The PlayStation Dreamworld

Alfie Bown

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781509518036, 9781509518029
• eBook ISBN: 9781509518067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.

Level 1
From Farming Simulation to Dystopic Wasteland
Gaming and Capitalism

It was the dawn of a new era, one where most of the human race now spent all of their free time inside a videogame.

Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (2012)

Before getting into the dream analysis of videogames and the potential for subversion found in such experiences, this chapter focuses on the way in which the videogame world is dominated by patterns that endorse protectivism, encourage a fear of “crisis,” foster a belief in a particular brand of American progress, and support economic and gendered social norms. In particular this section discusses the ways in which “gaming” can function as a supplement to capital, a kind of ally of the workplace structure and of new state and corporate methodologies of control designed to regulate a restive population. Furthermore, these patterns are found not only in games themselves but in relationships to gaming in a broader sense; in how, where, and why these forms of entertainment are experienced. As such, they go far beyond the world of avid gamers and reflect wider habitual patterns in relationships to consoles, phones, and computers. Perhaps most important is the relationship between games and the workplace and so this chapter focuses on mobile phone and browser games, games that can be played with an Excel spreadsheet open at the same time, to explore the connection between work and play in 2017.

Work and Play

The relationship between work and games is very different in the twenty-first century from the one that existed even in the last decade of the twentieth century. Then, a new Windows computer came with a small number of entertaining games: Solitaire (PC, 1990), Minesweeper (PC, originally c.1960), or the standout of the bunch, SkiFree (PC, 1991). A computer could connect to the internet, but only via a dial-up connection that could handle loading just one page at a time and made an entire household unreachable by phone. In short, if the user were on the internet, it was the only thing they were doing. The first browser to have tabs, NetCaptor, was developed in 1997, but the need for them was inconceivable to most users at that point and tabbed browsing didn’t catch on until over a decade later. Today the average browser has no less than ten tabs running at once, some of which are work and some of which are designated under the heading of “play.” The internet functions no longer as an activity but as a background radiation to all of our other actions. In E. M. Forster’s 1909 “The Machine Stops,” the machine, itself a kind of proto-internet, makes a continuous “hum” that “penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts.” This humming noise is imperceptible to those who live with the machine and can only be detected by those who are new to it.¹ The internet is exactly such a machine today, except for the fact that there is no one left to make this observation.

There may be some continuity between old games and new ones: Minesweeper, a forerunner to Angry Birds (iOS, 2009); SkiFree, a precursor to Flappy Bird (iOS and Android, 2013), or Temple Run (iOS, 2011). In truth, though, a significant shift has occurred in the relationship between workers and their games. While a few people probably did sneak in some Solitaire at work while their bosses’ eyes were turned in the late 1990s, these games were primarily enjoyed away from the workplace. The appeal of such games was their ability to sustain players’ concentration for several hours at once rather than because of their ability to offer a millisecond of pleasure at every gap in the working day. Thus, Minesweeper is more like Sudoku, and SkiFree is more akin to extreme sports games found in console gaming, perhaps something like Trials Fusion (PS4 and Xbox One, 2014). These games require something closer to full attention and in some cases even some critical-thinking skills. Most importantly, they are typically enjoyed during “leisure time” rather than in or around the workplace. By contrast, today’s internet tab entertainment and mobile-phone games are designed to be a perfect supplement to the workplace. It is no surprise that statistically the most popular time to play games like Clash of Clans (iOS and Android, 2012) is on the commute to and from work and during our lunch hour.

This means that we are in a bizarre second wave of what the Victorians called “rational recreation.”² That project emerged after 1832, when Britain was as close to political upheaval as it has ever come in modern history – “within an ace of a revolution,” according to E. P. Thompson.³ Through such useful and instructive “rational” amusements as parks, museums, and the promotion of team sports and social clubs designed to group people together in easily manageable clusters, those in power hoped to contain and control a restive population by organizing their enjoyment. Ostensibly, rationality seems to demand the complete opposite today: mobile-phone games and internet tabs encourage individual enjoyment and appear totally useless and uninstructive. Yet while the enjoyments themselves may be different, another wave of controlled recreation today attempts to organize people through their enjoyment, making us work harder for capitalism.

Some games do this by simulating or replacing “success” in the workplace. In a very successful but not at all subversive book on gaming Jane McGonigal argues that World of Warcraft (PC, 2004) is precisely such an experience. “What accounts for World of Warcraft’s unprecedented success?” writes McGonigal. “More than anything else, it’s the feeling of ‘blissful productivity’ that the game provokes.”⁴ In desperately trying to save her beloved games from those who claim that gaming rots the brain, McGonigal makes a criminal mistake, seeing the capitalist productivity simulated in gaming as inherently positive.

We’ve learned that gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression: its an invigorating rush of activity combined with an optimistic sense of our own productivity. That’s why games can put us in a positive mood when everything else fails – when we’re angry, when we’re bored, when we’re anxious, when we’re lonely, when we’re hopeless, or when we’re aimless.⁵

Here is a dangerously uncritical belief that games are good, that, as McGonigal says, “life is hard, and games make it better.”⁶ One obvious problem is that if games are experienced as a feeling of productivity, then they have a power to subscribe to us what productivity is. The clearest example would be a game like Virtual Beggar (Android, 2016), which tasks the gamer with turning a homeless man into a corporate big cheese, ensuring that gaining capital is associated with success, and with feeling good. This would be an important point even for those giving neurological explanations for the pleasure found in gaming. If such games use imaging and sound techniques to stimulate the neurons, they accompany these technologies with a narrative of capitalist production, establishing an unconscious association between feeling good and a certain formulation of capitalist “success.”

Yet there is an even bigger issue here. If McGonigal is right that games can seize us and affect us when we are feeling aimless, hopeless, or anxious – dealing with those feelings of fragmentation and transforming them into something concrete and apparently positive – then this should make the alarm bells ring and cause us to be very suspicious. It shows us nothing more than the extent to which games are powerful ideological tools. Like a nationalist rally in Europe today, they can work on those subjects and in those moments where we feel lost and which seem devoid of meaning. We need only apply McGonigal’s suggestion to a first-person shooter like Medal of Honor: Warfighter (PC, PS3, and Xbox360, 2012), which aims at “authentically” rendering America’s war on terror an experience that the gamer can share in by spraying bullets at Arabs, or Battlefield 3 (PC, PS3, and Xbox360, 2011), dubbed the “Iraq invasion game,” to see the serious problem with the argument. If games can turn feelings of boredom, fragmentation, and depression into productive positivity then we should be careful what ideological structures are being associated with this positive force. In other words, this is not what is good about gaming but what we must be most wary of. We can perhaps say that gaming interpellates, the neologism coined by Louis Althusser to describe a process by which the individual is called into a particular subject position. In interpellation, the subject is forced to respond to a prompt in a way that constitutes their subjectivity as the responder in the process. If gaming interpellates fragmented subjects, giving them a sense of purpose, then it does so in the service of dominant ideologies. If gaming appeals to those lost and dissatisfied, as the cliché would have it, it can function to send those people back to “work” by interpellating them into useful ideological subject positions.

Cultures of Distraction

Other games function in a seemingly opposite way, fragmenting the concentration of the worker. Living in what Walter Benjamin had predicted would be a “culture of distraction,” we now experience and enjoy hundreds of apparently mindless things that fill our time – not only mobile-phone games and internet tabs but also social-media notifications and YouTube clips. The most popular time to play mobile-phone games, check social media, and visit “listicles” such as Buzzfeed is on the way to and from work or actually from our work computers. The most popular time to tweet is between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., after two hours at work has begun to breed dissatisfaction and the need for distraction. The most popular time to post a link on Reddit is during work hours on Mondays and Tuesdays, with the week stretching out ahead of us. These distractions, far from being as useless as they pretend to be, are productive and powerful tools that transform us into suitable workers. They set into motion a strange guilt function that turns us into good capitalists and ultimately makes more money for the companies who employ us. In order to have this effect, it is essenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments and Note on the Games
• Dedication
• Tutorial: The Pokémon Generation
• Level 1 From Farming Simulation to Dystopic Wasteland: Gaming and Capitalism
• Level 2 Dreamwork: Cyborgs on the Analyst’s Couch
• Level 3 Retro Gaming: The Politics of Former and Future Pleasures
• Bonus Features: How To Be a Subversive Gamer
• Game Index
• End User License Agreement