Playing Through a Serious Crisis: On the Neoliberal Art of Video Games

In Reality is Broken (2011), Jane McGonigal recounts a story about games that appears in the opening book of Herodotus's ancient Greek text Histories:

When Atys was king of Lydia in Asia Minor some three thousand years ago, a great scarcity threatened his realm. For a while people accepted their lot without complaining, in the hope that times of plenty would return. But when things failed to get better, the Lydians devised a strange remedy for their problem. The plan adopted against famine was to engage in games one day so entirely as not to feel any craving for food... and the next day to eat and abstain from games. In this way they passed eighteen years, and along the way they invented the dice, knuckle-bones, the ball, and all the games which are common.1

McGonigal concludes by noting that whereas this distant past used game to stave off literal hunger, the twenty-first century is hungry for purpose and meaning. For the present, "it is not a hunger for food — it is a hunger for more and better engagement from the world around us." She marshals this narrative from Herodotus to argue that instead of being merely escapist, games might constitute a "purposeful escape" that makes "life bearable." She argues that we need "increasingly compelling alternatives to reality" and games are, for her, the most promising means to motivate intensified encounters with the world.2

My own reading of Herodotus's narrative carries a less optimistic edge than the one offered by McGonigal. When applied to our world, this parable points less to the creative meaning making capacity of games than to their instrumentality: their power to capture and channel human energy toward preset ends. While playing dice games to distract from famine might have helped the Lydians survive, present-day video games serve different functions. Playing games on omnipresent screens in networked environments can be "purposeful," especially in the case of gamification that uses games to encourage exercise or to train employees. Yet the immersiveness of video games can also redirect energies that might otherwise have served sustained action against problems that plague our world, such as structural racism, mass unemployment, and climate change. Video games are powerful in part because they can distract, provide escapism, and reinforce the status quo without diminishing affective intensities that players experience in the engaging flow state of gameplay.

And yet I must admit that McGonigal's specific account of games as agents of salvific distraction resonates with my own experience of playing video games, as I write this essay during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. During the "stay-at-home" order — which began officially where I reside in Chicago in late March, ended in late May, and yielded a partial and perhaps temporary reopening that started in June 2020 — video games have taken up a greater percentage of my leisure time than ever before. I am grateful for games now more than ever. Video games serve as temporary escapes from omnipresent anxiety, or at times, as a way of connecting to friends online through a medium that provides a shared social object. Like the Lydian famine, the pandemic has elevated games into absorptive distractions that help those of us privileged enough to work from home (and work at all) to wait out this evolving crisis.

Video games might seem peripheral to the pandemic, but they are not. Economically, even as the pandemic has precipitated a recession (possibly en route to a depression), some of the industries least impacted by the crisis have included media streaming, social networking, online gambling, and online gaming.3 With a reduction in social activities that require physical presence, video game play in the US has skyrocketed during the pandemic, further bolstering an industry that had, by some measures, already outpaced the music, film, and television culture industries, making approximately 120 billion dollars in profits in 2019.4 At the same time that the US film box office is recording zero profits for the first time in history, people are playing incredible amounts of games such as Fortnite and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

During the 2020 pandemic, video games have also gained cultural legitimacy as socially-oriented media and art.5 Consider that, in May 2019, the WHO established video game addiction as an official mental health disorder.6 Less than a year later, on March 28, 2020, the US Ambassador to the World Health Organization (WHO) tweeted, with the hashtag #PlayApartTogether, that playing video games is an effective way of facilitating "social distancing."7 What a difference a year makes. Through this convergence, the WHO's juxtaposition of addiction and therapy, we might look at video games as the quintessential pharmakon of our time: at once the poison and the remedy, ideological form and critical agent, omnipresent distraction and purposeful medium.

How might video games be considered one of our neoliberal arts? Video games emerged commercially in the 1970s, during the popularization of neoliberalism.8 Neoliberal principles influence the medium-specific dimensions of video game design and play. The art of video game design, in turn, inflects various algorithmic and data collection systems (see: the sophisticated data collection techniques practiced by Niantic's massively popular mobile game Pokémon GO) that underpin every aspects of everyday life in the twenty-first century.9 The underlying meanings of games have changed dramatically since the analog games played by the Lydians, as the form has become more central to everyday life for approximately 2.5 billion gamers and the people with whom they interact.10

In what follows, I examine two recent entertainment games with minimal artistic aspirations (Legendary Heroes and Animal Crossing: New Horizons) and then think through how many of their qualities remain active in an experimental art game (Death Stranding). I argue that not only narrative, visual, and audio aesthetics, but also medium-specific mechanical, rule-based, and participatory aesthetics of these video games offer valuable insights into contemporary neoliberal logics. Many video games offer a sense of activity, safety, manageable repetition, and control that the economy can no longer promise, even for the white middle class whom it once served in the US. Consider that studies have found a correlation between video game play by unemployed and intermittent workers and a work decline among men between ages 21 and 30 in the US, following the 2008 economic crisis.11 Moreover, in a way that is indistinguishable from a Black Mirror dystopia, companies such as Amazon, Lyft, and Uber have used game interfaces and mechanics to maximize employee performance and consumer engagement. In this way, video games are not merely a cultural byproduct of neoliberalism: they are this system's most sophisticated cultural co-emergences and engines that augment and reinforce the status quo. As a game designer, I have spent many years experimenting with ways that games can be converted from ideological constructs to parasitical media that undo this system from the inside. Yet to reach this experimental ground, it is necessary first to understand the current status of video games as a neoliberal art form.

Neoliberal Games: Legendary Heroes and Animal Crossing: New Horizons

I have played the casual mobile game Legendary: Game of Heroes frequently enough over the last year to be at an overall rank of 125 with a top character card that has a current power ranking of 10,564. I rarely enter into an extended multi-hour session of Legendary as I have, during this same period, when playing a 100+ hour roleplaying console video game such as Persona 5 or an open world game such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Unlike these games, I play Legendary mostly in the interstices of my workday: during a quick breakfast, in a Lyft ride to the airport, while watching a Netflix series, or as I wind down from the day in bed. It is even possible that I have played a round of the game while walking between meetings on campus, aligning hand-eye coordination with the proprioception necessary to avoid walking into walls.

Legendary was released by N3TWORK for iOS and Android in August 2016. The game combines elements from various genres including match-3 mechanics, deck building, quest-based roleplaying, guild-oriented online social interactions, and item crafting — all encompassed within the freemium distribution model that makes the initial game free but requires payments for various accelerations and upgrades in gameplay (Figure 1). In its various elements, it builds on the earlier successful tile-matching and roleplaying game Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (2007). The game also resembles myriad multi-generic contemporary mobile casual games, including Runemals (2015), Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest (2015), and Empires & Puzzles (2017). To offer a sense of scale, reportedly, revenues for this game have gone from 6 million dollars in 2016 to 45 million dollars in 2017 to 105 million dollars in 2018.12 In 2020, Apple's App Store overview of the game announces, "Your Legendary heroes battle against more than 10 million gamers." By the standards of online and mobile games, none of these numbers are extraordinary. In both its formal elements and distribution details, this game is like so many others — and because of this ordinariness, worth reflecting upon.

In terms of narrative genre, Legendary is a fantasy game that has little to do with our present-day economic or social landscape, let alone neoliberalism. Yet at the medium-specific level of game mechanics and in-game systems — that is, in areas where a player is asked to do something rather than merely absorb what is represented on the screen — neoliberal values are omnipresent. There are various features of the game that are relevant for thinking about neoliberal capitalism, but let's briefly consider three of these elements via its aesthetics: neoliberal personhood, competition, and a temporality of endless accumulation.

At every turn, Legendary promotes a neoliberal personhood. The neoliberal subject is characterized by self-entrepreneurship and expression that doubles as self-branding. In this game, you can choose among a seemingly infinite variety of "heroes" depicted on trading cards (Figure 2). Instead of choosing a single hero, you rearrange these figures into endless assemblages of teams that can undertake select missions. The player "grinds" — engaging in repetitive tasks by undertaking missions that are not always thought-provoking or challenging —to earn resources. In this process, the player builds up stronger cards that become visible to their guild mates and opponents alike. Your overall rank is constantly displayed on the screen and shown in comparison to other guild members. Legendary is by no means an "idle game" or "incremental game," which encourages grinding to increase rank and continues (albeit at a slower pace) even when the player is absent. Nevertheless, it does enable benefits to accrue through ambient gameplay and even in your absence. In this way, the player becomes as much a manager of their own value as an active player.

Entrepreneurial personhood in Legendary connects closely to the game's ceaseless mode of competition with others. Needless to say, competition is not unique to neoliberalism and is a feature of earlier forms of capitalism. During the current period, however, competition takes on an increasingly central social function.13 Most video games train subjects to compete and to register variable levels of difficulty. In that process, games normalize competition as constructive and fun. Legendary is no different in this respect, as one of its primary activities is the near-daily "Guild vs. Guild" battle mode that pits players against one another in asynchronous battle. Moreover, even as much of the gameplay involves an individual player against non-player enemies with simple automated attacks and actions, your achievements in these battles are judged against other human players. The game includes leaderboards for comparison among individuals and guilds in major recurring events that occur for several days at a time. No matter the activity or event, you are always competing against others, striving to make progress and to increase your own rank and brand.

Furthermore, Legendary introduces a temporality of endless accumulation that serves both the construction of personhood and competitive gameplay tendencies. From the beginning of the game, you are asked constantly to think about in-game economics. The player collects various forms of currency, including "gold," "gems," "stamina," "mana," "daily dungeon coins," "elemental trial coins," "loyalty coins," "honor points," "dust," and other unit types that can be spent on various upgrades and items.14 The currencies are so numerous that it is nearly impossible to keep them all in mind at the same time. In spending too much time accumulating gems, you might find that they have ignored mana or daily dungeons coins for too long. Thus, a player is never finished gathering more currencies, requiring regular returns throughout the day. With each return, the game immediately greets you with new offers in the online store. The game itself does not require hourly or daily returns. But players themselves begin to reinforce this imperative, as many guilds expect members to make contributions once every few days or even daily. As such, even as a player advances, they are never really done.

There is nothing special about Legendary: Game of Heroes. The features I describe above are common across many contemporary games, including other popular mobile games such as Game of Sultans (2018). Beyond casual games, the entrepreneurship of the self takes an even more expansive form in open world life simulation video games such as Stardew Valley (2016). In these popular games, you shape your own quantified self and value through various management tasks that relate to a character's personal life, business, and leisure. In this sense, video games are an exemplary instance of what the economic historian Philip Mirowski calls "everyday neoliberalism." As he playfully asks, "Don't like the way things are looking? Has the state of the world got you down?" The responses implicit to neoliberalism is: "Then create your own personal solipsistic economy, a fit virtual abode for your own fragmented entrepreneurial identity. That's the ultimate in self-reliance."15 In a country like the United States, which offers minimal social safety nets for people who lose their jobs or fall ill, subjects are encouraged to develop their own brand and identity into something profitable — instead of fighting for common rights and collective support.

A second case, the Nintendo game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Figure 3), is exemplary of the way that video games, beyond inculcating neoliberal habits, offer us a "fit virtual abode." This game was released on March 20, 2020, to critical fanfare and huge sales of approximately 22.4 million copies in the first four months.16 That it was released amid the COVID-19 pandemic made it an even more literal digital and networked escape from daily confinement.17 At one level, Animal Crossing is, in Mirowski's formulation, the quintessential "personal solipsistic economy." At the start of the game, the player relocates to a small but resource-rich island by purchasing the "Deserted Island Getaway Package" from a development company called Nook Inc. You dwell ambiently on the island, pick fruit, catch fish, collect insects and other animals, craft tools, and undertake quests. At the same time, this freedom has a cost. Even if it might feel benign and cute, you inhabit an island that is literally a company town that keeps you perpetually in debt. While the player is not quite an indentured servant, to make progress and keep the experience interesting you must constantly buy new things and take out mortgages on your house. In another sense, the island promises an imperialist adventure where you colonize and develop an empty island, taxonomizing the local fauna and placing it in a museum, with a company to protect you from the kinds of perils Robinson Crusoe faced on his island. Activity on the island is nearly inexhaustible, as there are always more collections and quests to undertake, day after day.

I highlight Animal Crossing in part because it appears so different from Legendary. Most notably, Animal Crossing is not inherently competitive — even as, even a few days into the game, there were already reported cases of players feeling FOMO after seeing more developed islands of friends who have put more time into achieving progress.18 Additionally, the game's economy, which includes the core currency of "Bells," "Nook Miles," and collections of various objects, is not completely "solipsistic" insofar as the game has a robust social component. The game famously developed a Turnip exchange through which this virtual commodity, which has notoriously fluctuating prices, yielded a real-world online "Stalk Market."19 Beyond economic games, a player is encouraged to visit not only randomly-generated islands that can be stripped of resources, but also the islands of friends who can show off their houses and share resources. These experiences can yield moments of improvisation and play, as I have experienced with several friends since establishing my own island.20 Yet this sociality is, at least in part, oriented in the service of generating greater legitimacy for the game's economy, as you share fruit, fish, and other items that feed back into the accumulation of Bells and Nook Miles. Moreover, any solipsistic economy or project of self-entrepreneurship requires the input of others. After all, even the successful Instagram influencer or YouTube star depends upon an audience.

Are the soothing qualities of this ambient game — its repetitive gameplay, nostalgic pleasures, and self-care opportunities — more than networked opiates or features of neoliberalism? I believe that the games we play and design, and how we play them, can open up modes of critical engagement and experimental practice within neoliberalism. Nevertheless, a prerequisite for that kind of thought is understanding how the default modes of our most popular video games orient us by shaping our perceptions, habits, desires, and actions in the historical present. Such analysis switches to a higher difficulty level as soon as we realize that it is not just entertainment-oriented video games, but also art games and even everyday environments that often use a ludic style to integrate neoliberal logics.

Ludic Neoliberalism: From Death Stranding to Amazon

Renowned Japanese designer Hideo Kojima's critically acclaimed and profitable Death Stranding, which was released for the PlayStation 4 console in November of 2019, is far more experimental in its gameplay and worldmaking project than either Legendary or Animal Crossing.21 Though this game aspires to the status of popular art, it nonetheless reveals just how central neoliberal values have been to the form of contemporary video games. In Death Stranding, you play as a courier named Sam Porter Bridges and traverse a post-apocalyptic America filled with otherworldly creatures. As the protagonist's full name unambiguously reveals, Sam is a courier. He must deliver packages among a loose constellation of colonies called "Knot Cities" that constitute the "United Cities of America" (UCA). Sam does not work directly for the crumbling government of a deteriorating nation. Instead he is employed by a company called Bridges, which contracts its services directly to the government that maintains a modest version of the military-industrial complex. This company asks its porters to take incredible risks that include environmental threats, as well as attacks by bandits named MULEs, an anti-UCA "terrorist" group named Homo Demens, and the dangerous creatures from a world between life and death known as "beached things" (BTs). At the beginning of the game, on top of his usual courier responsibilities, Sam reluctantly agrees to travel to each Knot City in the UCA to connect them to the central communication system known as the "chiral network." Access to the network entails various benefits for the player, as Sam gains access to a map of new territories and can trade in earned materials to generate new items via a device called the Portable Chiral Constructor, which resembles a 3D printer.

To be clear up front, there are numerous remarkable and experimental dimensions of Death Stranding that exceed what one would conventionally see in a game released by a major studio. Unlike other open world action-adventure games, such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), the player never feels powerful or superheroic in this game. While there are educational or avant-garde "art games" that give the player no or very little power, often in order to explore social inequities (SPENT) or marginalization (Problem Attic), one nearly never sees this dynamic play out across a game that cost millions to create. Yet a dimension of ordinary life remains alive in the gameplay, even amid an epic narrative in which you cross the entirety of the former US. In Death Stranding, the player spends much of their moment-to-moment time engaging in banal logistics and delivery work. Unlike so many games pejoratively dubbed "walking simulators," Death Stranding can be said actually to simulate walking as you must balance your load of supplies (positioning them on your back and strapping them to your avatar) and remain steady while crossing streams, climbing hills, and circumventing inconvenient geological formations (Figure 4). At a narrative and worldmaking level, even as the game is yet another addition to the post-apocalyptic canon, it also circumvents many of the stereotypes of fantasy or science fiction, or subgenres like the zombie narrative, in favor of something more akin to the generically promiscuous New Weird. Technically, too, the game experiments with asynchronous networked gameplay in which different players can leave items for each other in the wilderness.

Given the game's genuine artistic and experimental aspirations, it is even more notable that Death Stranding simultaneously interpellates the player so completely, and in a largely uncritical fashion, as a neoliberal subject. Though the villains of the game are a terrorist group called "Homo Demens," it is arguably Homo economicus who is at the center of the game's world. At a basic level, the player resembles a UPS or FedEx employee who delivers cargo, albeit in a slightly more fantastical setting. Instead of reverting to some earlier version of a postal worker, Sam is subject to the types of affective labor that have been so common in early twenty-first century logistics and gig economy work.

Upon reaching a delivery terminal, the player interacts with Knot City workers via a hologram, rarely in person. During this mediated interaction, the player enters a detailed textual interface that requires the confirmation of consignment content. For each item, you see the delivery volume, cargo damage percentage, total weight, distance traveled, delivery time, and other data. In addition to these quantitative measures, you receive "likes" for completing the order from the recipient (Figure 5). Your overall rating determines the "Porter Grade" which progresses through the game that move from ranks such as "Porter" and "Handler" to "Expert Handler" and "Courier." Though evaluation in video games is completely normative, the details are notable in this case. Every temporal, spatial, and tactical aspect of your performance is recorded. Even at a narrative level, Non-Player Characters reinforce the importance of this system. For example, if an order is late, the receiving agent might scold the player: "What took you so long? It's not like The Legend to come in late." Even if the goods are in excellent condition, a receiver might still note, in a passive aggressive fashion, "You did keep us waiting, but everything else seems to be in perfect order." At every turn, players are addressed as entrepreneurs of themselves who must take constant risks for the good of the company and the nation, while being responsible for every aspect of their performance.

Beyond the constant quantification and evaluation of the protagonist, there is the broader project of bringing the disconnected "knots" back into the "network" of the UCA. This scenario perfectly captures neoliberalism's paradox of the networked individual.22 On the one hand, Sam Porter Bridges is portrayed as the optimal rugged individual: a legendary courier who enters the post-apocalyptic state of nature to revivify human civilization. Other characters frequently remark how astonished they are that one man is traversing the nation and accomplishing this feat all alone. On the other hand, this individual exists in the service of a network that is connected by holograms, screens, and social media adjacent "likes" that appear everywhere throughout the game (including at the nondiegetic level of its own networked status that allows players to interact asynchronously across the PlayStation network). As the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argue, in the late twentieth century, we saw the rise of a "societal project" to turn the network into a "normative model." The benefit of networks for a neoliberal economy are that they are "open, indeterminate, and shifting" in such a way that "the parties to the network only very rarely have an overall view of it, each of them knowing only that section of the network which they frequent."23 The managerial and broader capitalist investment in networks in the 1990s coincided with the popularization of the internet (via the World Wide Web) during this same period. Death Stranding takes up this neoliberal romance of the network at political, economic, and technological levels, elevating the networked individual to the most resilient form of life.

It is important to emphasize that Death Stranding is not merely a representation of neoliberalism. Economic thought and the specific worldview of neoliberalism certainly influence the kinds of games that are designed, distributed, and played. But this type of game participates even more actively in the ongoing construction of neoliberalism. One could compare the simulated objectives of Sam Porter Bridges to those of an Amazon employee, but if we turn away from video games for a moment, this comparison is more startling and exact than it may at first appear. That is, it is remarkable how much the conventions of video games have already influenced daily life and shape Mirowski's "everyday neoliberalism." Precarious and intermittent work in the twenty-first century increasingly takes on the structure of games.

So many major corporations now use elements of gamification — the use of game mechanics and aesthetics in traditionally nongame activities — to motivate and track their workers.24 Amazon is exemplary in this respect. By maximizing information asymmetry and undertaking infrastructural expansion of warehouses, distribution centers, fleets of trucks, and networks of servers that facilitate its Prime service, Amazon has expanded its business into areas such as online shopping, physical delivery, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, digital streaming, and much more. By early 2020, Amazon had become the world's most valuable brand, ahead of Google and Apple, and a top five US technology company overall.25 In May 2019, The Washington Post reported that Amazon was experimenting, at several of its warehouses in the US and UK, with simple games to incentivize greater efficiency and motivation from its workforce. These games include titles such as "MissionRacer, PicksInSpace, Dragon Duel, and CastleCrafter" whose dystopian dimensions are scarcely mitigated by their playful camel case stylization and alliterative flourishes.26 These "games" create basic on-screen feedback systems, using all kinds of aesthetic tricks to make work more enticing and help workers fulfill their hourly quotas. As James Vincent writes, in a story for The Verge, "In at least one facility, managers reward workers who achieve high scores with Amazon 'swag bucks.' This is a company currency that workers can only exchange for Amazon-branded merchandise, like t-shirts and water bottles."27 Regardless of the behavioral effectiveness of these games, they have done little to alleviate reports of unsafe working conditions and anxiety-provoking pressure (one survey suggested that 74 percent of warehouse workers choose not to go to the toilet because they fear missing their productivity goals).28 Though a neoliberal blurring of work and play, a company like Amazon alters the interface of labor without making any substantial infrastructural changes in the fundamental nature of work.

The techniques of gamification that Amazon has experimented with are nothing new. Yet in terms of scale and normalization, it is notable for a company such as Amazon to be incorporating gamification, considering that they employed approximately 750,000 workers worldwide in 2019.29 Moreover, for companies such as Lyft and Uber, which largely manage their employees via screen-based interfaces, the structure and feel of video games can be imported into everyday work more easily and completely than ever before.30 In this way, the neoliberal inflection of present-day video games sees a reciprocal impact as game design increasingly serves the interfaces, data collection techniques, and algorithmic feedback loops of labor management.

Conclusion: Ready Player One

We can return now to McGonigal's account of Herodotus's Lydian game, which I recounted at the outset of this essay. The Lydian games offered a form of escape and survival through years of famine. Yet could we say the same of video games in the present? Even if video games have helped me and so many of my friends pass the time during the COVID-19 crisis, can they still provide aesthetic or somatic salvation — a way out of or around the inequality that has been exacerbated during the era of neoliberalism? Rather than offering "increasingly compelling alternatives to reality," as McGonigal suggests, I would characterize video games as constituting more immanent forms that hypermediate and modulate reality itself. As for the Lydians, but at a much higher scale, billions of people worldwide suffer from hunger, undernourishment, and poverty. Moreover, unlike the games of Herodotus's moment, the video games of the twenty-first century are not sustainable. Whereas the games of the ancient Lydians might "not rely on scarce or finite resources," our digital games have a different materiality, producing electronic waste (through video game consoles) and substantial energy usage (In 2018, PC gamers alone produced the output of 25 electric power plants).31

The historical co-emergence of neoliberalism and video games, particularly from the 1970s to the present, is important for thinking about the contemporary integration of economics and culture. Even so, as McKenzie Wark has provocatively asked: Is it possible that we have entered a new organizational phase of power, information, and value that exceeds past forms of capitalism or the more recent qualities of neoliberalism? As she puts it, "Is this something worse?"32 In the coming years, as we follow the expansion and evolution of recent gaming-adjacent phenomena — the freemium model, idle games, loot boxes, skin gambling, gamification of corporate giants such as Amazon, virtual and augmented reality, new forms of free labor on streaming platforms, and much more — it is important to keep the question about the relationship between economics and culture (including art) open.

Regardless of future developments, when I think through the relationship between games and reality, I do not always land on the relieving distraction that the ancient Lydians gained from games. More often, I think of the fictional premise of Ernest Cline's acclaimed novel Ready Player One (2011), which was adapted into a 2018 film directed by Steven Spielberg. This world is a dystopia characterized by poverty, an energy crisis, famine, and other hardships and redeemed only by a virtual world called the OASIS, which users access via virtual reality headsets and populate for most of their waking hours. This game looks like a digital and corporate update to the Lydian game strategy. But instead of a temporary distraction en route to survival, the OASIS is a permanent escape from an unsustainable present that most people find unbearable and can no longer imagine transforming into something better. Though Ready Player One begins as a terrifying dystopia, it quickly shifts into a pastiche-filled, nostalgia-driven adventure in which gamer Wade Watts and his online friends solve an elaborate scavenger hunt constructed by OASIS founder James Halliday prior to his death. At the end of the novel, Watts wins the scavenger hunt and earns Halladay's fortune, which is worth trillions of dollars.33 Even so, the structural inequality of the economic system depicted in the novel and film's opening moments remains largely intact. Watts, like the Amazon worker or Lyft driver, feels the desire to beat the game and, in his case, does precisely that. The game is won but the gamified structure of the world remains unchanged.

To change this game would require not playing it or, better yet, finding new forms of experiment to transform that "game" (increasingly, a merger between games and economic reality) into something less exploitative and more just. Yet experiment in general is not enough. In 2020, during pandemic-induced crisis and sociopolitical unrest, we see the familiar experiments of disaster capitalism unfolding all around us. Any meaningful experiment, then, would have to replace the opportunistic exploitation of fear, hope, and novelty at which capitalism excels with collective thought and action. I find games interesting and important because they are, simultaneously and irreducibly, both poison and cure. They present a tension between distraction and purposiveness. The video games and behaviorist gamification that have risen to prominence during the neoliberal era often use the relief of escapism to promote ideological instrumentality aimed at narrow ends. Yet games are a form that can also enable the improvisational play and alternative forms of community that we most need in this destitute time. But that will take more than an appeal to the category of the rarefied experimental art game.

Beyond a new ludic avant garde, game form might itself still prompt a reimagining of what ethical and collaborative experimentation could mean in a digital and networked environment. Whereas gamification is goal oriented — an instrumental means to an end — games can still offer what Bernard Suits called a "lusory attitude": a player's acceptance of rules and objectives for no reason other than that they make possible the activity of gameplay.34 Playing a game, in other words, can be intrinsically purposive without having a predetermined or extrinsic purpose. Even as games are increasingly put in the service of application and gamification, one of the form's core capacities is its challenge to teleology. Conceived otherwise, games can include orientations, local aims, and invitations that promote meaning making and experimentation, without relying on instrumental objectives. What it would mean to return to this understanding of games, or invent it anew — not treating games as a form external to neoliberalism but one that has gained prominence within a neoliberal era — is sure to carry both dangers and transformative capacities. But this, I think, is an experiment worth undertaking.

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Patrick Jagoda is Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab. His books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016), and Experimental Games (2020).

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References