes the medium more plastic and liquid.” Moreover, “For videogames, the avant- garde is the force that opens up the experience of playing a game or expands the ways in which games shape culture” (3).

109 I analyze Journey in Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Chapter One

1 Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker observe, “Digital media seem to be everywhere, not only in the esoteric realms of computer animation, but in the everydayness of the digital (e- mail, mobile phones, the Internet). Within First World nations, this everydayness—this banality of the digital—is precisely what produces the e%ect of ubiquity, and of universality.” For more, see The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 10.

2 Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolution- ize Your Business (Philadelphia: Wharton Digital Press, 2012), 25.

3 Robert Hunter, The Gami!cation Handbook: Everything You Need to Know about Gami!cation (Brisbane, Australia: Emereo, 2011). Also see Byron Reeves and J. L. Read, Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009); Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder, Game- Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010); and Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham, Gami!cation by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2011).

4 Mizuko Ito, “Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children’s Soft- ware,” in The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, ed. Katie Salen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 94. It is notable that Ito calls children’s software of the 1980s and 1990s “an experimental media category” (89).

5 During this period, an exemplary version of gami!ed education that used the rhetoric and form of games (without focusing on a particular game) was the “multiplayer classroom” developed by Lee Sheldon. This organizational model, based on massively multiplayer online role- playing games (MMORPGs), such as World of Warcraft (WoW), operated as an “applied” game, “played out in real- time in the real world of the classroom with students as players and the teacher as Game Master.” For Sheldon, the multiplayer classroom is not merely charac- terized by the use of game- based language. His pedagogical techniques, such as grouping students in collective “guilds,” place young people in environ- ments that are familiar, engaging, and collaborative along the same lines as the video games and social media that organize their lives. In his college courses, Sheldon explains, students do not earn grades but rather “level up” and accumu- late “experience points.” They do not take quizzes but “defeat monsters.” They

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