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There was a time when style was more or less concrete. Even during the structuralist era style could appear as a kind of grammar or structure imbedded in a reliable social context.
Style was so "hard" that it could even be cut into two halves that were called the "higher" and "lower" social spheres. Developed in Europe by class-conscious designers, it might come as a surprise that the notion of style would one day conquer the world.
But actually it did: Today, former Chinese peasants who have become recently rich not only buy Maseratis but also read Vogue. The Eiffel Tower is a symbol of Western structural concreteness.
Surprisingly, today you find an Eiffel Tower on almost every roof of one-family houses of the suburbs of Eastern Chinese cities. These towers are not antennas; they have no other function than that of conveying social prestige to its owners.
Rich people have very high Eiffel Towers while poor people do not even have homes. Not being based on vernacular childlike linguistic structures, but at the same time consistently refusing the adult world of referential English, EA English remains grounded in an adventurous cultural nothingness on which it can do only one thing: turn into a ritual combination of the vehicular and the mythical that is, becoming a kind of "everywhere-beyond". The ritual is opposed to both the vernacular and the referential and EA English ritually combines the "everywhere" and the "beyond" in order to become the "myth of the vehicular.
Thus, EA English does not resemble baby talk but rather the subtlest kind of teenage talk: in EA English half-intellectualized emotions, self-contained in immature fantasies, lead an ever liquid existence. Here everything is ritualized and everything is purely aesthetic.
Being without formal vernacular roots and referring to nothing, EA English is a little like what teenagers do when they belt-out English-sounding words while singing in the shower.
Thus, EA English is ritual and purely aesthetic. Paradoxically, it is not in spite of its fluidity, but because of it, that EA English can so easily be integrated into our lives. The aesthetic world of EA English is not the "hard" kind of artistic style that those artists who were engaged in idealistic projects like the Arts and Crafts Movement or Pop Art tried to introduce almost violently into life and society. On the contrary, the vaguely palpable quality of EA English contains no real life: it is a liquid style that cannot be seen and hardly felt but only overlooked.
Acknowledgments ——————————. I would like to thank the anonymous CTheory reviewer for the helpful comments and suggestions as well as the CTheory copy editor, Craig Tretiak. Notes —————. All quotations from Benjamin are taken from this edition. The steps are motivated by pieces of input data adult sentences which fail to fit into the smaller set, thereby forcing an expansion of the set.
Cognition and Representation, Westview, Boulder, , p. Roeper, p. It is simply aesthetic. While in Japanese magazines a considerable proportion of the words are represented by the expressions "happy," "pleasure," "fun," and "fantastic," in Chinese magazines, among the words most employed are "luxury" and "enjoy.
Her, in Chinese magazines, the authors clearly state what one is supposed to do in the emerging capitalist world. The scheme vernacular-referential-vehicular-mythical was actually first explored by Henri Gobard. As a postdoctoral researcher based in Finland he undertook four years of research on Russian formalism and semiotics in Russia and the Baltic countries.
He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Zhejiang in China where he is working on a project entitled "Language and Cognition. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter.
Forecasters claimed virtual play was recession-proof; a maturing audience of stay-at-home gamers would cocoon around the Wii, Xbox or PS3, or migrate to World of Warcraft or Second Life , to enjoy a diversion from economic disaster. Such estimates of game-business resilience may prove optimistic: by job losses were hitting industry behemoths such as Sony and Electronic Arts EA. But this latest iteration of bread-and-circuses culture-theory nevertheless provides a timely entry for a discussion of digital games as exemplary media of contemporary Empire.
We use "Empire" in the sense proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to designate a post-Cold War planetary capitalism with "no outside," [1] but we modulate their account to take greater consideration of the internal frictions wracking this order since the millennium.
By Empire, we mean the global capitalist ascendancy of the early twenty-first century, a system administered and policed by a consortium of competitively collaborative states, among whom the US still clings, by virtue of its military might, to an increasingly fragile preeminence. This is a regime of biopower based on corporate exploitation of myriad types of labour, paid and unpaid, for the continuous enrichment of a planetary plutocracy.
Empire is an order of extraordinary scope and depth. Yet it also is precarious, flush with power and wealth, yet close to chaos as it confronts a set of interlocking economic, ecological, energy, and epidemiological crises.
Its governance is threatened by tensions between a declining US and a rising China which could either result in some super-capitalist accommodation, consolidating Empire, or split it into warring Eastern and Western blocs. Its massive inequalities catalyze resistances from below, some, reactionary and regressive, others, like the global justice and ecological movement, protagonists of a better alternative.
Sprung from the military-industrial matrix that generated the computer and Internet, games are today a test ground for digital innovations and machinic subjectivities: online play worlds incubate artificial intelligences; consoles plug to grid computing systems; games are media of choice for experiments in neurobiological stimulation and brain driven telekinesis.
And, once suspect as delinquent time waster, virtual play is increasingly understood by state and corporate managers as training populations for networked work, war and governability.
We examine the relation between games and Empire in terms of the virtual and the actual , conjugating this couplet with intentionally fuzzy logic in two distinct yet overlapping ways. The virtual is the digital, the on-screen world, as opposed to existence "IRL".
But "virtual" also denotes potentiality ; the manifold directions in which a given, actual, situation might develop. Computers create potential universes. They model, dynamically, what might be. Such simulation is vital to a power system engaged in the high-risk military, financial and corporate calculus required for globalized control.
It is from such simulation that virtual games emerged, broke loose into ludic freedom—only to now be reintegrated into the assemblages of world capital, as a means of inducing the "flexible personality" [4] demanded by digital work, war and markets.
Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois character required by mercantile colonialism but also capable of criticizing it , and twentieth-century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism yet screened some of its darkest depictions , so, we suggest, virtual games are the exemplary media producing subjects for twenty-first century global hyper-capitalism but also, perhaps, of exodus from it.
The global game factory is now a major cultural-industrial complex, dominated by the console corporations—Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo—and a cluster of super-publishers, such as EA, Activision, Konami, Ubisoft and THQ. Control of game finance, licensing and marketing enables these giants to harvest the creativity of thousands of game developers, from big third party studios to microenterprises, all around the world.
Game factory revenues are, however, overtaking those of the music business, and growing faster than those of both film and music. But the market in old consoles and computers and mass pirating of game software give games a wider circulation into Latin America, the Middle East, and Southern Asia.
Nonetheless, access to the game metaverse remains stratified by wealth, and by energy and Internet infrastructures. In production, too, situating games in Empire shatters myths. For millions of young men and many aging ones, and some women from Shanghai to Montreal, a job making virtual games seems employment nirvana—a promise of being paid to play.
And it is true that for designers, programmers, and producers the industry offers creative, well paid work involving the most positive possibilities of "immaterial labour" [8] : scientific know-how, hi-tech proficiency, cultural creativity, and workplace cooperation. But just as game development studios typify the gloss of new media labour they also expose its dark side.
The slogan of work-as-fun legitimates the perpetual "crunch-time" culture whose revelation in by the disenchanted partner of a programmer, EA Spouse, unleashed an industry wide scandal.
Game studios, small and large, stratify permanent employees and a low-paid, precarious testers and contract workers. Behind these well-known studio labour flashpoints, however, lies the architecture of the digital play business organized, as part of Empire, in a "global hierarchy of production.
What enables publishers to extract extreme hours is not only internalization of responsibility, but the threat of outsourcing. Labour in such peripheral studios is far closer to the all-too material processes indispensable to the game factory, though far less glamorous, and less visible, than studio work.
The abyssal depths of this ladder were glimpsed in the coltan scandal of Of the A "ludocapitalism" [11] by which virtual goods or skills exchange for real currencies generates an interdependence between North American players and as many as half a million planetary poor country "gold farmers," the majority probably in China, for whom looting monsters round the clock is an alternative to labour on the strike-swept assembly lines of the Pearl River cranking out the very computers on which WoW is played world-wide.
Such migrant avatar-service work [12] at once sustains the gaming habit of time-stressed North Americans, incurs their racist antipathy for "ruining the game", and is repressed by Blizzard to control the property rights to its game world. It thus typifies the bipolarity of "Chimerica," [13] the current US-China axis of Empire, virtually replicating a relation where one side is all play, the other all work.
Such are the biopolitical forces mobilized in the global game factory. To situate games in Empire we must, however, discuss not only their political economy but also the psycho-cultural valences.
If virtual games are implicated in armored globalization, how do they support, or subvert, the subjectivities such a regime requires?
And how can we answer this question without resorting to notions of hypodermic "media effects" or at assuming the success of every ideological interpellation? In a spirit of radical empiricism, we look at the articulation of virtual and actual practices.
That is, we identify concrete linkages between in-game and real-life activity, examining how virtual play is connected to and articulated with other institutions, sites and practices, plugged in to barracks and battle spaces, work cubicles and call centers, investment banks and stock exchanges to form new virtual-actual assemblages. The obvious, original bond of virtual games with imperial actualities is military. All the many claimants of the title "inventors of the videogame" — William Higginbotham, who made a simple tennis game on an analogue computer in ; Steve Russell, who created Spacewar in ; Ralph Baer, who in devised the TV-connected game console; or Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari, the first commercial game company, in —were directly or indirectly employees of the US military-industrial complex.
Game-like simulations were integral to the "closed world" of Cold War computing, a means of thinking the unthinkable—thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union—and fighting not so unthinkable hot wars such as Vietnam. But the get-away was far from clean. Marine Doom and contract out work to private-sector studios. The so-called "Nintendo War"—the smart-weapon, video-bomb-sight slaughter in Kuwait in —made visible how closely together an informatic Revolution in Military Affairs had brought the screens of play and war.
While commercial game developers rushed to capitalize on market opportunities created by the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, funds poured into co-designed military-civilian simulations for the War on Terror. Developers able to cite collaboration with the military gave their products the cachet of authenticity that console-warriors craved, while military trainers capitalized on new generation of recruits familiarity with the Xbox and PS2.
Deep Green is not an ecological conversion, but a khaki super-computer, intended to generate automatic combat plans for military field commanders. If it succeeds, future wars in Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela or Kazakhstan will be truly plug-and-play, separated only by a few orders of computing power from a commercial war game such as the recent Tom Clancy-scripted Endwar in which Xbox players give voice-commands to armored, air and infantry units deployed in global combat theatres. Our argument, need we say, is not that "games make you kill," in the sense asserted in moral panics about the play of Doom or Grand Theft Auto.
At first, virtual games were on the side of leisure, hedonism, and irresponsibility against clock-punching, discipline, and productivity, appearing in dubious masculine refuges from toil, bars and arcades, and then, as the console entered the home, as machines for children and adolescents, devices on the border between innocence and delinquency. Game playing on the job was subversion, a refusal of work. Then a strange reversal occurred.
As the US military followed the tracks of its runaway virtual slave and re-captured it, other state sectors, from city planners to air traffic control, explored the possibilities of simulation. In the s, corporate capital latched onto games as a technology for training an increasingly digitized labour force.
In this virtual apparatus for the subject-formation of post-Fordist labour, game-like simulations are integrated with electronic hiring tools, psychometric personality tests and cognitive skills measures. Cisco prepares its teams for on-call crisis management by gaming repair of a network in a virtual Martian sandstorm. Yet more complete subsumption of games by work is offered by schemes such as Amazon. In the so-called ESP Game a player, gaming with either a human or AI, strives to agree on words that match images within a set period of time to optimize search engines indexing on-line pictorial content.
The current corporate enthusiasm for virtual play extends, however, beyond training simulations and serious games. It is all games — silly games, time-wasting games, fantastic orc-slaying and alien-blasting games—that are seen as beneficial for the bottom line. As Steven Poole recently observed, whether playing an elf or a gangsta, many videogames follow the "employment paradigm" of career progression, asset management and monetary accumulation.
Now a high-score at Space Giraffe is de rigueur for the up-and coming careerist. Virtual play rose not only out of the era of information war and immaterial work, but also the casino economy. In his Empire of Indifference Randy Martin links the informatic risk management strategies of war and finance capital. On one side, these games blend seamlessly with software tools abetting the "financialization of daily life" [27] : as Atari created its hits it also made "Bond Analysis" and "Stock Charting.
It is, we suggest, no coincide that in the early twenty-first century "virtual trading" means both on-line stock market speculation and the buying and selling of digital game goods. Meanwhile finance capital, ramping through the dot-com spree, the Internet bubble, and on to the great housing splurge, was, like the military, hot on games.
In a junior trader training in the game-like simulator of a German finance house posted , bond futures on-line, believing the sale was just an exercise. But the play was for real. The stockbroker Ameritrade created Darwin: Survival of the Fittest , a game distributed free to teach customers online trading just in time for the crash. They also prepared the future subjects of financialization. In , at the moment of the crash, the annual cycle of The Stock Market Game was beginning in North American schools.
They had bet virtual play would "prime the next generation of customers". Some students learned a different lesson; a thirteen year old confessed: "Before all this, I asked my mom to get me stocks for Christmas," but after experiencing the carnage of The Stock Market Game "told her not to do it" and "asked for a parakeet instead.
Do Mario and Princess Toadstool still have a chance for liberation from banal war, endless work and monetized life? But today economic crisis, deepening ecological catastrophe and military quagmires vindicates its activism and analysis, which were revived in however refracted, reformist mode in the global support for the Obama election campaign.
Even as this present crisis incubates nationalism, racism, retro-fascism and ultra-militarism, it also makes new radical openings to exit Empire. There is no blueprint for this process; many would say it defies schematic planning. But there are multiplying, thoughtful sketches of what a post-capitalist society might look like; less free market, more decentralized, democratic public planning; less commodification, more commons; less wage labour, more self-management, less precarity, more universal provision of basic life-needs.
Such potential exists because Empire is a contradictory system, cultivating the very creative, cooperative capacities it must repress and contain, not least of which is the innovation power of immaterial labour. As we saw, games originated in the excess playfulness of military science workers. As this hacker innovation was captured by the game factory, it has continued to generate surplus know-how that escapes complete capture in the commodity form.
Ever more sophisticated game editing tools, the rise of modding and machinima , flash authorship, and MMO participation have all generated within virtual play culture a powerful drive towards user-generated content created in an intensely collaborative and networked milieus.
Some commentators see such "autoludic" activity as automatically empowering and democratizing. The turn to user-generated content stands in an equivocal relation to corporate control.
So now we look at three assemblages of games and multitude, around piracy, protest and planning. Piracy is as widespread in games as in music and films. It affects PC games most, but consoles are far from immune. The game factory wages war on piracy by technological, judicial and police measures, ostensibly targeting big criminal software bootleggers. Industrial-scale game piracy is a reality, part of the transnational crime networks that are the shadow of neoliberal globalism. Nonetheless, the game industry crusade occludes many of the complexities, and all the politics, of piracy.
We call attention to just four points. First, not all piracy is for profit: much involves gamer cultures of swapping, sharing and "warez" accomplishment that are specifically anti-commercial. Second, piracy is the only way many people in, say, Brazil or the Philippines, or Egypt can afford games.
Fourth, mass levels of piracy around the planet indicate a widespread perception that commodified digital culture imposes artificial scarcity on a technology capable of near costless cultural reproduction and circulation.
Ongoing conflict over Intellectual Property Rights and Digital Rights Management in games is symptomatic of a bona fide contradiction between relations and forces of production, an antagonism of progressive technological capacities to the reactionary property rights into which they are forced.
A new culture, however, does not just copy, but creates. Feminist gamers such as Anne-Marie Schleiner were pioneers, hacking new skins and pacifist interventions to challenge the sexism and militarism of the game factory.
Since , however, radical game-creations have proliferated. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to deplete. Such tactical games, with characteristic stripped-down graphics and rudimentary production values, teeter between brilliant ludic alienation-effects and blunt didacticism. But, as Alexander Galloway observes, such "counter gaming" is about more than overlaying alternative imagery in established genre conventions; building "radical action" in game culture requires the creation of "alternative algorithms.
Is it possible to go beyond agitprop games of virtual protest to games of exodus that actively help constitute a society beyond Empire? All game development is about designing alternative worlds, all game play about learning what can be done in these worlds. Twenty years ago Bill Nichols in his study of "the work of culture in an age of cybernetic reproduction," suggested video games could be emancipatory because they made the player engage with "systemic principles" of world design, inciting a glimpse of "the relativism of social order.
Given the imbrication of virtual play in actual Empire, it is no surprise the dynamics of these worlds frequently merely replicates and amplifies political economic premises of the world market: the basic formulae for MMOs, however fantastic their setting, is accumulation backed by force.
Nonetheless the creation of such communal virtual laboratories allows social experiment simulating worlds with different rules. This is a virtual world clearly influenced by the new wave of writing about "life after capitalism. Borders have been opened to the flow of people, not just commodities. Private property has gone, too. Land will be in the trust of the state, leased to individuals and businesses. This is artist-activist collaboration in advance of the recent claim by an eminent computer scientist in the journal Science that online games enable large-scale studies of alternative governmental regimes, including explorations of "how individuals can be induced to cooperate in producing public goods.
It may, moreover, be feasible to link such simulations to new political institutions. Many radical activists agree that a global-commons alternative to the world market requires processes of participatory planning and democratized economic decision making. Game-like virtual worlds can be part of such processes. In , The Institute of the Future launched Superstruct , the "first massively multiplayer forecast game. But the basic point remains: if the Pentagon and Wall Street can use virtual worlds to plan the Empire, why should not communards use them to think through their escape routes?
Conclusion: Magic Circles, Strange Contraptions. Academic writing on virtual games often alludes to the "magic circle" of play proposed by the conservative medieval historian, Johan Huizinga, who in his famous Homo Ludens wrote of games as an "autotelic" activity, engaged in for their own sake, segregated in space and time from the hurly-burly of everyday life.
Yet Huizinga himself, writing in the shadows of a recently concluded World War I and of the approaching European fascism that eventually took his life, was well aware of what Ian Bogost describes as "a gap in the magic circle," an inescapable relation between "magic circle" and "material power.
Empire , Cambridge: Harvard, , p. Dialogues II , London: Continuum, Durham: Duke University, Accessed May 13, Teens, Video Games and Civics. New York: Perseus, Cambridge: MIT, Boulder: Westview, Boston: Course Technology, , p. Beck and Wade Mitchell. Boston: Harvard Business School, The Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University, Ambivalencia de la multitud: entre la innovacion y la negativdad.
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