Understanding Capitalist Labor Through Greek Punishment

Aubrey Anable’s Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect, explores the relationship between affect and the discipline of video game studies. In the chapter Games to Fail With, Anable goes beyond the model of affect and code to focus on how video games relate to larger structures of feeling. She explores how the “zaniness” of games relates to the commodification of affect under capitalism and shows their role as mediators of a longing for a different relationship to labor.

The game Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment may embody many of the theories that Anable discusses. Let’s Play presents various scenes of punishment from Greek mythology which the player engages with through rhythms of repetitive player action (e.g. rapidly alternating the “G” and “H” keys). The game denies you any chance of immersion by presenting fundamentally unsolvable situations. Here the myths themselves aren’t that important past the purpose of introducing the theme of punishment. Doing as the game asks doesn’t inspire players to care about their actions but rather irritates them because there is no conclusion.

By having the player repeatedly fail without the hope of success, Let’s Play is engaging in a conversation with and about failure. The game may be presenting its players with small-scale paradigms of the endless competition under which capitalist societies thrive. It replicates the mixed feelings that manifest due to the model of capitalist labor in which workers futilely perform repetitive tasks without themselves being able to see the “success” that their labor reaps.

Rather than requiring players to evade or even immerse themselves in punishment, Let’s Play is asking players to think about and feel failure differently (in this case, to think about failure in relation to capitalism and capitalist labor.