Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification

By Patrick Jagoda

In our unprecedentedly networked world, games have come to occupy an important space in many of our everyday lives. Digital games alone engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide as of 2020, and other forms of gaming, such as board games, role playing, escape rooms, and puzzles, command an ever-expanding audience. At the same time, “gamification”—the application of game mechanics to traditionally nongame spheres, such as personal health and fitness, shopping, habit tracking, and more—has imposed unprecedented levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life.
 
Drawing from his own experience as a game designer, Patrick Jagoda argues that games need not be synonymous with gamification. He studies experimental games that intervene in the neoliberal project from the inside out, examining a broad variety of mainstream and independent games, including StarCraft, Candy Crush Saga, Stardew Valley, Dys4ia, Braid, and Undertale. Beyond a diagnosis of gamification, Jagoda imagines ways that games can be experimental—not only in the sense of problem solving, but also the more nuanced notion of problem making that embraces the complexities of our digital present. The result is a game-changing book on the sociopolitical potential of this form of mass entertainment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226630038

Book preview

Experimental Games

Experimental Games

Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification

Patrick Jagoda

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62983-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62997-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-63003-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226630038.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jagoda, Patrick, author.

Title: Experimental games : critique, play, and design in the age of gamification / Patrick Jagoda.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020018418 | ISBN 9780226629834 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226629971 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226630038 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Computer games. | Video games. | Computer games—Social aspects. | Video games—Social aspects. | Gamification. | Digital computer simulation.

Classification: LCC GV1469.17.S63 J34 2020 | DDC 794.8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018418

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book is dedicated to Irus, Ziggy, and Mark for their generosity in buying me my first video game console (a Nintendo Entertainment System that amounted to a substantial expenditure for them) when I was eight years old—but also for having the foresight to encourage me to think about the games I played and how I played them.

Contents

List of Figures

Prologue: Game Experiments

Part I   Framework

Introduction: Society of the Game

1   Gamification

2   Experimentation

Part II   Concepts

3   Choice

4   Control

5   Difficulty

6   Failure

Part III   Design

7   Improvisation

Coda: Joy

Acknowledgments

Notes

Ludography

Index

Figures

0.1   EVE Online (2003)

0.2   Every Day the Same Dream (2009)

1.1   Habitica (2013)

1.2   Candy Crush Saga (2012)

1.3   Candy Crush Saga (2012)

1.4   Stardew Valley (2016)

2.1   StarCraft (1998)

2.2   Braid (2008)

2.3   Braid (2008)

2.4   Braid (2008)

2.5   Braid (2008)

2.6   Braid (2008)

2.7   Braid (2008)

2.8   World of Warcraft (2004)

3.1   Super Mario Bros. (1985)

3.2   The Stanley Parable (2013)

3.3   The Stanley Parable (2013)

3.4   Moirai (2016)

3.5   Undertale (2015)

3.6   Undertale (2015)

3.7   Detroit: Become Human (2018)

4.1   Dys4ia (2012)

4.2   Dys4ia (2012)

4.3   Problem Attic (2013)

4.4   Problem Attic (2013)

4.5   Luxuria Superbia (2013)

4.6   Passage (2007)

4.7   Passage (2016)

5.1   Doom (1993)

5.2   Dwarf Fortress (2006)

5.3   Game, Game, Game, and Again Game (2007)

5.4   Game, Game, Game, and Again Game (2007)

5.5   Loved (2010)

5.6   Loved (2010)

5.7   Loved (2010)

5.8   Space Invaders (1978)

6.1   SPENT (2011)

6.2   Thresholdland (2010)

6.3   Little Inferno (2012)

6.4   Little Inferno (2012)

7.1   the parasite (2017)

7.2   the parasite (2017)

7.3   the parasite (2017)

7.4   the parasite (2017)

7.5   the parasite (2017)

7.6   the parasite (2017)

Prologue

Game Experiments

This book—Experimental Games—argues that games, including video games, serve as a form for staging, encountering, processing, and testing experience and reality in the twenty-first century. More than this, I hope to advance the claim that games do not merely represent or simulate reality, but also serve as an experimental form that has the potential to alter the conditions of the historical present. Since the 1950s, through approaches that include economic game theory and behavioral economics, researchers have already analyzed games as experimental forms. But it is only since around the beginning of the twenty-first century, through the substantial expansion of video games as a medium and gamification as a design philosophy, that the experimental capacity of games has more directly impacted a broader global population. Within that period, the very concept of an experimental game has further been complicated by the myriad meanings of what an experiment, as a form, has been in the past, is in our time, and might someday become.

My method in this book encounters games at the intersection of media aesthetics on the one hand and social, political, and economic theory on the other. First of all, with the term media aesthetics, I mean to highlight the effects of games on sensation, perception, meaning making, and political affects. In this respect, the book focuses on medium-specific affordances of digital games that distinguish them as both a unique analytical technique and an embodied mode of experiment. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have offered the elegant definition of a game as a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.¹ These medium-specific qualities—formal systems, players, artificial conflict, rules, and quantifiable outcomes—enable particular kinds of experiments. In addition to these qualities that define all games, digital games introduce additional qualities such as navigable two- and three-dimensional spaces, interactions with artificial intelligence, complex decision trees, or networked interactions with other players. Such qualities influence the kinds of experiments that can unfold in and through a game. My primary methods for tracking media aesthetics in this book include humanistic approaches such as close reading, as well as processes of critical making that draw from my own work as a game designer and digital media artist. Second, even as I undertake formal and medium specific analysis, I am simultaneously committed to the importance of understanding video games in a broader context that exceeds their own specific histories and extends to their social, political, and economic milieu. To achieve this end, I turn to methods that include critical theory and the intellectual history of games.

Before delving into historical frames for thinking about the experimental dimensions of games and considering the experimental qualities of specific video games, I would like to take a step back to consider, for a moment, the ways that games have been represented as experiments in mass culture. To do this, let us consider a popular film and a television series. First, in David Fincher’s 1997 film The Game, investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) receives a birthday present from his younger brother (Sean Penn) in the form of a voucher that allows him to play an unusual game. After being subject to a battery of physical and psychological tests by a company called Consumer Recreation Services (CRS), Van Orton is notified that he is ineligible to participate in the game. Gradually, he discovers that CRS is an elaborate scam that has used the innocuous form of a game to steal his vast fortune. After several unsuccessful attempts to extricate himself from a growing conspiracy, Van Orton finds himself drugged and buried alive in Mexico. After surviving these trials, in the film’s climax, he finds himself on a skyscraper rooftop and, in a state of devastation and ruin, decides to jump off. Instead of hitting the ground, however, he lands on a massive air bag. In the epilogue, he learns that this entire experience was, after all, an elaborate live-action game that incorporated his family, friends, and actors. The game was an experiment staged to test Van Orton’s decisions, give him an opportunity to work through his past, and help him achieve a more fulfilled life.

A different type of game unfolds in a second case: Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s 2016 series Westworld, a television adaptation of Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same title. The series explores a theme park built for wealthy patrons and populated by intelligent android hosts who are designed to satisfy every fantasy of the guests. Westworld raises the question about why a rich businessman would invest so much money in building this huge, state-of-the-art park—one that is frequently compared to an open world video game—that serves only a small number of guests. In the second season, the park’s creative director, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), reveals, The park is an experiment. A testing chamber. The guests are the variables and the hosts are the controls. When guests come to the park, they don’t know they’re being watched. We get to see their true selves. Their every choice reveals another part of their cognition. Their drives.² In the Westworld park experiment, the android hosts serve as a control and the human visitors are independent variables. It is not, then, the immediate revenue that matters to the chief investor so much as the information learned about the habits, decisions, and actions of the high-profile guests who play within the park.

Though one of these games seeks to benefit and the other to harm, The Game and Westworld have in common exclusive games built primarily for wealthy white men who, unbeknownst to them, become experimental subjects. These subjects appear as adult counterparts of the adolescent boys who came of age in the United States in the video game arcades of the 1970s and console-equipped suburban dens of the 1980s.³ Even with a representational narrowness focused on white male anxieties, this film and television series signal a broader imbrication of games with lived existence: a blurring of the magic circle that cultural historian Johan Huizinga famously described as the boundary that demarcates a space of play, separating the activities of games from everyday life.⁴ Especially during the 2010s, video games advanced from specialist electronics available to a limited and privileged demographic to a form that saturates everyday life for a significant part of the world’s population. In this world, games have become, in McKenzie Wark’s formulation, our contemporaries—with an our that included, as of 2019, an estimated 2.5 billion video game players worldwide.⁵ Video games, in this world, have become an expansive medium (though one that is still woefully lacking in all manner of diversity) that includes games played across mobile, computer, console, arcade, virtual reality, and augmented reality platforms.⁶ The range of game genres—from puzzle-platformers to first-person shooters, from survival horror to rhythm games, from sandbox to multiplayer online battle arena games—is exponentially higher than it was in its inaugural years in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Beyond entertainment, the variety of audiences addressed by games becomes apparent through orientations signaled by terms such as artgames, independent games, serious games, casual games, gamification, queer games, citizen science games, and e-sports.

This book includes analyses of a variety of digital games, and thus contributes to the digital humanities. More than this, however, this is a text that imagines an experimental humanities. Experiments rely on science and art, often in equal measure. As the psychologist Lauren Slater observes, experiments are fascinating, because at their best they are compressed experience, life distilled to its potentially elegant essence.⁷ Though experiments compress experience, they are also something other than life’s essence. They are inherently artificial constructions that nudge and modulate reality’s constellation of potentials in ways that allow for observation that would have been otherwise impossible. Games, too, are artificial constructions that can compress particular experiences and model small subsets of the present world. That is, in a historical moment when the world is figured increasingly as a game—especially with the spread of digital and networked media—video games take on an unprecedented experimental significance. The experiments they enable unfold at the interface of technoscience and media art, code and affect, computation and human participation. As this book will demonstrate, not all games are experiments in equivalent ways. In a more direct sense, a simulation game may seek to model the real world with degrees of calculated external validity or an educational video game may attempt to change attitudes or behaviors within empirical constraints that can generate data about test subjects. However, in a world increasingly saturated by digital and networked media, even popular video games intended for entertainment purposes entrain players to particular modes of perception, action, and habit. Such games produce experimental situations, even if they often occur in largely uncontrolled conditions. Reciprocally, too, players regularly test a game’s possibility space, but they also find themselves in the midst of experiments to which they have not entirely, or at least consciously, consented. Though many of the cases throughout the book are not quite as dramatic as those depicted in The Game or Westworld, those opening popular media representations point to a world in which games exceed the status of specialist pastimes or even mass entertainments.

The concept of experiment suggests a fuller understanding of the ways in which the contemporary world and games have become imbricated with each other. Video games, of course, are not experimental instruments that are wholly external to the world. In many ways that this book explores, games are aligned with contemporary technological, economic, and political thought. For example, the histories of computation, economic game theory, and behavioral economics, as well as management theories such as Taylorism, have influenced contemporary game forms and cultures. For this reason, a better understanding of the broader milieu from which video games emerged remains an important historical project. This book is by no means a history of video games. Even so, it shows how particular types of games emerge from an intellectual history and the underlying cultural logics of the Cold War period—particularly through the rise of the broad paradigm of neoliberalism—and to dramatize what lessons such games, in turn, might offer about how to negotiate, navigate, and transform our contemporary world. These lessons remain more important than ever. Even in the middle of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues worldwide and brings with it a reduction in social activities that require physical presence, video games (alongside social networking, online gambling, and media streaming, but not older media such as feature films) have only experienced accelerated growth.

I do not take for granted that digital and networked games somehow rise above the technical and economic logics that have informed their development. However, beyond a historical account, this book takes seriously the possibility that the types of experiments that video games have enabled, from the 1950s to the 2010s, might not be the only ones of which they are capable in the future. Thus, though I begin with an analysis and diagnosis of the resonance of games as metaphors and forms starting in the mid-twentieth century, the majority of this book concerns what else might be possible if we think more carefully through the thick affective field of the present. In his constructionist educational writing about the use of computers in learning, Seymour Papert characterizes computers not merely as cognitive learning machines but as devices that gain their experiential and experimental force from an affective component that makes learning more engaging. Papert describes computers as instruments that help people think and, in an even more fundamental and paradigm shifting sense, influence how people think.⁸ As arguably the most popular contemporary expressive form that emerges from computation, video games introduce a mode of thought that is affectively rich and a site that encourages ongoing experimentation.

Experimentation in games is increasingly figured as a process of identifying and solving problems within games (e.g., using trial and error to traverse the dungeons of The Legend of Zelda) or problems outside of games (e.g., using instrumentalized educational games created by companies such as Legends of Learning to improve classroom performance). In my earlier example, the game-based experiment in The Game serves as a kind of therapy that solves Van Orton’s psychological problems in a fashion parallel to real-world play therapies and seemingly benign gamified apps that claim to shift human attitudes and behaviors. The experiment of Westworld represents a sinister data-gathering experiment that solves a corporation’s social engineering problems—a scenario that finds numerous real-world counterparts in the uncontrolled experiments built upon Facebook, Google, and Amazon algorithms, or Niantic’s use of the hit Pokémon GO augmented reality mobile game to lead players to sponsored corporate PokéStops and to harvest GPS coordinates and other personal data. In place of the experimental problem solving of such games that activate trial-and-error tests, this book imagines what games might look like if we instead approach them as media for more sophisticated problem making that embraces the complexities of a digital and networked present. What it means to make a problem through games is an active and developing concern in this book. Rather than systematizing or resolving problem making as a privileged concept, I hope to demonstrate a variety of approaches to it as a logic of experimental games that departs from the problem-solving logic that pervades the present moment.

Part 1

Framework

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 moment awash in economic game theory, military simulations, and geopolitical 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 figurative 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 relations are a game. Every personal argument is a game. And almost all business activity is a game.¹ Games, he insists, are more serious than the frivolous 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 qualifications 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 benefits from being modeled as a game. Drivers manoeuvring in heavy traffic are playing a driving game, he writes. Bargain-hunters bidding on eBay are playing an auctioning game. A firm and a union negotiating next year’s wage are playing a bargaining game.² Binmore deploys this expanded language of games from a world in which the expansion of finance has made stock trading games an even more central aspect of economic life. In the contemporary media ecology, the coverage of political electoral contests is often rhetorically and structurally indistinguishable from the coverage of professional and collegiate sports, even if the consequences are of drastically different 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, films, 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.³

By the early twenty-first 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 different meaning from the context of the early twenty-first century, within a world characterized by the increased 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 first commercial video game arcade machine: 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 film 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.⁴ Consider just a few other developments. Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto V (2013) grossed $1 billion in its first 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 first three months after its release. In the first forty-five days after its release, Call of Duty Black Ops (2010) gamers logged approximately 600 million hours of gameplay (the equivalent of over 68,000 years). Even as these titles represent mainstream videogames, independent games have also seen parallel successes, with Limbo, for example, selling just over 892,000 total units within its first 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 quantitative measures of their growing centrality to contemporary life. At a qualitative level, the position of games has also been elevated above the status of pastimes and entertainments. This underlying sense of significance is registered, however playfully, through a variety of cultural works, such as Ernest Cline’s Armada (2015). In this novel, high school student Zack Lightman discovers 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 off 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 off—but on a global scale! (29). In many ways, the novel is a mashup of earlier works such as The Last Starfighter (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 film 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 find themselves feeding an unprecedented corporate data collection scheme and facing fatal consequences. In all of these cases, video games operate as a crucial interface with the world. By analyzing specific games, this book will attempt to elaborate how we might understand the interface between games and the world in the twenty-first century.

Just a Game

In the early twenty-first 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.⁵ 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 seriousness and that gameplay should be treated as a fundamental element of culture.⁶ In 1954, still prior to the emergence of digital games, RAND Corporation analysts Alexander McFarlane Mood and R. D. Specht described gaming as a technique of analysis that could be applied to areas such as warfare.⁷ 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.⁸

The cultural saturation of games and gamelike thought has already been observed by a number of scholars, particularly in the field of game studies. The extension of game mechanics to traditionally nongame activities across business, education, marketing, psychology, and war making goes by the name of gamification.⁹ A number of alternative terms exist for varied approaches to integrating games into everyday life, including gamespace, ludofication of society, ludic society, ludic century, and gameful world.¹⁰ This imbrication of games and reality is a historical development. But this development cannot be reduced to the narrative of technological progress that is coterminous with the development of digital computers, networked connectivity, 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 affairs, exploring the ways that games, as metaphors and forms, alter our understanding of contemporary social, political, and economic 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 first-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 specific 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 important 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 experiment that emerged from the exploration of this theory. In this scenario, first imagined by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher at the RAND Corporation in 1950, two prisoners (figured 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 different 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 different insights into competition and cooperation among actors.

During the early Cold War, economists gradually began to adopt noncooperative game theory, believed to be the optimal strategy from the standpoint 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 occupied 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 diagnosed 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 conflict, 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 transition, however, game theory already posits a logic, which dictates that everything can be figured as a game. When confronted with disconfirmations, Mirowski writes, the first inclination of the paranoid is always to enlarge the conspiracy: that is, expand the definition of the ‘game’ to encompass considerations previously external to the formal specification of the game. Even within a multiplayer contest, game theory does not imagine the player communicating with other players, but instead requires the isolated simulation of possible moves. A player engages in "the complete and total reconstruction 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 choosing the best response.¹¹ 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 official world that describes 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 analyze specific games, he finds, in game structures, the formal properties for approaching a dominant contemporary mode of thought. As in the extremely formal conditions in the playing out of a game, he writes of this contemporary thought type, it is necessary to frame, demarcate, and report it—and in this sense see through it and reflect 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 game and world, or a virtualization of the world through game rules and mechanics—a common fantasy imagined in films 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 contingency, self-conditioning, and deliberate self-complication. Games are not merely alternative realities that become, by the early twenty-first century, coextensive with the world; importantly, they are "at once models of the world and in it."¹²

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 arbitrariness of moral systems, social norms, and even laws that make up the groundwork 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 everyday experience.¹³ In other words, if games can serve as models of real-world systems, they can also influence the experiences, attitudes, habits, and behaviors 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 influence the social world—or, more accurately, a world that is perpetually changing in ways that undermine the grammatical work performed by the definite article the.

This book explores various ways that games make realities, through particular design decisions, formal properties, and modes of play. Before focusing on games, including what I see as their crucial experimental qualities, I first 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 qualifications, 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 sociopolitical context. In the theoretical framework of this book, gamification (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 intersection between these forms, it is first necessary to establish the coordinates of neoliberalism. Without question, neoliberalism is a heuristic, and the constellation that this term names has changed since its inception. This polyvalent concept is often used to describe both an economic policy and a philosophy 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 experiments 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 substantially increased emphasis on the entity of the free market, individual entrepreneurship, private property rights, financialization, and practices of deregulation that transitioned from a marginal scholarly argument to a guiding societal principle in the late 1970s.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵

Political theorist Wendy Brown, building on insights made by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s, elevates neoliberalism to a normative order of reason that encompasses these specific 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 activities—even where money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus." 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.¹⁶ 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 colonize 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 specific and historically distinct form of economic organization and political governance, one that resonates particularly well with game form, especially as it has developed during the rise of digital games.¹⁷

Beyond its economic and political periodization, the term neoliberalism also names a new social project and order of subjectivity. As numerous critics 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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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 ‘immaterial,’ affective, and cognitive resources of the self in all its activities in order to become its own boss and own slave, capitalist and proletarian.²⁰ 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.²¹

In the neoliberal scheme, workers are increasingly figured as entrepreneurs who must develop themselves and their own value—through continued education, generation of new qualifications, 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, unemployment becomes more than a time that is filled with job seeking; it transforms into a period of intensified 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 production of subjectivity, of forms of life, of forms of existence, is not part of a superstructure, but rather of an ‘economic’ infrastructure.²² In sum, neoliberalism expands economic impoverishment through new forms of precarious labor and an unprecedented control of wealth by the top 1 percent of the population, but it also entails an impoverishment of subjectivity, a reduction in its existential intensity.²³

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 President of the United States, Narendra Modi as Prime Minister of India, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as President of Turkey, and Vladimir Putin as President of Russia. Despite the political and economic instability that these developments 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 competition. In his writing on neoliberalism, Michel Foucault already identifies 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.²⁴ Moreover, as Lazzarato observes in his account of neoliberalism, Hypermodernity and neoarchaisms are not contradictory processes but the two complementary faces of the same mode of governing our societies.²⁵ Similarly, social theorists such as Silvia Federici have pointed out that the neoliberal period brings with it new forms of primitive accumulation and labor exploitation that introduce new gender regulation and sexual discrimination across every aspect of the reproduction of labor-power.²⁶ 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 orientation, 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 competition, repetition, and quantified objectives that make up gamified designs, 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 understood through dimensions of economic production and consumption that are marked by terms such as Taylorism, post-Fordism, postindustrialism, and advanced capitalism.²⁷

Gamification, I argue, marks a condition of seepage or doubling through which game mechanics and activities influence 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 everyday experience through neoliberal principles. Before continuing this theoretical 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-specific framework for understanding the cultural importance of video games in our time cannot be separated from the sociopolitical context 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 historical conditions of production.²⁸ 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 perception that is contemporaneous to it. Within Benjamin’s historicist framework, 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 film is a historically specific mode of perception, rather than simply a degraded form of concentration.²⁹

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 Benjamin, in the opposed directions of fascism (which engages in an aestheticizing of politics) and communism (which responds by politicizing art).³⁰ Of course, in a variety of ways that I explore in this book, video games depart formally, and therefore also politically, from film and other media on which he focuses.³¹ Nevertheless, Benjamin’s framework, alongside related methods emerging from the Frankfurt school, offers a useful starting point for approaching this newer medium. In other words, just as film 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-first centuries in part because of their resonances with neoliberalism. The high-level differences between the medium of the video game and that of film are important and can be abstracted to clarify the broader cultural field of gamification.

The novelty of gamification comes into relief if we set it in contrast with the concept of spectacle that Guy Debord developed to describe not merely film, 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 sociopolitical theory of mediation that described a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.³² Most of all, spectacle generated the image of the apparent unification of a global society to cover over the underlying 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 communications that were "essentially one-way and depended on the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration.³³ Much like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s earlier theory of the culture industry," spectacle described the ideological dimensions of cultural forms such as film, magazines, and television.³⁴

If spectacle conveys the total practice of the particular economic and social formation of late 1960s capitalism, then gamification expresses the equivalent formation in the present.³⁵ Games unquestionably have a history that long precedes the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but they achieved the status of cultural prominence (arguably even a kind of preponderance) only during the late twentieth century.³⁶ If film and television were still, in the 1960s of Debord’s society of the spectacle, the quintessential 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-first 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 significance of digital games for thinking through our contemporary historical moment.³⁷ 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 dominant mode of production and not something added to the real world—not a decorative element.³⁸

Despite some conceptual affinities, a society of the game differs substantially 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 reproducible but spreadable and broadly distributable.³⁹ In place of the one-to-many communication characteristic of spectacle (and traditional propaganda), the world depends increasingly on many-to-many communication. Digital 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 network television channels intended for a mass audience) to narrowcasting (e.g., the proliferation