Control Machine

Seeing the boundary fading between work and play, it is not an exaggeration to say, as Dyer-Witheford argues, that the computer game is an “ideal-type commodity”1 in post-Fordist society. If the games are spread and played through network, we might have to say that digital games are “an ideal type of global post-industrial neo-liberal cultural product.”2 Following Raymond Williams’ television analysis and David Harvey’s theory of postmodern society, Kline, Dyer-Whiteford, and De Peuter argue that online game playing become not only ideal commodity but also necessary production process: “In production, game development, with its youthful workforce of digital artisans and netslaves, typifies the new forms of post-Fordist enterprise and labour”; and also “in consumption, the video game brilliantly exemplifies post-Fordism’s tendency to fill domestic space and time with fluidified, experiential, and electronic commodities.”3 To play online games are now definitely to perform economic activities, whether it is production or consumption.

As many constructionist theorists of technology argued that technology is not neutral, virtual space and digital games are also not neutral. They are sometimes actively political in that they are somehow containing and reflecting the interest of a particular group or class in a society. Game space is where capital (industry) and player (user or consumer) meet. Ken S. McAllister sees computer games as “a site of struggle, a point in the dialectic where rhetorical forces are exerted in an effort to gain dominance over competitors, technologies, players, concerned citizens, and the media.”4 If computer games as mass culture and media are analyzed in terms of psychophysiological, economic, and instructional forces, they can be understood as the place where complex social powers intersect and compete with each other. But McAllister seems missing the political aspect of that struggle. His analysis fails to catch the fact that, by drawing the gamers into the late capitalist mechanism, online games make the players consuming mass and free game developers (or designers) as well. Even though online game is a site of struggle where all the social forces are competing, since it is already an ideal commodity in which the neoliberal capitalist idea is embedded, it should be pointed out that the game players tend to adopt politically conservative attitude rather than to prefer the progressive value. And also by consuming an ideal commodity of global and neoliberal capitalism, we are successfully adapting ourselves to the social controlling system while only playing fun stuffs. We seem to become obedient gamers earning a living by playing in virtual world.

Politics of Video Games

In some point, as Galloway put it, “in the very core, video games do nothing but present contemporary political realities” demanding players execute an algorithm, the rule or hidden mechanism of the gaming, which is the key to “solve the problem of political control”5 of society. The concept of algorithm is directly borrowed from Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media. According to his explanation, an “algorithm is the key to the game experience” and “as the player proceeds through the game, she [sic] gradually discovers the rules that operate in the universe constructed by this game.”6 Online games are the device of play activities, in which the reality principle is already embedded. Thus, playing the games naturalizes and reifies the rule of the real and universal norms of society, more than the cinema has done to the spectators: the gamers in front of screens will not easily stand out in the street to change the world.

To put the question differently, does playing online game give us more freedom? In other words, does the gamer have more interactivity with online game? It is a majority opinion that, thanks to new digital media, the users have become more free and interactive in communication, overcoming one-directional, inculcating inclination that old media have had. When new digital media began to provide participatory and interactive environment among the users as well as between man and machine, we expected it would facilitate different kinds of media experience and broaden users’ accessibility to the information: the ideal of information democracy. Especially, interactive computer media changed traditional image of audience as passive consumer to (inter-)active pro-sumer. In The Wealth of Network, Yochai Benkler compares television culture with online game culture. While television culture as “the epitome of the industrial information economy” structured the role of consumers as highly passive, MMORPG as the symbol of the “networked information economy,” offers “a persistent game environment” and “massive collaboration platforms for thousands, tens of thousands users.”7 In sum, due to the interactive nature of new digital media, online game playing allows for the emergence of participatory cultures in which we identify ourselves as collaborative players and active producers.

Interactivity

However, Manovich strongly expresses his opposition to the concept of interactivity that new media is believed to have. For him, “in relation to computer-based media, the concept of interactivity is a tautology.”8 Although interactive computer media seems to open new, progressive, or revolutionary media-scape, what it really asks us instead is to click on an image or a highlighted sentence in order to go to another image or another sentence: “we are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations.”9 According to Manovich, as ideology’s interpellation constructs concrete individuals as concrete subjects in Althuseer’s theory of ideology, “interactive media ask us to identify with someone else’s mental structure.”10 In fact, many online games are assemblages of diverse historical, political, and social presupposition reflecting dominant ideology. “One might then construct a vast ideological critique of the game,” argues Galloway, “focusing on its explicit logocentrism, its nationalism and imperialism, its expansionist logic, as well as its implicit racism and classism.”11 Especially, when games’ narratives are related with the real history and the actual events, how to interpret the contents is always problematic. Some game could justify expansionism of the colonial period of modernity and other could naturalize lower-level character’s submission to the higher-level character. Thus, interactivity is only a deceptive mask of digital media, or rather another name of algorithm of social control, embodied in it.

As a prominent symptom of global digital capitalism, online games will be an apparatus which enables and supports the frictionless exploitation in digital economy, by making the difference between gaming and working indiscernible. Therefore, we cannot understand the essence of online games without knowing the nature of the late capitalist economic system, “from which they emerge” and without realizing “the changing political, social and cultural contexts in which they are produced and consumed.”12 Above all, it should be stressed that online game is nothing but the real, a material reality, what the social system produces.

Protocol

Ultimately, we come to confront the issue of resistance: how can we resist against this informatic-entertainment networks? Networks are not liberating by themselves. And networks are not simply constructed by several (inter)relations, but always have protocols which facilitate and govern them as an apparatus for social and political control. Moreover, within this “protocological” control of networks, traditional power shifting is not possible. Thus Galloway and Thacker suggest the discovery of “exploits” which means “discovering holes in existent technologies and projecting potential change through those holes.”13 As computer viruses (as protocological exploits) have evolved by replicating the difference in previous cryptographic form, our resistance to network control or “counter protocological practice” is not desiring for “stasis or retrograde motion” but desiring for “pushing beyond.” The political strategy they argue for is to replace the concept of resistance with the concept of “hypertrophy”: “The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go.”14 Therefore, the central concern in politics of network is “no longer the action of individuated agents” but “the very distribution and dispersal of action through the network.”15

1Nick Dyer-Withefold, “SimCapital: General Intellect, World Market, Species Being and the Video Game,” The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change, Ed. Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills (New York: Alt-X Press, 2003),125

2Aphra Kerr, The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework/Gameplay (London: SAGE Publications, 2006), 1.

3Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction pf Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 75.

4Ken S. McAllister, Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture, (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004), 25.

5Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 92.

6Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 222.

7Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 135.

8Manovich, 55.

9Ibid., 61.

10Ibid., 61.

11Galloway, Gaming, 96.

12Kerr, 4.

13Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 81.

14Ibid., 98.

15Ibid., 157.