Game Design in the Imperial Mode #CGSA 2022
The text from the keynote talk I gave at the Canadian Games Studies Conference May 2022 — thank you to Gerald Voorhees and Alison Harvey for inviting me to speak. This talk builds on my DIGRA India 2021 talk about White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures — here’s the text and the video.
So an alternative title for this talk could be: I work in video games and I have complicated feelings about it. Or even, how does living and working amidst the crises of capital and empire — in this imperial mode of living — shape what video games are and what they mean?
How these many interlocking ideologies of our present moment of accelerating crisis — capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, caste supremacy and so on — are reproduced through the formal techniques and themes of game design, and also to reflect a little on how these conditions affect both the contexts of games making and play.
As players and designers we all live, willingly or unwillingly, in the imperial mode of spectacle and alienation, geopolitical instability, global inequalities and accelerating ecological crisis. As Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen argue, the imperial mode of living is one in which the imperialist world order is normalised, and inscribed into everyday practices and even unconsciously reproduced.
This is where we live, where our work meets our players, and where our work is made or sometimes not made, whether we like it or not. And most often, we don’t. The ideologies of dominant culture shape what players expect, what is considered viable and valuable, which is to say what is funded, made and distributed, what is expected of us as designers and workers and as humans. Deviations from the approved scripts are difficult to enact, and are often harshly punished — ask any marginalised person working in video games.
Why does our discipline bend so deeply towards designing worlds which tremble at the passage of the player, agency as a sacrament available only to The Protagonist, largely conceived in the modes of exploitation and domination, protagonism that sustains its vitality by making everything around it dead? The prevalence of the NPC which exists only to be victimised, rescued, used by the player? This is not “natural” design, it does not come into being spontaneously even if it is at times normalised so deeply it is instinctively understood as a function of “what games are”. These are the shapes that the imperial mode of living prunes video games into.
Game design falls into the tendencies of the imperial mode sometimes because of the designers’ intent but also, often, despite it. The material conditions of the industry are not conducive to new frameworks and experimentation, and become less so with scale which requires capital — which is why teams with greater resources are not usually where alternative and subversive designs emerge.
Narrative design — which I’m talking about not because it deals uniquely with any of what I’m discussing, but because that’s my area of experience in the games industry — currently encompasses work which is difficult to discuss cogently much less enact, because the vocabularies don’t exist, are too new, or are contingent on particular types of expertise or because they require new types of collaborations. And in those silences normative approaches become default, particularly due to limitations of time and resource or precedent, which is often how certain ways of thinking are unintentionally reproduced.
Subversive and countercultural work in video games largely comes from places where experimental work can thrive. The indie space, the non-commercial space, interactive fiction, queer games, twine games, itch.io, game design at the interstices of theatre, art, design, music. The dynamic sound design work happening right now in video games is extraordinary. There is beautiful work in this spectacular, bombastic industry of cheap thrills if you know where to look. And even the cheap thrills are cathedrals of impossibly complex and difficult and fascinating work. As academic and developer Frank Lantz memorably said, “Games are operas made out of bridges.”
Our industry is also a place of precarity, where we struggle to find sustaining and sustainable work. Despite the intentions and desires of most of us working in the games industry, as it is in so many other professions, it is difficult to do fulfilling, stable, dignified and meaningful work which pays the rent. These human desires of ours run counter to the imperatives of the imperial mode which we all live in. What games are now is also a result of all the games that didn’t get made, work which has been suppressed and forgotten, and the shadow of all the potential work unmade by people — particularly women & marginalised people — who have quite frankly been persecuted out of the games industry.
Over these last couple of years, I’ve asked myself whether this is really the place I want to be. Does it feel like my work here is meaningful and satisfying? Does what I do make any sense in the face of everything that is wrong with the world, the crises and horrors and systematic injustices that are so vast and so urgent, but that seem so utterly beyond my ability to even reckon with much less touch or impact from my own small and specific position? And even — is this a position I want to continue inhabiting? Being here is accepting the cycles of online abuse and harassment faced by many marginalised workers in the games industry. The tokenisation. The necessity of engaging with alt-right ideologies and language and spaces, if only to ascertain my own level of risk and exposure with any clarity, I am not the only marginalised person in the games industry to have a safety plan in case of doxxing, justified paranoia about the leaking of private photos, an utterly absurd expectation of harassment and threats if I accept certain professional opportunities or say or do certain things. There are parts of this talk which might get me or my colleagues in trouble. Of course, we expect to encounter critique, but harassment is an unpleasant reality, and most of the networks of support are informal and ad-hoc. There are many parts of our work which game designers don’t talk about publicly, because they can become flashpoints for harassment and abuse, which can threaten our employment.
To exist as a marginalised person in video games is to be cast in the role of activist, which is not always comfortable. And I think about bell hooks’s insights about marginality. That marginality should not be regarded a place of pain, but a space of possibility and resistance.
The problems which plague us in the games industry plague every industry — if not in exactly the same form. The frustrations of working in video games are the frustrations of work, and of working and living in this imperial mode. There is no escape from it, the only way is through it. The only way out is liberation for all of us — a monumental task, which is hard to even imagine how to approach. So I suppose we just begin, in whatever way that we can, where we are. Video games won’t save the world, but as I’ve said before saving the world isn’t the only way for what we do to matter. We all have to do what we can in the places that we can reach, and reach for each other, organise and build community in the teeth of these vast interlocking mechanisms of oppression and extraction.
So let’s talk about players and protagonists.
C Thi Nguyen talks about games as a medium of agency. Game design tells players who to be and what to do. I think we have to think about that nexus between player — protagonist — designer to understand how agency in games works, and how we can intervene in it as designers. Last year at DIGRA India I talked about bringing Umberto Eco’s idea of the “model reader” embedded in the text into thinking about games design. So: instead of the model reader, we have the “model player” that is imagined by the game’s designers as we encode meaning into the work. The “model player” of the video game is a white man. In my DIGRA India talk I go on to talk about the “white protagonist” as a set of assumptions that can be challenged about what it means to be a protagonist, but today I want to talk about the entity known as the “white player”, which haunts our work.
The white player
I’m going to start us off with a quote:
Writers have long had a language for how whiteness warps the imagination. James Baldwin used a vivid metaphor to describe the sensation: the “little white man” who hovers nearby and passes judgment on everything you write. I prefer this to the more polite contemporary euphemism, the “white gaze,” which sounds like it has an off-switch and ignores the way it can get inside you. The “little white man,” by contrast, sounds like he climbs up your back and breathes down your neck and farts in your ear. He demands that you explain yourself and your people according to specific scripts; cries foul when you describe what it’s like to live in your body; when you turn a nice phrase, probably hisses something like “but you’re so articulate.”
This is from Tajja Isen’s brilliant piece in Time, titled “America Doesn’t Know How to Read the Work of Black Writers”. I think it’s absolutely astute. The way I think about the white player in video games builds upon the work of writers, particularly Black writers, who have brought to light the perniciousness of whiteness.
The white player is a vortex that distorts our art and practice. It lives in each of our minds in the way that the white reader resides in the writer’s mind. But beyond the white player inside our own minds is the white player’s institutionalisation and formalisation of whiteness in our design structures and in the structures of our industry. The white player’s — imagined, assumed, understood — desires have been enshrined as objective and sacrosanct by our market-driven, data-driven, player-centric model of video game design. Funding is dispensed at his behest, he is invoked whenever someone in the room dares to suggest deviation from the well-trodden road, female protagonists are “unmarketable” or “financially risky”, whiteness and masculinity are replicated over and over not out of any racial prejudice or bigotry, no, but merely because of the practicalities of the market, which is an entity largely made of fantasy and unconscious desire. As Isen says, “whiteness gets reproduced through formal technique”.
The white player is also a projection of the white designer’s anxieties, fears, repressions, desires and instincts. The white player justifies the white designer’s own preferences, which are then normalised and replicated. Other possibilities are shut down. The white designer maintains their own power in the hierarchy of the studio through this “special communion”, this “unique ability to understand” the white player. From this, I hope it is easy to see why marginalised designers and particularly non-white non-male designers might find it difficult to be entrusted with this delicate task. And therefore why white playerism is worth being made visible and rooting out, not least because as a conceptual framework it occludes the true multifariousness of our players and their needs and desires.
Narrative design as a craft is about what the player is feeling, desiring, anticipating.
“Player-centric design” is plagued by unexamined whiteness, and I believe that our reluctance as an industry to believe that players can enjoy experiences of unfairness, exclusion, limitation, powerlessness — or even just types of power outside of domination — is rooted in our internalisation of the white player. The anxiousness to “give the player what he wants”, in the sense of the ritual mantra “the customer is always right”, often runs counter to a game’s ludonarrative intentions, causing dissonance and distortion. Whiteness cannot be curtailed, it is freedom — to cross digital boundaries and borders as it traverses physical ones without impediment.
Upending the white player and the white protagonist open up not only possibilities beyond the gun and the war, but even ways of talking about and designing about war, guns and violence that isn’t glorified, propagandistic or bombastic. This War of Mine is a brilliant and important game precisely because it is a response to the context of how our industry manufactures and presents narratives of war, it’s narrative design — through focusing on civilian survival in war time rather than the protagonism of soldiers or warriors — contains within it an implicit if not explicit critique of the regressive perspectives and preoccupations of the mainstream industry, but also the dominant geopolitical order which valorises, prettifies and sells war as an exhilarating way of being in the world.
I want to touch on here the complexity of unpicking the white player for the marginalised designer. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as I write and design the game I’m currently working on with Outerloop, called Thirsty Suitors. It’s a joyful immigrant fantasy of battling with your exes, reconciling your cultural differences and disappointing your parents through dance battles, cooking and skating. The protagonist is a young queer South Asian immigrant woman. I’m working closely with brown colleagues for the first time in my career — I’ve been in this industry since 2013. My team is remote and lots of us are queer, immigrants, women, non-white. I contrast my approach as a narrative designer on this game to my work on 80 Days — which is an anti-colonial retelling of Verne’s Victorian novel — and though I’m proud of my work on 80 Days I do see it now as still an attempt to reach the “white player”. Of course I was also driven by a desire to seize back the histories and fantasies of non-white and colonised people, but I think there is inside my work a secret wish or hope to make whiteness in the form of the player recognise us, me, the marginalised designer, as human, worthwhile, interesting, of value. Even the ways I subvert the injunctions of the white protagonism in the game belie my preoccupation with whiteness. Isen talks about this beautifully:
“If you’re going to build a creative practice out of denying somebody’s expectations, you still have to spend a lot of time anticipating their desires.”
Has there ever been an art form more formally and mechanistically dedicated to the anticipation and fulfilment of white desire?
By contrast — as I’m working on Thirsty Suitors my conception of the player is “like me”. I’m writing and designing “for us”, which feels so utterly different and even new in my practice. The white player is invited into the game as a guest, but they don’t own the home. Of course, this freedom from the white player isn’t entirely a freedom from the burdens of being a marginalised designer — the lack of representation in the industry more broadly places an unfair weight of responsibility and expectation on marginalised developers’ work. Our work is always read as representative, it must act as a “moral corrective” to the distorted representations and stereotypes of broader culture, it is bound to disappoint some marginalised players because a single work no matter how thoughtful or insightful or compelling is only a band-aid over the deeper wounds of cultural invisibility and media distortion. There’s also not much precedent for how to handle these narratives and themes, which sometimes makes this work a bit of an adventure. It’s hard to know whether we’ll pull it off, until it happens.
As marginalised designers we have to consciously reject the roles of saviour, educator, ambassador and gatekeeper of “otherness” to dominant culture. We are often herded into this roles, which are then used to trap us. But we should attempt to occupy the role of the artist, as something to hold on to when we’re pulled in these directions by the industry’s undertow.
I’m going to conclude this section with a last quote from Isen’s article, which is a question I return to again and again: “does what I’ve put on the page unsettle your dominance the way it should?” — Does this work unsettle your dominance the way it should?
White players & meritocracy myth
I’ve talked in the past about the “fairness fantasy” in terms of player expectations, or at least, our idea as designers of player expectations. I’ve always argued that unfair isn’t a bad thing for a game to be, drama often comes out of unfairness. But there is a phenomenon amongst our players that I’ve always struggled to understand, until I looked at it through the lens of the “white player” — and that’s the backlash from certain vocal segments of our players against easy mode, auto-play, and a whole host of accommodations that serve to make games accessible for a broader range of players without in any way impacting anyone who does not choose these modes or features. Why, then, the anger, betrayal, upset that seems entirely out of proportion to the impact? Clearly the answer does not lie in the game’s systems, which still operate for this player in the same way, but in the context and metanarratives of play.
I think we can understand this backlash in the context of a challenge to the idea of meritocracy, which is part of the propaganda of whiteness. The gamer who is winning in the game which presents itself as meritocratic, sees any accommodations made for other players as unfairly advantaging them and devaluing their own achievement. But the reality is the so-called meritocratic system was rigged for exactly the kind of person who can succeed within it. Broadening a game’s ability to “read” and reward a broader range of play styles, capabilities and players, is deeply threatening to the myth of meritocracy which relies on the idea that only one type of play, or a certain set of abilities — that just happen to accrue to a certain type of player, say young white middle class able-bodied Anglo-American men — are the only legitimate types of play within the system. The objectivity of the rules cannot be questioned, because the white player’s ego is enmeshed with the idea that they are objectively better and uniquely deserving. The game is thus a forum for the white player to “prove” “objectively” the innate superiority of whiteness, that is part of the metanarrative of play that the white player brings with them. To challenge or broaden the definition of success is a challenge to the idea that the white player is uniquely suited to protagonism, and so is read as an unsettling challenge to deep-rooted ideas of white entitlement. As such, I would say this is a worthwhile player entitlement for us to challenge and design against, while accepting and anticipating regressive racist backlash disguised as player critique.
The white designer
The “white (male) designer” as model designer of the video game is a powerful imaginary. It shapes hiring practices, whose work and jobs are valued, who is protected by and occupies the C-Suite, what games are funded, and whose preferences are considered “good”. Our industry culture of a lack of accountability for rock stars and auteurs, and a disproportionate focus on their contributions and importance to what is fundamentally the work of teams, is at the root of so many of the harmful labour practices that characterise our professional lives: toxic workplaces, abuse, exploitation, bullying, sexual harassment, crunch. As the white protagonist makes games hostile environments for non-white and marginalised players, the “white designer” as the “model designer” makes the games industry hostile to non-white and marginalised designers — and really, to everyone.
This conception holds a deep sway over active parts of our player base. The mere visibility of non-white, queer, marginalised people or even cis straight white men who do not confiorm to the specific expectations of the “white male designer” is often met with harassment and anger. The types of slurs and conspiracies deployed are telling to me — “blue haired SJW”, transphobic slurs, “soyboy”, “white knight” — are all about certain types of developers incorrectly performing gender, and somehow polluting this sacred space. The sexuality of women working in the industry is somehow an insidious threat to video games, which need to be protected from them through a viciously imposed code of “ethics in game journalism”.
That brings me quite neatly to my next point. Let’s talk about DOMINATION!
Dominator culture
The imperial mode of living is living inside what bell hooks and other theorists describe as “dominator culture”, where hierarchy and power are rigidly enforced through fear and force, and domination is valorised and normalised. This plays out in our families, interpersonal relationships, societies, structures — and I think hooks’ ideas about “dominator culture” are very resonant with video games.
Games where enemies are killed, subjugated, displaced, where we design juicy feedback to enhance the sadistic thrill of maiming our opponents, god games, turn-based military simulations, even farming games where the player dominates and brings to productive order the landscape, 4X games, many strategy games. On the thematic level, games that are about conquest, war, overcoming enemies through violence, overthrowing nations, becoming king / boss / tycoon, or even achieving mastery over the game’s systems.
hooks also talks about the “acts of psychic self-mutilation” that males are called on to perform in dominator culture, that they must “kill off the emotional parts of themselves” and as a result many men live in a state of profound loneliness. It’s telling how many male protagonists in games exist in a state of profound loneliness, relieved only by hypermasculine brotherhoods of war, violence and sport. How many video game plots are driven by the white male protagonist’s struggle with guilt or shame ludonarratively sublimated in the form of violence?
The tendencies of dominator culture shape not only the stories and satisfactions we offer to players but also our own positionality as designers whose work deals deeply with player agency, and systematising reward and punishment of our players in the game world. It is easy to slip into the role of dominator-designer. Which is not to say that this is an illegitimate position for the designer to occupy at all — the designers of many queer twine games take on this role as critique, or with purposeful intent to explore ideas of power, hierarchy, obedience, often by subversively eroticising domination and playing with complicity. I think porpentine’s work in this area is unparalleled.
Games where players must submit to arbitrary and strict rules, where obedience is rewarded and deviating from the designer’s expectations is not ignored, but punished. Games which guilt us into staying with them, and shame or punish us for staying away. Games which demand constant attention — for instance, games without a pause button, which are absolutely hostile to anyone who has caring responsibilities. Games which use punitive and coercive design techniques to enforce their regime onto players.
A dominator mode of design is also one where players are subjected to traumatic experiences carelessly or callously — this is particularly prevalent under the regime of the white player, where non-white players are routinely subjected to racially traumatising or alienating experiences.
The basic form of this is the non-white player embodying the white protagonist who brutalises non-white NPCs.
To even be able to recognise our design as traumatising we need to get outside of that closed circle of white designer — white protagonist — white player. That is not to say that players who are white are not traumatised by the spectacle of subjugating the other which is packaged as pleasurable fantasy. In fact I’d suggest this fantasy would not be compelling and so prevalent if whiteness was culturally and psychologically resolved. The violence and brutality that is repressed under the veneer of civilisation bursts out in the space of play, and playing a shooter offers perhaps a kind of return to the repressed trauma, an endless and futile attempt to re-enact and master this racial, cultural trauma in the safety of the game world. I’ve watched many people play beloved shooters over and over again, in a state which looks more like dissociation than relaxation.
Think about the many open-world games that are about gleeful brutality taking place in South American jungles or Pacific islands or war-torn Asian or African landscapes. Real places disoriented by the Anglo-American imagination: the inexplicable civil war in South India in Uncharted: Lost Legacy, the nearly-Nepal of Far Cry’s Kyrat. The histories and geographies of the Global South, of many nations scarred and wounded by Anglo-American imperialism, ungently remade by these games for the consumption of the white player, an act of symbolic reconquest. (“They’ll bomb your country and they’ll make a movie out of it.”)
Alice Miller, the brilliant psychologist of childhood talks about unresolved trauma as a deficit of knowledge. She asks a compelling question: how can we treat others with dignity and respect if our own dignity was violated in childhood? Given that games as a medium are all about manipulating agency, our own ideas as designers about what agency is becomes resonant. Game designers tell players who to be, what to do, what is good or bad.
The moral universe of our games is intricately designed for our players — much less by narrative content than by what pathways, interactions, behaviours we incentivise and what we frictionalise.
Therefore, I think our own understanding of agency as designers is a deeply important question in our profession, particularly living as we do in cultures of normalised domination.
Many of us as a result will have deficits of knowledge or misconceptions around agency, consent, respect, autonomy — facing and in some way resolving our own deeply imprinted misconceptions, and developing a vocabulary to talk about agentic effects, outcomes and dynamics with each other may well be a necessary part of our craft and practice as narrative designers. To enable us to design responsibly and compassionately, and explore possibilities of agency in games which are not distorted by the imperial mode and our own taboos, anxieties and repressions.
Perhaps in the attempt to understand and accept our own unmet needs we can develop fuller understandings of the human needs and desires of our players? Those of their truer selves, rather than repeating the suppressions and false promises of dominant culture, and merely satisfying our own unmet undigested desires in our designs rather than the player’s unmet desires?
If we have not come to terms with our own oppression and subjugation and even suffering are we not more likely to repeat it through our players, designing them into submission to our ludonarrative regime with a dominating hand?
I have to admit, maybe this is on my mind of late because I’m working on a game about generational trauma, which has necessitated a certain amount of revisiting and reckoning with my own. These processes have served each other.
Dehumanisation / Mechanisation
The modes of categorisation and bureaucracy which allowed colonial powers to efficiently extract resources from the colonised gave rise to the technology which powers video games. We design games in the afterlife of empire, with tools that have been used to subjugate and annihilate. The pleasures of naming, categorisation and collecting are deeply embedded into the normative design frameworks of the video game. Management sims and Tycoon-style games are about the effective bureaucratic deployment of resources. Even when games turn away from designs of violent domination they often replicate other imperialist pleasures: the museum, the explorer, the merchant, the scientist, the bureaucrat. Assassins Creed: Origins demonstrates this beautifully: the enemies can be turned off, and the gorgeously designed and imagined spaces turned into a virtual museum, complete with tours. We can switch between the battleground and the museum with an airy gesture, revealing them both as connected imperial modes of play. Underneath the cobblestones, not the beach — but the playground.
Games and the tech industry are also fertile ground for new forms of scientific racism and bureaucratised surveillance. Look at Activision’s recent Diversity & Inclusion tool, built to produce a graph of each character’s axes of diversity to enable the team internally to see at a glance the “diversity” of each of their characters and spot diversity gaps in their games’ casts, assigning characters a number which corresponds to their relative distance from “normative” in categories such as race, gender, cognitive ability. I don’t want to heap more criticism onto this tool, which was no doubt created in good faith and has already been heavily critiqued by designers, developers, critics and thinkers. But I think it’s important to acknowledge here that the colonialist underpinnings of these modes of categorisation and bureaucracy are antithetical to anti-racist, liberatory work. “Diversity and inclusion” when co-opted can be merely a guise for the empire to weigh and measure, dissect and reconstitute us into resources to be efficiently deployed in service to capitalism-colonialism.
Games studios — unsurprisingly, given our proximity to Silicon Valley, are also laboratories for technocratic bureaucracies of workplace efficiency with most of studios using several different types of productivity software or applications. Progress must be tracked and measured, to allow management to secure approvals or funding, and an unpredictable workflow made somehow orderly to mitigate capital risk. I sometimes feel we are attempting to systematise the production of video games even while we are at a tender and early stage of our development as a medium. And that there is also something else, something immeasurable to what we do, when it really works — but under the regime of bureaucratic efficiency whatever cannot be measured will be lost.
The myth of linear progress
The very fact that we use “progress” as the fundamental term to describe the unfolding of a game brings with it certain assumptions about what it means to progress in dominant culture, key to that is that things will get better, more orderly, that progress in a game will mirror the colonialist idea of a linear progression from savagery to civilisation.
In my DIGRA talk I described how the white protagonist will be forgiven, that whatever the protagonist must do in order for the game to progress will be forgiven by the structure of the game itself. And I wondered whether this was in fact a feature of protagonism rather than “white protagonism”, because I couldn’t really see any ways of designing subversively that didn’t begin with accepting this premise and designing with it in mind. I think that in fact the idea that “the protagonist will be forgiven” is enmeshed with colonialist-capitalist conceptions of progress shaped by future oriented ethics as encoded into game progression, rather than white protagonism. Future oriented ethics have long been critiqued by anti-colonial intellectuals and have animated imperialist conquest and currently animate technocratic elites in the form of longtermism and Effective Altruism, and it’s a complex subject which there’s too much to say about, really. The idea of what is to come, an imagined future justifying brutality, violence, oppression, horror in the present, because it will all be somehow made worth it. The imagined future is both glorious and inevitable, and the pursuit of it both noble and necessary. Therefore whatever actions are taken in the present are pre-emptively vindicated by the future which doesn’t exist. Whatever the cost of progress is, it must be forgiven, in the game world and in the material world. So it’s progress that forgives the protagonist, rather than whiteness — but it is a white and colonial idea of progress, so.
I think “progress” is such a useful design framework in video games partly because of the need to give players a sense of scale or context, which games don’t intrinsically have in the way that reading a physical book makes clear to the reader. Maps are often used for this purpose, charting the player’s journey, to memorialise what they have done and to give players a sense of how much more there is to do in the game world.
Another potential way of giving players a sense of scale or context is through pace rather than “progress”, which is the structured pattern of ludonarrative satisfactions designed for a player to experience within the overall metanarrative of play which of course also includes their embodied contexts (playing on a phone, having children or responsibilities, playing alone or with friends, etc etc.)
The war on leisure
The imperial mode loathes leisure, which is a human need. The forces of capital are arrayed against it. It is unproductive time — which is blasphemy in the religion of capital. We live in “hustle culture”, where all our pleasures, hobbies, opinions, emotions must be professionalised and monetised. Our interactions with each other must be in some way corporatised: mined for data, bringing eyeballs to YouTube or SnapChat or Instagram, through Facebook or Zoom or Slack. Any unmediated time we spend with each other which escapes post-processing by social media, is fertile territory for digital technology to occupy, even if it requires the displacement of the human bonds or pleasures which previously thrived in that space.
We can see this in the ongoing enclosure of spaces for joy, play and community in the material world, and the colonisation of video games by capital as part of the workification of games and the financialisation of leisure. Lewis Gordon talks about the capitalist pleasures of Animal Crossing: New Horizons in The Nation:
“with millions made unemployed due to the pandemic’s economic fallout, New Horizons might be resonating all the more because of this — a means to keep working, even just figuratively, as literal jobs are disappearing.
Except in New Horizons, work is obviously not like a regular job; it’s suffused into an everyday existence where economic value is ascribed to even the most banal tasks. My avatar has a cell phone that comes with an app called Nook Miles, which tracks and records all my actions; for every fish I catch or weed I pull, I’m rewarded with points accompanied by a bright melody and sharp endorphin kick. […] As the days unfold, everything on the island, myself included, begins to feel like a stockpile of standing-reserve waiting to be transformed into capital or tokens.”
Game design in the imperial mode tends toward addictive, coercive and exploitative pleasures — abusive design which does not respect the player’s human needs, and in fact leverages those needs for its own purposes. Exploiting flaws in the human psyche to leverage the player’s vulnerabilities to keep them playing while their time, attention and money are extracted from them. We can see the recent rise in prevalence of this type of design: loot-boxes, microtransactions, dual-currencies, pay-to-win, turn-exhaustion, premium pathways, the corporate push towards games-as-service. Games in which the experience is broken for the majority of players to extract value from the few.
The work the industry produces in the near-future will also be shaped by the increasing platformisation and ongoing monopolisation. A straightforward example: the nature of Apple Arcade distorts the designs of the games which it funds; Apple Arcade’s metrics of success determine what a successful game is, and the space for iPhone games outside Arcade shrinks. What is good for Apple Arcade is not necessarily what is good for the medium, though there is a lot of good work to be found on Apple Arcade.
Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction By Design is an incredibly depressing and valuable book about digital and video technology assisted machine gambling in Las Vegas, and I think it’s deeply useful for us as game designers to familiarise ourselves with the types of addictive designs and frameworks refined and perfected in the casino so we can identify them and design and agitate against them as they increasingly infect video games and the imaginations of management, executives and VC funders. She talks about what players call “the machine zone”, which is a trancelike state engendered by the rhythms of design in which they play in order to keep playing, rather than to win, ignoring bodily needs and physical and even economic exhaustion. I think this is usefully read alongside Braxton Soderman’s Against Flow, in explicating how the focus on immersion and designing players into states of pleasurable flow can be harnessed towards capitalist exploitation, offering the false promise of individual transformation and self expression rather than serving the player’s real human needs, the pleasurable / numb state of flow keeping the player trapped inside and veiled from the mechanisms of their own exploitation.
There is, I think, a correspondence between the decreasing satisfactions & compensations of work in the material world, and the playful pleasures corporations and executives offer to us with crypto, play-to-earn, play-to-own, the workification of games and what the gamification of work. I deeply worry that the type of gamification design which escaped from video games into the worlds of work and consumption will come back to haunt us, pulling games design toward gamification in service of the demands of value-extraction. As someone who worked in gamification in the mid-2000s, I had hoped we had laid that ghost to rest.
Which brings me to another feature of the imperial mode: it is one of false promises and the scam economy, pulling game design into the shape of the casino and the ponzi scheme. Look at Axii infinity. The rise of cryptocurrencies, blockchain gaming, NFTs etc- They can be seen, as Katherine Cross puts it, as “part of the grim harvest of capitalism’s newfound lust for the intangible”.
False Promises and Imagined Futures
What is the future of video games? If the VC-funded corporate myth-making is to be believed it is cryptocurrency and the metaverse. Leaving aside the many problems of feasibility and necessity, there is I think such a deep push from capital to make these things real that I am resigned to their infiltration into video games. However there is something deeply delusional about the fact that both of these future paradigms for digital entertainment come with an enormous environmental cost at a time of ruinous ecological crisis. Mining bitcoin right now uses more electricity than the country of Ireland, and we imagine a future of widespread adoption of crypto and NFTs? The metaverse, similarly, relies on the widespread adoption of VR and the environmental cost of manufacturing more and more VR headsets so that player-consumers can be subsumed into this space of corporate fantasy.
These do not seem like rational responses to our present circumstances, and are, I think, deeply enmeshed in the technocratic elite’s anxieties about the faltering fantasy of endless exploitation and growth. As we approach the finite planetary boundaries of the material world, instead of giving up the dream, it is projected into increasingly digital, virtual and intangible spaces.
The aspirational fantasy offered to people in the material world is converted into one of roleplaying in the virtual world. I think we can see one of the appeals for cryptobros as roleplaying — pretending to be a rich person, speculating on a fantasy currency market, serving the individualist fantasies of capitalism-colonialism where success is determined by your wits and skill. The NFT’s invention of artificial scarcity of digital goods speaking to the fantasy as being one of endless exploitation rather than endlessness.
In some ways, heaven is the metaverse. An externality which cannot be exhausted. A spiritual promise of pleasure, satisfaction, fulfillment which can be manipulatively offered in the place of pleasure, satisfaction, fulfillment in the material world. I’m sure we will see in the future metaversal escapes to beautiful locations which have been ravaged by capitalist-colonialist exploitation in the real world or are only accessible to the super-rich, virtual worlds full of species which we have driven to extinction, workified video games which offer a relief or replacement for materially unsatisfying or non-existent work, the opportunity to role-play elite pleasures of domination, subjugation, overconsumption, individualist / libertarian freedom, gambling and speculation.
I want to make it clear why I think the misenchantments of technocracy and the delusions of venture capitalists and tech billionaires are useful to talk about in a talk about game design. The technology industry, of which we are a part, is shaped by the preferences, ideologies and instincts of a very small elite, and our work as game designers will be harnessed to their purposes if we don’t find ways to collectively resist these pulls.
Video games are technocracy’s cultural medium, one of the avenues through which it attempts to invent new desires and bring new consumers within the extractive grasp of capitalism-colonialism to fulfill the dogma of endless growth which the entire system relies upon. But the technocratic elite has withered imaginations and so therefore outsources its imaginative work to us — this is a type of labour that I fear will become increasingly hard to divest from or resist as video games are increasingly financialised and replaced by scam economies and platformisation and monopolisation further narrows the range of tastemakers who control the chokepoints between players and designers.
Conclusion
I hope it’s clear by now that I don’t think video games will save the world. I’m not even sure we can save ourselves. But maybe that’s okay. The truth is that all the futures I imagine in which video games exist are dystopian.
So what do we do in this twilight space, practitioners of a decadent art form whose very existence is perhaps contingent on the same ideologies which are accelerating us towards ecological collapse and mass suffering and death. Did the band really keep playing as the Titanic sank? Maybe they did. What else is there to do, especially if the only thing you know how to do, and love to do, is to play the saxophone?
We can do our best to channel people’s energies to the collective rather than disperse them, we can resist designs of addiction and the financialisation of games. We can try to serve our players real human needs as much as possible. And in truth, as T S Eliot said, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality”- we need fantasy and stories, to be able to bear what we have made of the world.
Game design in the imperial mode makes games spaces of comfortable re-enactment of safe pleasures for white players, white protagonists and white designers. But as bell hooks tells us, “the practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” To design from a place of love is to unsettle the imperial mode of game design, its conventions and truisms, its supposedly universal pleasures and objective delights, it’s assumptions of agency and power, it’s regressive safeties and aversions to risk, and its hypermasculine antipathy towards vulnerability.
And for me, to design from a place of love is also to admit: I would rather make a bad video game rather than harm someone in pursuit of some self-serving artistic vision. I think a lot of my colleagues would agree. I would also rather make trouble than “be a bricklayer”, which is a piece of extraordinarily sensible and unspeakably grim advice someone I was once with on a panel gave to young designers. Please don’t be bricklayers. Smash the whole house up. Don’t keep your heads down. Bring all the things you care about in the world into your practice as game designers, and keep some parts of yourself outside of video games. Find and build community within it. None of us are going to escape the traps that lie ahead of us alone.
There’s a wonderful moment in The Great British Bake-Off, seasons and seasons ago, back when it was on the BBC with Mel and Sue. One of the contestant’s cakes, that they’ve spent hours and hours making and decorating, topples over and the contestant starts to cry. Mel and Sue — the hosts — come over and give her a hug, and say, “it’s only a cake!”. Which is entirely true but antithetical to the entire premise of a baking competition show. It’s only a cake! But that’s why the show exists, why they’re making it, why we’re all watching it. The cake is why we’re all here. We’ve spent hours and hours on it. It’s okay to cry when it topples over. But it is, also, only a cake.
