“Games providing the impression or actuality of more autonomy are growing in popularity”, says prog games-maker Keir Milburn
It’s a joy to find a piece which opens up a world of political action, in a place where you least expect it. (This reflects our constant theme about the 90-odd percent of citizens who aren’t signed up to political parties, and whose concerns and agency is thus largely out of the policy loop).
Such is Keir Milburn’s essay in Red Pepper this month, on how games and play flourish under neoliberal capitalism - but also point the way to a better future. We encourage you to read it all (and subscribe to the publication), but we wanted to pick out some points that are congruent with our concerns at Alternative Global.
Gamification and neoliberal capitalism are deeply linked. The latter’s aim—to introduce market competition and its dynamics into more and more previously non-market realms—fits with the experience provided by the former. Platform companies get cab drivers and Amazon workers to compete against each other in the workplace, getting rewards of cute icons as they do so.
Milburn notes that the “gamifying” of a workplace only brings temporary rewards in performance, and answers the question of why these game practices persist: “By offering ‘streak bonuses’ for completing tasks and having constantly changing rewards linked to unclear metrics, companies can obscure work intensification and changes to overall pay and compensation. Gamification at work facilitates the lowering of labour costs through obfuscation.”
But if games are about the experience of agency, then couldn’t they be designed for different, more cooperative agencies? All video games shape the action of the player, and most just reproduce the high-octane competition of current capitalism. But Milburn provides a list of games-makers - digital as well as board-games - who try to do something different, in the paragraphs below:
Games providing the impression or actuality of more autonomy are growing in popularity.
Many modern video games push in this direction, from open world games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, to multiplayer cooperative games such as It Takes Two, but the growth of analogue games such as board games and particularly TTRPGs [table top role-playing games] should also be understood in this light.
The latter allow you to explore worlds of your own creation, while the rules that govern play can be changed and adapted to suit the group playing.
The cultural studies scholar Stephen Shapiro has gone so far as to argue that the independent, rules-light, experimental TTRPGs that have emerged since the 2008 financial crisis, such as Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts 2, are one of the key cultural forms through which a young, intersectional left – what I’d call Generation Left – is forming and expressing itself.
He cites Avery Alder, one of the key game designers in this movement, to argue that while novels explore interiority, a character’s internal thoughts and states, and films explore action, the function of such TTRPGs is to explore the process and consequences of decision-making.
Playing such games can act as a form of training in democracy. They produce a collective deliberative agency around the equal, collaborative, creation of shared narratives and the building of worlds.
Compared to Dungeons and Dragons, or the huge numbers playing video games, only small numbers play these games, but we can see the influence of this cutting-edge spreading into more popular genres. Some of the most interesting video games with a distinctly left-wing bent, such as Disco Elysium, take their game mechanics from experimental TTRPGs.
Citizen Sleeper, for instance [trailer embedded at the top of this post] ses a pool of dice to permit action, but that pool diminishes if you’re unable to eat or gain access to medicine, mimicking the impacts on agency of poverty or disability.
More here. Milburn is walking his talk as co-founder of Red Plenty Games, which develop socially and ecologically conscious board-games like the Social Strike Game and Parts Per Million. And check the Games Transformed playlist on YouTube for more discussion