Playing Candy Crush and Diner Dash this week, I was reminded of a book that focuses on another set of “leisure” practices characteristic of another age of technological innovation. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars, by historian Joel Dinerstein, contends that jazz and related forms of music and dance served a specific and underappreciated social function in a period of history in which work and other aspects of daily life were being radically restructured by mechanization.[1] “As machines speeded up hands, hearts, and minds,” he writes, “individuals had to engage these new aesthetics on the body.” (13) At the same time, “the transformation from agrarian to industrial work brought forth a need for dynamic physiological engagement and cultural resistance—taking one’s bodies back from the machines.” (14) Workers had a need to both habituate themselves to and reclaim some sort of agency over the new rhythms of life that were demanded of them by work. Dinerstein argues that new musical forms like jazz, drawing on rhythms and movements characteristic of West African dance, allowed people to do this—unlike traditional European and Euro-American music and dance, which were at odds with the new, faster, more fluid, more dynamic rhythms of modern life.
Games like Candy Crush and Diner Dash—not really “relaxing” (as the intro screen of Candy Crush insists) or even pleasurable, exactly, but somehow compelling nevertheless—might serve a similar social function. Aubrey Amable I think makes a version of this argument when she writes that “time management games (and all casual games to some degree) function as rhythmic interludes that mediate the gaps, pauses, and glitches that are part of everyday digital rhythms. The timing and rhythm of the games interrupts our workflow in precisely the way that interruptability, fragmentation, and piecework have come to be the common conditions of labor in the digital age.” (n.p.)[2] But I don’t think these games necessarily have to either be interpolated directly in among instances of work or narratively represent work in order to be sites for the kind of habituation to, and reclamation of agency over, the rhythms of work that Dinerstein describes.
The other text we read this week on these games interprets them in a way that feels to me at odds with Amable, the argument above, and my own experience of playing the games. When playing a game like Candy Crush, Scott RIchmond writes, “I may be encumbered by an experience of I-ness, but I am not encumbered by the burden of being present (or not) to, or for, someone else. “ (33)[3] Moreover, these games, he argues, “are not immersive, saturating, or tightly attuned: they are shallow, slackened, diffuse.” (34) Both of these claims seem to me like misapprehensions of the affects the specific games in question generate, although they may describe some of the other cultural objects Richmond is interestsed in well. Games like Candy Crush and Diner Dash seem to me to offer precisely a retreat from the conscious experience of the self, paired with a continuation of the kinds of demands placed on the subject in “real life.” True, the demands come from a simulated other rather real others, but the simulated interactivity seems to me to be an important characteristic of the games. Likewise, the characteristic affect produced by the games seems to me to be not anything “slack” or “diffuse” but intense anxiety. This is more true, I think, of Diner Dash, which requires shorts bursts of intense speed and focus, than of Candy Crush, but the latter too seems to me
to solicit a kind of anxious, attentitive engagement, not just with its busy and frenetic graphics but with its very odd, oddly propulsive, and (I find) disquieting background music.
Overall I’m more compelled by the idea that these games offer an abstract reproduction of—and possible site of reclamation or processing of—the rhythms of contemporary work than the idea that they offer a contrast to or retreat from them.
Image: Still from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. DVD Talk, 21 Nov. 2010, www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/45441/modern-times/.
1. Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.
2. Anable, Aubrey. "Causal Games and the Work of Affect." Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no.2, 2013, doi:10.7264/N3ZW1HVD.
3. Richmond, Scott C. “Vulgar Boredom, or What Andy Warhol Can Teach Us about Candy Crush.” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2015, pp. 21–39., doi:10.1177/1470412914567143.