Ludocapitalism

So far we have traced a sort of short history of virtual spaces and, at the same time, have analyzed three boundaries getting blurred with the development of virtual technology and digital capitalism. Although the role-playing with avatar, RMT, and the presence of Chinese gold farmers demonstrate that the boundaries between the real and the virtual are already quite blurred, it is sure that the boundaries will fade even more over time. Given the universalized virtual asset trading and social networking, we can easily predict that the virtual world itself will evolve beyond just playing games.

Based on these analyses, we can assume the real implications of blurring the boundaries between work and play. First, labor in virtual space comes to be immaterial. As many postmodern theorists have pointed out, it seems that labor in digital network economy is losing its materiality and becoming increasingly ephemeral. Gold farmers' physical labor seems to be faded in the circuit of digital capital. Second, play becomes work. In gold famer's case, we must not simply say that play was paid or work became just play. Rather, play, or leisure in traditional sense, is hijacked into work. Third, play loses its anti-capitalist characteristics. The desire for gaming, desire not to work and to be entirely free, succumbs to the logic of capital. Thus, online game would be an exemplary commodity promoted by capitalistic control machine of society. Finally, the only way to resist to global network control embedded in online games is make it fail by cultivating and imploding it.

However, many scholars of game studies stress that a new theory of game should be created in order to grasp the potential of online game and virtual world. For example, Galloway argues for a “play theory of value” not any more “labor theory of value”1 and Dibbell hints at the necessity of “theory of Ludocapitalism.”2 In order to examine the symptomatic relationship between play and capitalism, the further researches on online games, I hope, should be extended to the subject such as governance of virtual communities, legal status of virtual property, military use of the simulated planet, wealth of the game industry, generation of virtual value, and so forth. Yet, the most important question never answered properly: what makes the online games fun?

1Galloway, “Warcraft and Utopia.”

2Dibbell, Play Money, 299.