Play,History and Politics: Conceiving Futures Beyond Empire

Introduction

This article revisits the intellectual history behind Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire (2009) and builds on their work to think further about how we might politically analyse games, especially in relationship to new forms of social organisation in the future. The worlds of games are important places for us to think about time, as demonstrated by historical game studies in evaluating the past, but there is a role for games to help us consider the future as well. Because games are, to some extent, systems, they facilitate a systems thinking approach that connects the material to the immaterial. Because games also tend to be action-based, they allow thinking through of acts as well as representations. Games allow us to think about a time and place that is different from the present and how it might operate as a system that we could live in. Our speculation on the future can make use of games that both do and do not align with our individual politics. We do not need to see games as representing only the world we want to live in but also to think about worlds to avoid, as both utopian and dystopian projections of the future can shape our acts in the present.

The role that Games of Empire (2009) plays in this picture is to expose the alignments and disjunctures between the ideologies that a game presents and the means by which games are produced. The possible futures offered by different games can be critiqued in relationship to their conditions of production. Games of Empire emerges out of games studies, but perhaps, it owes a greater intellectual debt to the history of post-autonomist Marxist scholarship. Dyer-Witheford was among the first anglophone interlocutors of autonomism in media studies with his work Cyber-Marx (1999), and this trajectory continues into Games of Empire with de Peuter. Unlike Cyber-Marx, which draws a great deal on the Italian autonomia movements of Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, Games of Empire takes the post-autonomist work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire trilogy (2000, 2004, 2009) as its reference point. The question raised is simply worded but impossibly complex: what is the future we are after?

In this article, I argue that the historical game studies framework of experimenting with history through games can also be used to open up politically useful gaming experiments for the future. Indeed, as I will show, the post-autonomist lineage that Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter draw upon is predicated on theories of political resistance that are developed through experimentation in new social forms. I argue that games can be a component for thinking about the possibilities that the future might hold, both for understanding how we might organise economically but also for thinking about what problems we might face. Like video games, post-autonomism concerns itself with a practical focus on the future. I argue that a post-autonomist method of games analysis requires an explicitly political interpretation that is focused on trying to imagine a political future through experiments in gaming.

Marxist Theoretical Lineages for Games of Empire

Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter draw primarily on the work of Hardt and Negri’s Empire trilogy (2000, 2004, 2009) as their core theoretical background and also make use of key works by other Italian Marxists such as Virno (2004), Lazzarato (1996) and Tronti (1966/2019). These scholars can be broadly categorised as post-autonomists, as they are inheritors of the autonomia movement of the 1970s, itself largely drawing on prior Italian Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci (see also Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Wright, 2002).

Autonomia formed in response to the roboticisation of Italian automobile factories; this reduced wages and the need for specialised labour, while also undermining the union movement’s bargaining power. Traditional forms of factory-based strikes were no longer sufficient as mass skilled workers were replaced by machines. Instead work was reframed around informational, affective and intellectual forms of labour and the creation of social or cultural commodities, accordingly new forms of social resistance became necessary. Autonomia experimented with new forms of social organisation both inside and outside the factory walls.

The autonomia movement was defined by a core Gramscian framework and the significant influence of feminist scholarship from Lotta Feminista. These approaches drew attention to how labour was arranged outside the space of the factory through a particular attention to social reproduction, that is the focus on the creation of social subjects within capitalism, especially in gendered forms of labour. This is accounted for in works by Dalla Costa and James (1971), Federici (1984/2004), Fortunati (1996) and more recently Terranova (2000). A wide array of unique theoretical positions and crises emerged over this time within Italian Marxism that led to numerous splits and divisions (see Bologna, 1980; Tronti, 2012; Wright, 2002, p. 11–21). From this period, Italian Marxism was defined by an interest in networked, affective, militant and collaborative approaches that tended to reject institutions, including unions and political parties (see Lotringer & Marazzi, 2007). Autonomia was defined by a new community of activism that – however incomplete or partial – included a diverse collection of identities recognising a common problem.

Hardt and Negri’s Empire trilogy responds to this period and is post-autonomist insofar as the autonomist tendency significantly shifted in terms of its idea of the subject and in terms of its idea of the factory. Not least of which is the fact that the autonomist focuses on the changes in the workplace due to robotics, computers and a shift towards valorising intellectual work over manual labour has found a great deal of purchase in explaining contemporary trends in technology and work. Their thesis is that the world had been organised by a political rationality that had reorganised nation states into a single system that facilitated these changes, a world order they call ‘Empire’. Empire was to politics what capitalism was to the economy, and they worked hand in glove to expand and accumulate. Empire is not found in a single source but is present in a diverse array of state bodies and international treaties and fostered through practices such as trade liberalisation and expansion of property systems. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thoroughly demonstrate the value of post-autonomist language in unpacking the multilayered, intertwined cultural, ideological and political economic components in digital video games. They have drawn on the autonomist and post-autonomist histories of language and globalisation, material and immaterial labour, and imperialist expansion and ideology.

Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter see gaming as having a potential role in an emancipatory praxis; video gaming’s status as exemplary media of Empire (2009, p. xxix) means that it is ideal for representing imperial systems and also for submitting them to critique. My contribution to this discussion is to note that games provide an important form of critique: alternatives to Empire. Experimentation and imagination about the future are political necessities within post-autonomist scholarship. In their critique of Empire, Hardt and Negri (2009) note that while it is all well and good to critique what we have, there needs to be some sort of orienting positive force that allows us to create the world after Empire. The problem with the present moment is that it not only suffuses material politics but has also infected our imagination of the future. We need to develop new ideas about how we might live and think together and to identify new social and economic systems for living.

Problem of Imagining a Future

In each of their books, Hardt and Negri ask ‘what is to be done’ to move past Empire. This recalls the post-autonomist theory of exodus: the idea of transiting from a present crisis into a new, real space that may provide us with better conditions of existence (see Virno, 1996). If we are to move past the space of Empire, then we must have a model or idea of what we are going to build. The problem of imagining the future of the world past capitalism has been articulated in academic contexts at least since the 1970s by Franklin (1979) in an evaluation of Ballard. Franklin critiques Ballard’s ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963) as misapprehending the end of capitalism as the end of the world itself that Ballard himself could not think of a world past capitalism and that capitalism’s absence could only be accepted if it also meant the end of everything. Later interlocutors such as Jameson (1994) and Žižek (1994) generalised the problem from an individual pathology to a social one: the population at large struggles to conceive of a world past capitalism, where capitalism cannot be seen to thrive, hence the quote that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The ideological nature of the problem is posed by Fisher (2009) who notes that capitalism, like all ideological systems, contains within it an assertion of its own natural continuation. This problem – the inability to think of a future that is substantively different – is difficult to resolve. For Hardt and Negri, Empire infects everything so profoundly that we cannot think of its responses.

This does not mean that games naturally produce a new political horizon. As Hutchins (2008) has noted, the goal of a politics built from play cannot be left to ideas of fraternity or camaraderie naturally emerging out of an ‘Olympism’, where controlled competition would necessarily lead to a form of community. Hutchins critiques the idea that a natural liberal politics might harmoniously emerge from institutional play, even when such institutions have strongly didactic positions on what should emerge from play; something new emerges but not necessarily in a predictable way. We cannot leave our analysis of games to only address the apparent, didactic and marketised presentation of what the future might look like. What is necessary are forms of experimentation that allow us to think beyond the present moment. The post-autonomist theory provides the concept of the laboratory (Hardt, 1996) as a way of thinking on the new forms of social organisation that might help us move into the future. This is a task that, by its nature as an evaluation of a situation that does not yet exist, is accomplished through speculation, the application of theory and the inspirations of fiction. Other scholars, such as Jameson (1984) and Hage (2012), note the centrality of the imagination of the future as a core issue for political action. Hage states that a mental projection of the future is necessary in order to take political action in the present: ideas of the future are ‘not just a conception of the world but an investment in it’ (2012, p. 291). Games can productively contribute, as ‘laboratories’, to the experimentation for the future by allowing us to think about other times and places so that we might think politically about the present. Games can contribute to this by allowing us to think, experiment and reflect of different social orders that we might bring to light. Games are not the only way that this could happen, and building from Games of Empire, they have a unique capacity to help think about life beyond Empire.

Imagining Gaming in the Present

Games of Empire adds to the political analysis of gaming by establishing connections between the internal narrative, subjective, aesthetic, affective and ludic elements of a particular game with the conditions of production, especially with regard to the labour of those who make the game possible. The way that these conditions make games possible also shapes what kind of possibilities we can imagine for the future. Within this paradigm, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter align individual video games against two primary categories: games of multitude and games of empire, with these terms drawn from the Empire trilogy. The two categories are determined by what kind of future they permit, either a self-determining alter-globalisation or a continuation of military imperialism. This is the frame that Games of Empire takes: to understand how to locate games within post-autonomist discourse.

Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter fold the questions of content and form together under a rubric of consumption and production that pulls in the whole of the imperialist system. They note how the conditions of game development are not separated from the narratives, stories and futures that they produce: these very concerns are built into and are expressed within production and consumption in reciprocal ways. The conditions of these forms of labour are present in the case study of ‘EA Spouse’ (2009, p. 59–65) through to the extractive, slave-based labour necessary to obtain the coltan used in console development (p. 222–224). These examples take the hegemonic impact of informational labour from simply being a top-down system as Hardt and Negri propose, whereby intellectual labour shapes industrial labour, which in turn shapes agricultural labour in a pyramidic structure with intellectual labour at the peak. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter make clear that the nature of industrial and extractive labour in itself shapes the conditions of intellectual labour as well, influencing the stories and identities that games can tell. As they state,

[Fictional] subject positions may be utterly fantastic, quite realistic, or somewhere in between. But such in- game identities are never entirely separated from the options provided by the actual social formations in which the games are set, from which their virtualities derive and into which they flow back. Game virtualities remove us from, but also prepare us for, these actual subject positions. Mostly, as we have discussed at length, they simulate the normalized subjectivities of a global capitalist order – consumer, commander, commanded, cyborg, criminal – not to mention the rapid shedding and swapping between identities that is such an important aptitude of workers (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009, p. 192)

It would be a mistake to read the political value of the gaming avatar or a gaming identity as allowing someone to ‘live in another’s shoes’. There are numerous cases where games fail to achieve this because individual lives, especially the lives marginalised people whose experiences are ‘dipped into’ temporarily, are always more complex than can be represented in games, and the consequence is always more severe that can be represented. From a political perspective, we can re-read the above quote as suggesting that we take on others’ subject positions not just to work towards new social formations. We can take this further to critique our current moment, addressing the forms of labour that define not just game production but capitalism more generally.

Histories of Future Games

There is a wealth of scholarship on the way that games allow us to think across time, predominantly historical societies. This scholarship has focused on historically themed games that allow us to think differently about the past, in historical game studies. Games have a different relationship to the representation of other times and places than other media forms: Chapman, Foka, and Westin (2017) locate the work of Uricchio (2005) as the starting point for the consideration of games as presenting a medium-specific form of historicity. Uricchio focuses on how historical research has often been shaped by the question of mediation of particular histories, with a long history of media being poorly received in the discipline (2005, p. 328). Historical games enable a reinforcing or disruption of colonialist ideologies of the past (Chapman et al. 2017, p. 415); Spring (2015) notes that games allow for methods of representation that are not as available to other media forms; Metzger and Paxton (2016) note that games allow a new kind of interaction with the past. Postcolonial studies of gaming in particular expose how games make alternative conceptions of history possible. The work of Souvik Mukherjee has explored cases of what we might describe as ‘alter-empire’ in historical games (2016) and also how we might frame the complexity of ‘tourism’ as resistant historical subjects of imperial forces (2017, p. 59–62, p. 70–71). Emil Lundedal Hammar has explored the complex relationship between history, memory, individuality and race within a context of political activism (2017) and in politically decontextualised revenge fantasies (2020) in a way that addresses how contexts of other times and places allow for playful reactions to political complications of the present. The theme of interaction is one that Apperley (2013) and Chapman (2016) both locate as being an important attribute of the way we think about the past that games allow both a connection to history and a departure from it, and through this, the rethinking of history becomes possible.

The flipside to the investigation of the past is those analyses that explore a presentation of the future or at least ‘a’ future. This literature includes a focus on the aesthetics of the future and alternative presents and also research into the way that some games that frame their futures in procedurality allow for a type of emergent future. Abraham and Jayemanne (2017) have called attention to the way that games could aesthetically present a vision of a future of ecological sustainability and survival for the planet, an approach that Abraham deploys in the analysis of military shooters (2018). My own work has looked at the way that games allow people to rethink homes and domestic economies through Dwarf Fortress (2006) and the homesteading mechanic of many games (Fordyce, 2018). McClancy’s (2018) analysis of the Fallout franchise also exposes the concern around possible futures, specifically noting that the narrative of the Fallout series is what stakes a claim about how desirable any such future might be. Ruffino (2019) has identified a strand of procedural games that mimic Franklin’s (1979) analysis of capitalist futures, specifically noting that incremental games in particular offer a logic of infinite expansion and that players respond by withdrawing from the prospect of an ‘end’. Conversely, there is also scholarship that attempts to address the nature of what survival itself might look like, post-capitalism, such as van Ryn’s (2020) account of survival without an economy of exchange in Don’t Starve (2013). There is also game scholarship that takes the notion of utopia to task in itself, often framed around the analysis of the Bioshock (2007) series. The Bioshock games focus on intensified notions of political ideologies from the real world hybridised with hyperbolic visions of capitalist consumption habits (see Nyman & Teten, 2018; Pérez-Latorre & Oliva, 2017; Schulzke, 2014). The only thing to be wary of is when our imaginaries of the future are themselves stultifying and we are left without energy or investment to move forward. This is one of the dangers that the imaginaries presented in Bioshock truly risk that all futures that diverge from centrism are awful, so any change is disastrous. The same tools through which we reimagine the past can reimagine the future.

Reading Games Politically

In 10 years, I have found only one quote by Negri that is a sideline reference to video games. Squeezed between complaints about broadcast TV and pop music, Negri states: ‘Now, television has become interactive, producing trash culture and constructing an appropriate audience!’ (Negri, 2007, p. 48). Yet, video game experimentation can contribute to imagining past Empire; we can see in games a space that allows exploration and experimentation of future worlds. A game can display a new economic arrangement, it can consider alternative political configurations, it can enable experiments in subjectivity and community and all of these attributes are important for a political consideration of the future. While games do not do this equally, all games can contribute something to these debates in some respect. While the scholarship above has mostly focused on the role of the action, rules, play and narrative, there remains space within the autonomist tradition to consider games in terms of alternative subjectivities for political action.

The risk for a post-autonomist political analysis is mistaking games as a cornerstone to solve the problems within imperialism. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter note that ‘games are exemplary media of Empire’ (2009, p. xxix), but they are not Empire itself. Games are capable of exploring the politics of worlds that do not yet exist, but they are not in themselves a necessary part of the political future for new worlds to come. As Stengers (2005) suggests, in the case of any post-autonomist praxis, the use of particular tools should always be selective and partial. The politics of games are valuable, but limited, and playing them politically should not identify them as the sole site, or replacement for, activism on behalf of the multitude.

With this we can find themes of command and authority that allow us to identify games that are politically quite didactic, such as Bioshock, as holding a theme of individual agency and choice against a bodiless authority such that we can extract a multitudinous thread from a very liberal/centrist narrative. I believe that the core question to ask is how a game relates to imperial frameworks, as with many imperial expansionist games where the player is not asked to reflect on the process of imperialism, such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series or the Civilization series, or whether a game implicates a player as a subject that becomes aware of imperial systems and positions themselves as questioning them, as with Deus Ex’s perpetual critique of shadow government, The Sims’ blasting open of idea of normative nuclear families or Dwarf Fortress’s rearticulation of the command economies of Civilization. The degree to which any kind of digital work can be considered a part of a paradigm of resistance is a doubly articulated issue. The two tensions that come into play when we evaluate the politics of a work of art are firstly, the degree to which the work articulates, supports, questions, critiques, reveals or conceals an imperial formulation of power. The second is how the work is imbricated in a system of imperial extraction, overwork, exploitation, unionisation, crisis, crunch and resistance. Games, by their nature, are a part of the future world that they seek to describe and are shaped by the parameters of their world in the present. The political economic conditions of the creation of games shape what kind of futures is imagined and what kinds of variables are involved in their analysis. Equally, the new futures we imagine will also require imagining new modes of producing games themselves.