Possibilities for Counter-Cultural Games

As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter illustrate in the first chapter of Games of Empire, videogames began as a subversion of military-industrial priorities through a deliberate redirection of resources intended for killing towards virtual play. Their origins, if not revolutionary, were at the very least counter-cultural. Today that subversion has been completely captured, commodified and “re-territorialized” to serve the whims of capital. In this post, I outline what seems to stand in the way of the reemergence of a videogame counter-culture and ponder how it could become possible.

The principal barriers are material. Videogames require a huge breadth of talent, from graphics and gameplay programming to asset creation (whether 3D or 2D) to animation, music composition, sound design, environmental art, level design, etc. Obviously not every game requires all of these to succeed, but if the affective experience is limited by a lack of the requisite skill instead of by design of the artist, it suffers. To produce a game, one must pay for all of these different parts of production, whether that’s done with fewer people and a longer development cycle or more people and a shorter cycle, the cost is substantial. This means that only wealthy people, wealthy companies, or wealthy non-profits are able to fund “full” game production– distinctly “un”counter-cultural groups.

Several students in class tried to dismiss this barrier, pointing to games that were produced as “labors of love” or funding through early access releases and/or crowd-funding. But both of these fail as work-arounds for the aforementioned problem. Anyone who labors on a game, no matter how full of love for their work they might be, needs to pay rent, eat, and sleep. All of those require money. Either the “love-laborers” are financially well-off enough to go without employment for the entire development cycle of their game, are forced to turn to a wealthy institution for funding, or can attempt to crowd-fund their entire living expenses for the duration of the game. Given the difficulty of this (if each person gives 10$, that’s 3,000 new donors needed per year), the prospective developer needs to produce and market a commodity. No experimental, hacky, counter-cultural game is pulling in that kind of money on Kickstarter. For a game to succeed here, it must fit consumers preconceptions of what a game is, what it’s goals should be (namely being fun, pretty). As soon as the game is forced to market itself, it’s limited by popular conceptions of games. Counter-culture is by definition not marketable– when it’s commodified (as is all counter-culture’s doom) it loses its subversive quality.

It seems then, that the potential for counter-cultural games lies outside of high-production value, marketable games. Rather (and, to be fair, this was mentioned in class) we should look to “lo-fi” games like Problem Attic or Between that had lower development costs, shorter production times to show us what counter-cultural games could be. Furthermore, counter-cultural play does not have to conform to the category of games– a future art could borrow qualities of playfulness and procedurality from games without being games. Thus such an art (some threads of new media have already embraced this) would avoid the pitfalls of commodification and funding that games encounter. Ultimately though, everyone has to pay rent and eat, so the most we can hope for is benevolent funding or engaging in counter-cultural production in the time we have left over after selling our labor to survive.