This is more a collection of responses to what we discussed today than a single coherent post. People brought up a lot of interesting topics and lecture's lease has all too short a date, so hopefully some of the debates can live on in a blog post.
1. Immaterial Labor: A Neoliberal Conception of Videogaming
I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but the system I felt like people were getting at in class is a sort of ideal market in which people are able to anticipate the costs and rewards of "playbor" and make rational choices to maximize their own interests. That is, people would be able to choose what they do or don't put their labor into and even have contracts where they are compensated a predetermined amount for it. Which I think is a bit funny in context of the article we read, which maybe I'm misconstruing but I got a sort of "workers of the world, seize the means of production" but applied to video games vibe from. I guess we've just decided by now that the most efficient way to compensate workers is through a market system. Video games as a representation of working class heroes rejecting powerful corporate or military institutions and rampaging off to colorfully do their own thing isn't even a question anymore. Instead, immaterial labor is just another way of creating goods for an appropriate market, in this case maybe Steam or something similar. So whatever revolutionary games there are get commodified and consumed.
Also, unpaid playbor can be part of the contract. I'd argue in a game like Garry's Mod or any MMO where players create a lot of the world together, they do so well aware that they're not getting paid and all they get out of it is enjoyment. I absolutely agree with "MMOs are thus a "co-creation" of player communities and corporate developers" but I'd dismiss the sinister idea an MMO "appropriates the "immaterial, affective, collective production" of their virtual population". People engaging in playbor knowing full well it's just for fun, and that's their choice. Nobody is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to make a game. And furthermore, the shared community production allows for free, unlimited distribution in cases that wouldn't be possible if a company had to develop the same level of detail on its own. So the players benefit doubly: they get to improve the game and they get to benefit from the improvements. There might be edge cases (eg players feel obligated to provide hairstyle representation so the work falls to an unpaid black modding community instead of the developer of The Sims). But the ideal form, where players create the interesting stories and metagames of the games they play, is not inherently problematic. Something like the difference principle applies: the important comparison is between the person who is worst off with the system of playbor and without it. Obviously people playing the game in a system of playbor are better off because it's a better game. And the people who work on the game, assuming they aren't somehow pressured into doing so, are presumably choosing because they enjoy it. Maybe they enjoy pretending they run a pizza shop/drug money laundering business and creating that story in a game is fun for them. Whatever the work they're doing is they chose to do it. Yes, they're unpaid, but they made a rational choice to accept a contract in which they know the only compensation would be whatever satisfaction they get by doing it, so it's fair to assume they're better off.
2. Exploitable workers
Someone brought up in class the idea of a group of a workers who can be exploited because they value what they do. It was a nice point that that extends beyond game designers. GSU seems like a topical example here. But I think there's an important distinction between actively choosing to spend 100 hours or however much time and effort and not completely rebelling upon being exploited. The former is not ethically problematic. It's an easy win win like I was talking about earlier; the people who make the game enjoy making it and the people who play the game enjoy playing it. Hooray, everyone is happy. The more interesting case is one in which the workers are not better off.
UChicago grad students seem like a relevant example. The workers (sorry, I mean students/educators) are doing something they're deeply passionate about and get academic rigor and all that. But that doesn't pay rent. Maybe the market will solve all our problems and save us the effort (and moral worry). Prospective grad students who want the extravagances of a place to live and good healthcare will look elsewhere, and people will only come to UChicago if whatever it offers is enough compensation (though chasing off grad students doesn't seem like a great strategy in the long term). But what of the worker who goes down a certain path because of their passion for a certain type of immaterial labor but later regrets it? It's very possible that you don't know what you're getting into and can later be stuck as a result of sunk cost. The person talking about this in class argued people who work on games could also be software engineers, so by the logic of rational choice what they're doing couldn't be worse than software engineering. For one thing, passion might imply irrational choice, so maybe immaterial labor doesn't fit a market in that sense. But more practically, there might be this sort of sunk cost for a game developer. Going into the game design industry certainly gives you skills that overlap with what you might need for other work. But designing games prepares you best for designing games. So if someone goes into an industry because of passion for it but later finds out that passion isn't enough to justify 100 hour work weeks (and I'm not singling out RDR2 as a case here, I'm just talking in a general sense) they might be stuck in it because their skills aren't necessarily transferable. So that seems like a case where people do value their immaterial labor but only enough to allow them to be exploited, not enough to make them choose of their own volition to put insane hours in.
3. Unfulfilled promises in Spent
As someone said in class one use for failure is being part of a learning process: "the games promise that through repetition we might arrive at graceful mastery". Failing is difficult but ultimately rewarding-Dark Souls, League, I'm sure there are tons of examples of these games where you knowingly fail with the expectation of improving. The same sort of thing might exist outside of games-I would be surprised if my code worked properly the first time I compiled it, the expectation is that it's broken and the road to making it work includes fixing it. But I think in games in particular there's an assumption that failure will be useful in this sense. Maybe sometimes in life you mess up and it's not clear what you can glean from it, but in games there's an expectation of amelioration from failure, and maybe even as Peter said today we expect it immediately, not hours and hours down the line. So in a way Spent breaks that promise games implicitly make. You can fail over and over again without really getting better at it or learning how to game the system. You might get better at prioritizing certain sacrifices over others but there's no ultimate success state you can achieve in which you manage to give your kid birthday presents and whatnot without running out of money. So Spent never offers the graceful mastery promised by failure, only awkward allocation of money, and it's frustrating that the game breaks its promise with you. Of course, that's sort of the point of the game. And that pushes you to learn something about dealing with poverty so your failures in the game weren't totally meaningless.
But I'm not sure the game is very productive even in an educational sense, because of the unfulfilled promise of procedural rhetoric. The idea is I'll put you through a process in the game, and you'll get a sense of that process outside of the game. Then maybe you'll click the link to charity or facebook or whatever. Or at least you'll empathize. So in Spent money is the central mechanic, it's literally in the center of the screen. And figuratively you always have to worry if you can afford nice things (you can't) and you have to sacrifice stuff like sending your kid to a gifted and talented program or chipping in to help a coworker. It conveys a sense of always worrying about money and weighing every decision in terms of dollars. But the problem is how blatant and developer controlled it is. When someone was talking in class today about how Spent might be unconvincing because it never offers any escapes from poverty, he wasn't trying to imply that there aren't (billions of) people out there with no way of stabilizing their lives. His point was that as a medium for showing that Spent is bad or even counterproductive because it never offers any escapes ever. It's blatantly obvious what the game is trying to teach you, but it's also very abstract and difficult to identify with. The game just hits you over the head with "feel bad, you didn't give your grandmother crucial medication" without ever making your family part of a story, they're literally just a mechanic. So the procedural rhetoric is successful in the sense that it conveys what the developer is trying to argue, but it isn't necessarily successful in changing your mind. As people said in class, someone who's already aware of the idea of structural disadvantages but not convinced could easily respond "I know an immigrant family that went from rags to riches this game is bullshit" and if anything have their position be more cemented. But more generally I think the procedural rhetoric is a problem because you see the game and say ok, this is developing empathy for poor people. The obviousness and rigidness of the rhetoric makes it clear what you're supposed to learn. But it might also not do a good job of conveying that, which I'd argue could be problematic. Because it's so clear what the game is supposed to convey but it might not actually work, it could give you the sense that you developed empathy when you didn't actually do so. So play Spent, be a bit annoyed that the abstract representation in the game has a broken central mechanic, pat yourself on the back and go home. I'd like to contrast that to the experience I had last night of walking past a real life homeless person. It was like 10:30 PM, I was walking back from Harper to my room, it was cold out. And it was genuinely disconcerting and jarring, I just wasn't sure what to do. Obviously you feel sorry for the person, but what will happen if you engage with them? Is it ok to ignore them if they address you? Do you walk past, do you stop? I don't pretend to know the right answer to those questions, but they worry me much more than Spent. Maybe there's something to be said for a safe space for failure in games-you can't hurt people in the same way you can in real life. But I just felt like the rhetoric of hey, you don't have enough money, now try to allocate money was so obvious that it made the promise of empathy without following through, which then makes you think you've done the work of putting yourself in a poor person's shoes when you haven't.
That was a lot of rambling and by this point this is barely tangential to video games, but as a better way of understanding poverty I'd suggest asymmetrical reciprocity. The idea is that imagining yourself in someone else's position is problematic: it obscures difference, it could be impossible to reverse positions, it could be politically suspect. Instead, real understanding recognizes the difference it's across and comes with a respectful sense of wonder. There's nothing to wonder at in Spent. The procedural representation of poverty is so simple you can hold it in your mind. That gives the impression, the promise that you're getting a sense of what it's like to be poor. But you aren't, and agonizing over, say, medicating your grandmother or not, might not something you can fully imagine yourself going through until you go through it. If anyone is interested in the idea of asymmetrical reciprocity, maybe it's vaguely related to the failures of procedural rhetoric but I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore but here check this out: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1467-8675.1997.tb00064.x. A sociology professor who's done ethnographic work in Manilla recommended it to me as a potentially better framework for understanding across difference, in this case with the poor.
3.5: 3rd World Farmer>Spent
Just briefly, obviously the two games have sort of similar premises, but 3rd World Farmer references a genres of games, maybe not exactly clicker games but games where you start with minimal resources and allocate them to create exponential growth as you play. As soon as I started I looked at my options and was like great, I can plant corn until I have enough money to buy a harvester to increase my yield and then get more out of my corn to do bla bla bla. And right after the game sets up that expectation it just bats it down with a drought or whatever you were unlucky enough to experience. But I think the fact that the game brings up an expectation of progress before smashing it is important because it makes it more frustrating when something bad happens. And making you think "this is one of those games where you build structures and manage resources and get super strong over time" does that nicely.
Then when you've tried to grow your resources and it's all for naught, it's like why am I even trying. And the way it plays with the idea of "work leads to rewards" addresses the thought that poor people are poor because they're lazy. Instead, poor people might just be in situations where (bad) luck and systemic disadvantages make effort not feel worth it. To end on a depressing note (but one in 3rd World Farmer's system of aspiration and failure):