First section would be about how existing as a tool for corporate profit harms the medium. It’d talk about things like concentration of the industry under a handful of companies, predatory microtransactions, the rise of subscription-based platforms where players never really own the games they play, how series like Call of Duty serve as propaganda for the American military industrial complex.
Second section would discuss how video gaming might be different under socialism, based and my own experiences with other nonprofit hobbyist developers - artistic expression over spectacle, an end to predatory monetization models, making the hobby accessible to people who can’t afford expensive consoles or gaming PCs, etc.
You could also have a section about the recuperation of mods (free/hobbiest) into the corporate model. This has happened numerous times. The big examples would be Counter-Strike and Battlefield 2, but I’m sure there’s more that could be cited. Maybe the minecraft saga could be another case study with the infiniminer code base etc.
There’s a lot of rich areas for analysis of games, game cultures, ludology under capitalism, pay to win, etc.
Games, especially but not exclusively AAA games, are incredibly weird because you often have genuine attempts at art stapled to the most nakedly predatory and commercial systems. It’s like if War and Peace had a MLM pyramid scheme interpolated into it
There are two books you might be interested in:
Marx at the Arcade - It likely covers what you’ve done, but its short so you can easily dive into any particular category the book brings up.
The PlayStation Dreamworld - A
experimental analysis of video games using Freudian Dream Analysis. Video games are a special class of art because they are uniquely interactive. You are immersed, you forget that you are playing a game. This immersion, this Process of Forgetting (“They don’t know, but they do it anyway”), is the player’s process of absorbing the game’s ideology. At the same time, it shows just how weak Ideology really is when that immersion is broken and we become aware again that we are playing a game. This book is also short, so you can dig much deeper on this analysis if you want.Will check these out, thanks!
if you haven’t already, you should read Games of Empire
Read a summary and this looks cool. Will check it out!
I would enjoy this.
The point of art is completely different when considering its role in Capitalist systems vs Socialist systems. Producing art because you have an emotion you want to record/transcribe into some medium that others can use to create that emotion in themselves. That’s what art is, and in a Socialist system it’s the only reason anyone would make art.
In a Capitalist system, “art” is instead a kind of legerdemain to trick capital out of people. The artistic product itself doesn’t need to have any value because in Capitalism value is imaginary and corresponds only to how believable your life is. In a Capitalist system art is still created for artistic reasons but it will be to some degree contaminated, by necessity or by avarice, with the “deceit” that marketing doesn’t pretend not to be. I concede that arguing how “pure” any particular piece of art is is pointless circlejerking though, “good” art can still be made for Capitalist reasons and “bad” art can still be effective (have an effect on) a person.
Pitch it to Zero Books
As always on the innate link between Capitalism and video gaming, I like to link people to the Godot Game Engine official doc on Encrypting Save Games. Sadly since removed to avoid arguing (cowards).
Encrypting save games
Why?
Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.
But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.
No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let’s see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.
