Wasting away in a cubicle, your jerk face boss is implementing the new micromanaging
techniques from their yearly seminar in Honolulu, and someone took your pastrami sandwich from
the refrigerator… again.
The mind numbing repetitiveness of the daily activity is soul crushing. Your phone begins
to call out to you… the dreamland levels of Candy Crush demand your attention. So you
decide to take some ‘me time’ for the next fifteen minutes.
You might even believe that these fifteen minutes of your non-productivity are metaphorically
sticking it to your boss. But is it really?
In his book Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism, British writer Alfie Bown suggests that although
the leisure afforded by games like Candy Crush and Fruit Ninja may seem like a brief respite
from your mechanical capitalist grind, it may be quite the opposite, they’re all part
of your humdrum capitalist existence.
But this is nothing new. This societal demand for constant gratification, goes all the way
back to the 19th Century Victorian concept of "Rational Recreation."
“Rational Recreation” was a belief in a hierarchy of leisure—where the urban working
class was introduced to the concept of relaxation in the direction of self-improvement. Instead
of activities like drinking, napping, and fighting—workers were encouraged to spend
their time doing productive and organized things like team sports and stamp collecting.
The idea was to keep workers engaged, happy, and domesticated instead of unruly, subversive,
and wild. Because a happy worker is less likely to strike.
While we may not live in Victorian England, contemporary capitalist culture continues
a new form of rational recreation with an arbitrary distinction between productive and
unproductive enjoyment.
Basically we are culturally biased against video games.
"Well things gone a bit too far."
It’s the reason why at early
ages kids are pushed into t-ball and soccer and not gaming. I mean… one rots your brain after all.
"I just like jumping on things and killing them."
So if our capitalist overlords don’t want us playing games, does that mean we’re heroically
bucking the system when we game? What if the end of corporate capitalism and consumer culture
doesn’t end with the whoosh of a fiery Molotov cocktail and violent revolution—what if
it is heralded but the beep boop beep of handheld games? Well probably not.
There are a couple of obstacles to the revolutionary potential in games.
Most games require a massive amount of investment in order to keep up with the increasing demand
for pleasure. Between DLCs and micro-transactions, grinding games like Diablo, Destiny, and World
of Warcraft generate entire economies of their own. Not to mention the people that spend
their day making pennies to farm for virtual gold or the six figure salary you can make
as a professional gamer. There is literally an entire economy that thrives from the profit
created from gaming.
People enjoy games; they spend hundreds of hours playing, building relationships, and
they trust in their game designers. Sequel after disappointing sequel is snatched off
the shelves with the hope that some inkling of the original magic will remain.
The new shiny advertising object is dangled in front of the consumer—one legendary camouflaged
limited edition console at a time… it’s hard to see how games can eradicate late modern
capitalism if they’re such an easy product to sell.
And how can anyone be upset about their working conditions when they've cleared all of the
jelly in level 147 of candy crush?
It's impossible because you are too busy yelling: "In your Face!!!!" to your tablet.
What we are dealing with is a particular type of ideology—an ideology of consumer capitalism
that mandates enjoyment.
There isn’t a pure, correct, or optimal object to enjoy—just that one ought to seek
out and find pleasurable experiences… and this works perfectly with our society of advertising—where
there is always a newer and shinier object promising pleasure—capitalism promotes and
demands that we find happiness and that, most importantly, we enjoy that happiness.
Surely your boss doesn’t want you to play games at work—but the very concept of distracted
gaming maintains a healthy work environment. While it should seem that the time that people
take to play games like angry birds, clash of clans, or doodle jump hurts the workplace
due to lack of production—it is the small enjoyment itself that keeps most people from
burning the place down.
So if even games are just trying to keep us happy while we toil away… does that mean
ALL forms of enjoyment are destined to dull us to the utter meaninglessness of our corporate
existence? Alfie Bown finds a ray of hope in a special kind of Lacanian enjoyment: Jouissance.
Jouissance is an irrational form of pleasure that borders on suffering —it is a sort
of pleasure and pain wrapped in one. A sort of enjoyment that there’s no explanation
for- Like watching The Room, picking at scabs, or playing Flappy Bird or any of the Dark
Souls games.
With Jouissance there’s an opportunity, not to destroy our ideology that mandates
enjoyment—but to reflect on the how unnatural our feelings of enjoyment are—that we aren’t
beautiful individuals who are fighting the good fight against the corporate machine—that
what we enjoy is predictable, sellable, and taught to us.
Well dear viewer, which one is it: are we just non-playable characters in the ever-expanding
RPG of late capitalism or are we a heroic avatar in complete control of our quest for
liberation, fighting a consumer culture from atop the work commode—faces basking in the
sweet incandescent glow produced by internet meme after internet meme?