Metadata
- Author: Sam Adler Bell
- Full Title:: All Work and No Play
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/all-work-and-no-play/
- Finished date:: 2024-10-06
Highlights
Zach Mumbach, a longtime employee of Electronic Arts (EA), noticed that while he and his coworkers crunched for game after game, the C-suite executives were going home every day at 5 p.m. (View Highlight)
For this reason, the most popular games today do not contain, at their heart, “fun.” What they most resemble, what they seem to dream about, is twenty-first-century work. (View Highlight)
“Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work,” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer declared in 1944. (View Highlight)
We learn—or are disciplined by—the game’s rules and receive positive feedback for following them efficiently. “You didn’t play the game,” Poole writes, much less “beat” it. Rather, “you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour.” (View Highlight)
Single-player games with plenty of weapons to upgrade, skills to gain, and currencies to spend are perhaps the archetypal iteration of this phenomenon, but almost all contemporary games contain some mimetic elements of work and market exchange. They don’t offer fantasies of escape, of imaginative play for its own sake; they offer a fantasy of rules—a rationality otherwise missing from the contemporary wage labor process. (View Highlight)
Games, like all entertainment products, shape us into the sort of subjects required by capital’s present. (View Highlight)