Presented at this year’s Digital Games Research Association conference, Think Design Play

Here I want to talk about three things: ludocapitalists, ludotopians, and what I have roughly come to call the ludic sublime: the power of technological myth making and what this means to the future of videogames. Explicitly I want to show how recent discourses around videogames reflect past trends about how we frame and understand the role of technology in society, and look critically at how these narratives are used by various forces. Now that videogames are increasingly recognized by governments, the press and big business as objects of importance, we are more and more likely to find ourselves exposed to myths about videogames, inside of game studies, as well as in the wider public.

But first let’s address the question of what exactly technological myth making is. The Canadian Political Economist Vincent Mosco’s work on the subject, The Digital Sublime is a template here for understanding this. In understanding what the sublime is, he turns to Myth.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Myth as “a purely fictitious narrative, usually involving supernational persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena.”

Myth is intimately linked with the Sublime, which initially was used to describe moments associated with natural wonders: Mountains, or the mist off a massive waterfall.

Edmund Burke describes the Sublime as such:

It comes upon us in a gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros. ( Burke, 1756, p. 86)

The sublime merged its way into other aspects of existence and culture. It transitioned from nature to technological works. Virginia Wolf described in her novel, Mrs. Dolloway, the sublime nature of a post-WWI airplane:

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (or so it seemed to Mr. Bently, vigorously rolling his strip of turf, at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, Mr. Bently thought, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelin theory – away the aeroplane shot. (Woolf 1925: 28)

Paired with the beauty of the sublime in myth, is moral panic about its power. We can look to the moral panics that surrounded the automobile for this. A revolutionary mode of transportation that would degrade the family by subverting geography and sexual mores.

In essence, the kind of myths I’m speaking about are those which elevate technology to the level of the sublime or demonize them as the bringer of a new and terrible destruction. It seems that no communication medium is exempt from this. First women were in danger from the Novel – as it opened a world of sexual deviance. Comics threatened children with violence. Television, violence and sex again. Videogames – sex, violence. That being said I wish to focus on utopian myths, rather than these.

Mosco speaks to how he thinks we should address the sublime in relation to myth. We should recognize the lie in Myth, as myths all contain incongruity and falsehoods, but that these very lies offer a window to another reality: the promise of the sublime. Thus we should not demonize myths or spend all our time debunking them, but rather recognizing them for what they are: tales that reveal our hopes and fears about technology, modernity, the social condition. Critiquing myth allows us to address current problems and to stop hoping for a perfect future created by technology alone. They are tricky, unfullfillable yet always captivating fictions.

Myths about communications technology have defined much of how we think about them – yet with time each particular medium or media becomes prosaic and fades into the background. Timothy Wu has illustrated this extensively with his treatment of American telecommunications and broadcasting, showing how radio, television and yes, even cable TV, were all hailed in their own was as the bringers of a new democratic age: the ability to transmit hundreds of stations into the household would allow us to watch any number of educational and public access channels. I think we know how that went.

These technologies were things that would end history, geography and politics. We know that communications technologies have had profound effects on our world, but the utopian dream of a perfected democratic project realized through communication remains unfulfilled. Similarly, as much as some might suggest that cable TV rots the brains of the suburban youth, the world has yet to fall apart due to over indulgence in reality TV.

Instead these myths served the agendas of various groups – the utopians oversaw the development of massive communications networks around the world, hoping for a better world while the capitalists used the myths to enclose and control them. The utopians lobbied for and oversaw the spread of cable TV – capitalists like Rupert Murdoch enclosed them to ensure order and profits.

So where are our utopians? Let’s look to some games that provide the fodder for myths: Minecraft. If you haven’t actually played Minecraft, it’s very simply a procedurally generated sandbox game. In the single player game you spawn into the world as it is randomly generated according to it’s procedural rule-set, and you set out to do whatever you want. You can spend your entire time battling against zombies and creepers in the dark of night or build objects to specifications of your own design.

Minecraft also allows for multiplayer in which a number of people join-in. Depending on the culture of the server people do different things. The most common it seems is to stake out areas to build and mine, and then getting together with your friends to put something together. Early on in Minecraft’s history videos started popping up. I’m a big fan of these two, which are oft cited, as they seem to embody the essence of the sublime possibilities of computers.

These are amazing things! In the first I like how the creator specifically asks for help from people to begin working on constructing the interior of the ship. The second has spawned a lot of other experiments with constructing various machines like pneumatic catapult and whatnot. In addition to this early work, people have since spent a lot of time creating more prosaic things: like entire towns or just pixel art.

I would say that Minecraft represents the bright, amateur-centric, decentralized qualities ideal for building the myths of videogames as a force for good. It taps creative potential. Mod makers are regularly are creating new ways of playing Minecraft – using it as a starting tool set for their imaginations. Alex Leavitt presented on this at PAX East recently, speaking about how he believes that Minecraft embodies the future of videogames – one where the players are taking a very direct and active approach in the development of the game, where their culture is central to the game itself. Clay Shirky’s recent work has focused on the redeeming qualities of a creator culture made possible through the internet – now we have the tools to create, rather than consume as we did with television. This has remnants of the creator culture that arose in the early days of AM radio, where just about anybody with the machinery and the time could become a broadcaster: a co-creator of the medium itself.

I have little doubt that Jane McGonigol would have written about the creative potential that is tapped into in Minecraft in her book, Reality is Broken if it had been around then. Some have described her as a proponent of gamification (I will speak to this in a second) but I think that’s mistreating her work. She is better described as a myth-maker, a bricoleur, about the sublime capacity of videogames. Some of these might be “gamified”, but a lot of her work focuses on games in general. She spins the tales of our society redeeming itself out of destruction through the power of expertly played games. Looking to myths of long ago, she tells the tale of the Iron Age Lydian civilization, which managed to save itself from famine through game playing. She also speaks to the power of “epicness” in games – their ability to communicate the importance and massive nature of the world to people.

For her this is the 6th “fix to the world”: Epic Scale. I would say this is just gamerspeak for the sublime. Thus Minecraft for me stands as a beacon to the ludotopians, to those who see the power of the medium as a force for the collective good.

On the other side of technological myth is that which is pushed by capitalists –where they often use the rhetoric of utopians to justify their enclosure of the medium. This might mean a re-imposition of the broadcast format – where they centrally plan and organize its continued expansion. Or it might mean just exploiting this discourse as much as they can to get a buck.

Foursquare trades in the world of advergames and gamification – which has come to be the buzzword for its proponents and critics alike. Foursquare operates rather simply. Using geolocation you “check-in” (this being the branding buzzword of the entire operation) to a store of some type. When you do this foursquare keeps track of how often you go somewhere. If you go the most, you become the mayor. In addition to mayoralships there are various ways to earn badges – the inner workings of which are not published officially by the developer. The most “gameful” aspects of foursquare are these badges.

In general foursquare then would have hard time fitting into Huizinga’s definition of play and games. That’s why people have termed this trend towards badges and whatnot to be gamification or as Ian Bogost describes more accurately, “exploitationware”. Put simply this is the trend of applying game-like mechanics to traditionally non-game like things. Shopping. Doing chores. Navigating websites, etc.

Ludocapitalists look hungrily to what foursquare has done and McGonigal has valorized the service. She happily notes that it brings people together, gets people to try new things and helps out businesses. People like Gabe Zichermann use this kind of rhetoric to evangelize for gamification, coining the term, creating things like the gamification summit, writing a book, and in general making a living off of the concept.

Recently he responded by Bogost’s assertion that, in philosophical terms, “Gamification is Bullshit”:

There are real and tangible benefits to Gamification that cannot be denied. To write them off simply as perversions or tools of evil, scary corporations and marketers is more than denying your fellow gamer or designer the chance to make an honest living. It denies the world a chance at being a better place.

Here Zichermann showcases perfectly how ludocapitalists utilize the rhetoric of ludotopians to justify their work. Instead of addressing Bogost’s criticisms directly, he went straight for the “games make the world a better place” argument, making sure to highlight the use of gamification for positive ends in education, health, government, etc. He obviously leaves out much of what it is used for: spurring desire and marketing commodities.

More likely for Zichermann is that gamification’s heyday as a marketing fad will slowly fade, and using game mechanics like this will be become prosaic, much as any tool of communication does.

These critiques standing, I don’t believe that we should focus on the lies of these myths, but rather understand why we are intent on building them in the first place. Utopian visions see a world enabled by the power of technology. Capitalists use these visions for their own ends, which is the accumulation of capital, and not much else.

At the end of the day it seems to me that in our continued critiques and valorization of videogames we need to be aware of what we are fundamentally longing for in our technology, and maybe as a project attempt to formulate a realist, inclusive and most importantly, radical politics out of the technology we have. What is it about creation and art and play that would cause us to elevate games like Minecraft to the level of the sublime, and why is it that these myths are so useful to capitalists who don’t seem to care too much about the medium, just the bottom line.

Videogames will change the world, but most likely when they fade into the background. When they are prosaic, common and cheap is when we will be more intertwined with their development than we are now. When marketers stop selling gamification like snake oil, a perfect solution to ones business problems, but just as another tool of communication in the toolbox is when we need to worry about them the most. Similarly, when Minecraft seizes to be a revolutionary new game, but just the progenitor of a new form of digital games and play, just one example of many, that is the time of real revolution.