Games and Culture

2019 marked ten years since the publication of Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire, which has become a seminal book in videogame cultural criticism. Ten years later, there is still a pressing need for cultural and materialist criticism of the politics of production within game studies. In putting together this special issue, our hope is to identify new developments in the game industry and academia that are emblematic of 21st-century capitalism. Just as Games of Empire popularised critical political-economic perspectives ten years ago, we encourage others, as the authors in this issue did, to continue and maintain investigations into questions of ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations and radical struggle. Such analyses are necessary not only to trace but also to open up new directions in game culture and academia for decades to come.

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. I argue that a post-autonomist method of game analysis requires an explicitly political interpretation that is focused on trying to imagine a political future through experiments in gaming.

This article interrogates Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter’s Games of Empire. Since its publication in 2009, the game industry evolved significantly, adding billions of players, dollars, and devices. One of the driving forces of this transformation has been the global diffusion of mobile media. This raises the question: Do mobile platforms and the app stores operated by Apple and Google allow for a radical departure from global hypercapitalism? This question will be explored by taking on three themes: shifts in labor, the political economy of platformization, and the capital-intensive mode of app production and circulation. Doing so addresses two gaps in Games of Empire’s approach: a dearth of empirical economic analysis and the acknowledgment of work in critical platform studies and mainstream economics. It is concluded that rather than providing a staging ground for dissent or collective action, apps of empire signal the foreclosure of an exodus from global hypercapitalism.

This article investigates some of the key debates that have emerged within the nascent union organising project Game Workers Unite, with a specific focus on its UK branch (GWU UK). The analysis is based on a period of participatory observation and a series of interviews with board members of GWU UK. This article evaluates Game Workers Unite (GWU) in relation to other recent attempts at unionising the game industry. It concludes that the strategies adopted to counter the hyper-visibility and individualisation of the game worker are key contributions of GWU in contemporary video game labour. This article draws on the work of Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) Games of empire: Global capitalism and video games to evaluate the historical specificity of GWU and the importance of the organisation for the contemporary video game industry.

Game workers have a problem. They code values and ideologies into games, but they are either not aware of it or deny it. Through a constructive and critical engagement with Games of Empire, I propose the concept of “ludic religiosity” to reveal how white masculinity informs game workers’ professional discourses, technological practices, ludic desires, and imaginations. Drawing on three-year-long ethnographic research and in conversation with cultural studies, philosophy of technology, and postcolonial game studies, I revisit desiring machine and ideology, two major concepts from Games of Empire. My goal is to demonstrate the racialized and gendered discourses and practices behind game developers’ desire to produce cognitive capitalism’s “escapist” commodities and rethink ideology within white masculine production cultures. Foregrounding how racialized and gendered practices and imaginations inform the desire behind the global game industry is crucial, especially in the aftermath of Gamergate and the rise of authoritarianism.

This article builds on Games of Empire by centering the experiences of diversity workers in Game Studies of Empire. Our data were gathered through qualitative mixed methods of in-depth surveys and semi-structured interviews. Participants self-identified to be included in the study, all thinking critically through the definitions of “diversity,” “diversity work(er),” and “game studies.” Thus, this study reports on a tapestry of knowledge and experiences from the various educators and advocates of diversity across academia and the games industry. Diversity workers in Game Studies of Empire are often exploited by their affective attachment to diversity and perform significant unrecognized and uncompensated affective labor. Empire uses diversity workers to produce a quantifiable and tokenizable product of bodies and lived experiences that can be used to further profits for companies, universities, and other institutions. Diversity work(ers) against Game Studies of Empire unite! We will have nothing to lose when we become unchained.

To demonstrate how Games of Empire (Dyer-Witheford, N., & de Peuter, G. (2009). Games of empire. Global capitalism and video games, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota) elaborated an important standpoint within critical game studies, this article discusses the thesis that a specific type of video games perfectly converges with our contemporary modes of representation and praxis, which are best situated within the paradigm of hypermodernity (Lipovetsky, G. (1983). L’ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris. Gallimard, coll. «Folio essais»; Lipovetsky, G. & Charles, S. (2004). Les temps hypermodernes. Paris: Bernard Grasset, «Nouveau collège de philosophie»). Hypermodernity radicalizes modernity because, within hypermodernity, values such as progress, reason, and happiness are overly (hyper) actualized rather than surpassed (post) (Aubert, N. (2006) (dir). L’individu hypermoderne. Toulouse: Eres, coll. «Sociologie clinique»; Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press). Based on an archetypal account, that is, a theoretical model rather than a case study, this article will show how hypermodern video games' commercialization and use within a capitalist context are emblematic of hypermodernity. We will also evaluate how these games promote adaptation to hypermodernity toward an "ideal" becoming-player for Empire. In conclusion, if playing can be seen as the multitude's escape hatch out of the dominant order, this article will explain how hypermodern video games, as a media, may also be viewed as a key site where asymmetrical and unequal relationships replicate within Empire.

Responding to a journal issue revisiting Games of Empire, this article begins by surveying the state of digital play amid a conjuncture of pandemic lockdown, anti-racism protest, and looming recession. We go on to address criticism of our book’s outlook on “games of multitude” in the face of the reactionary side of gaming culture expressed by Gamergate. We next outline elements of a research itinerary, were we to update our book’s project, including climate crisis, platform proliferation, organizing and organizations, and video gaming’s violent intersections. We conclude by reasserting the need to attend to emancipatory currents within—and against—game cultures. While gaming’s complicity in energy overconsumption and cultures of domination raises serious questions about its contribution to any postcapitalist future, the struggles that might bring us to this point will be waged by combatants whose subjectivities have been formed within the digital complexes of which gaming is now an integral part.