All Work and No Play
dissentmagazine.org
dissentmagazine.org
Funny, but I disagree. Video games, to me, resemble something more like school.
A day or two ago I was reflecting to myself that part of what makes school so compelling & part of what is so deceptive about it is that it creates a very expected, causal reward system. We can guess fairly well ahead of time what rewards we're going to get, the rewards are fairly well quantified & gradated, there's a whole system here designed to offer predictable reward & encouragement.
Like video games. Keep leveling up this character & unlock +3 strenght +1 con and +1 dex per level. Keep going through dungeons and get the +3 version of the sword. The rewards are somewhat randomized, but we're again encouraged & told that ongoing continual work will yield results. There is some allowing our imagination to run wild, some hoping to see powers beyond imagining come unto us, but overall, I think the real nature is much more about grinding, about grim FPS games where most players only rarely come near to excellence. The mystery & hopes & initial excitement are fun- games like Horizon: Zero Dawn keep us in suspense, play into the core thesis of this article, but this, overall, feels like an exceedingly rare aspect of video-gaming to me:
> The critic Michael Thomsen compares video games to prayers. “They have the most promise when they are the least specific,”
I tend to think video games, although set in the fantastic, often have fairly well shaped hopes & visions for our characters & ambitions, with more steady marches to progress. Certainly there are many variety of games, but take for example Path of Exile, where players will often chart a course through the skill tree[1] well well well in advance. Games like DOTA & LoL & so many others are as much about knowing character builds & how to use strengths as they are about the actual moment-to-moment playing of the game. These are highly predictable, high structured environments that reward our planning & modelling sense of the world, that let us pre-visualize, reach for, & find success. Sometimes it takes a couple rolls before the loot box gives us what we want, but like school, there's rules, and we follow them, and we get there.
This is what I see is rarely so well defined in work. Work is so rarely predictable; what you face changes so often. The reward cycles come so rarely, in yearly reviews perhaps, governed by such whimsical elements: what team you are on, what the company happened to need from you, so many questions of team dynamics & recognition/recognizability. This isn't just work, this is life. It's vague & unformed, we have to keep stealing fire again & again from the gods, have to keep seizing & making our own successes somehow, against odds. The beaten, defined paths so rarely really get us anywhere special. Work is a chore, one without the rewards of video game or even school. School programs us to see ourselves as attainment machines, drives into us an ethic that we can get through things & come out the other side, but work so often never has such clear resolve, such well defined finishes. We have to keep seeking our own meaning, making our own causes, in a way school nor video games challenge us to do. I disagree with this article's premise, and I'm not sure how such confusion could arise, but maybe I have a different view of work than many.
"The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects" - Adam Smith
This OC feels both unfinished and too big.
I really like comparing the grinds of producing and consuming a game. I half hoped to a Marxist or Socialist critique. (Sam Adler-Bell is a Socialist.)
I didn't really follow the bits about prayer. Am always a fan of name dropping Graeber and Bullshit Jobs.
To your point, though grinding in games like Factorio and Farmville and WoW have frequently been compared to work, modern work doesn't have analogs to loot boxes, gacha, and other gamifications. I'm almost afraid to idly wonder what that kind of employment would look like.