Thomas Malthus’s Video Game Industry Simulator 2020: Introduction

Or: An Anarchist Critique of Video Games

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“While it flays us alive, power makes a point of persuading us that we are flaying each other,” wrote Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem in 1967. I think about this a lot when I read about the so-called Indiepocalypse^[1]Wright, Steven T. “There Are Too Many Video Games. What Now?” Polygon, 28 Sept. 2018, https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-many-video-games-what-now-indiepocalypse., a moment in this industry’s present and ongoing history where the excesses of AAA studios, publishers, and even console manufacturers are being laid at the feet of those who can’t possibly bear their weight.

Reading 4xisblack’s Speculation Jam piece, Climate Change and Indiepocalypse^[2]“Climate Change & Indiepocalypse by 4xisblack.” Itch.Io, https://4xisblack.itch.io/climate-change-indiepocalypse. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021., confirms that our frustrations with the mainstream industry are being redirected back at us in a way that harms indie developers and critics and leaves AAA studios and publishers largely alone.

“[There] are too many devs spawning out of the game schools; too many emigrating from the bankrupt AAA studios, or fleeing like refugees from the doomed/sinking/conquered worlds of Flash, web games, shareware etc. Too many have come seeking indie paradise, or so the story goes, & with them came ‘asset flippers’ + other bad game apples. Now it’s supposed to be overcrowded,” he wrote.

“[The Indiepocalypse] kinda has to be about ‘overpopulation’ or ‘unscrupulous products’ or some other bullshit like that, for the reasons climate change has been about those things. But the underlying trajectory of truth is easy to discern: Motherfuckers like Mario and Pikachu divert more resources from independent game work than any tsunami of ‘asset flips’ ever could.”

4xisblack, at least, isn’t taking the bait. Nor is Calei2copi0, who wrote:

“Bad games are the waste floating in the oceans; the plastic fish choke on. But—the analogy sure runs deep—why are we so afraid of individuals instead of corporations? At least bad games, by nature, take up little space. But AAA games? With their overarching marketing campaigns and suffocating coverage, they are far more abrasive to the ecosystem than their tiny counterparts.”^[3]calei2copi0. There Aren’t Too Many Videogames: Indiepocalypse or the Eugenics of Art | Calei2copi0. https://calei2copi0.neocities.org/there-arent-too-many-videogames.html. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021.

In the first post of the No Escape book club, I mentioned briefly^[4]“The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games, Chapter One: ‘Leveling Up in Life.’” No Escape, 10 Mar. 2020, … Continue reading the concept of the vertical “dominance hierarchy.” I want to unpack that a bit here in a more general sense than simply talking about meritocracy. A “dominance hierarchy” is a social order by which someone stands above you in terms of power, importance, economic status, etc. and actively wields that power with the aim of keeping you from seeking a more equitable arrangement. Think about the relationship between you and your boss; or you and your local police officer. Are you equal to them in terms of your freedom of movement or ability to make workplace decisions? Can you act against either of them with the same force they could deploy against you? The answer, on balance, is no.

For example, a boss can simply decide one day that everyone needs to ignore pleas to maintain social distancing and return to the workplace; the punishment for not doing so is termination. And while it’s absolutely ethical to refuse that order, the economic position being fired puts you in is… shitty, to say the very least.

Historically, workers have attempted to flatten the dominance hierarchy by unionizing and taking strike actions, to varying degrees of success. Unfortunately also historically, employers have used scabs to maintain their economic output and mercenary strikebreakers to force striking workers back to work, sometimes under threat of injury or death. And the state isn’t your friend here, either. On a federal level, the National Labor Relations Board acts as a regulatory valve on the unionized workforce, telling them what they can and cannot do to force employers into making workplaces better. And on the state level, 28 states have “right to work” laws that explicitly prevent workforces from unionizing, especially in retail, food service and customer support industries. These “right to work” laws give the boss at-will hiring and firing power. Even when we organize, the employing class has ways to remind us they are on top.

I don’t think I have to say much on what happens when you try to flatten the hierarchy between you and a police officer.

Now, you might get the impression reading this that I’m not exactly a huge fan of dominance hierarchies. And while you’d be right, I want to say that this doesn’t mean I simply reflexively hate all vertical hierarchies, period. Vertical hierarchies are tools, and temporary vertical relationships — where someone takes on a brief leadership role to coordinate the accomplishment of a specific task — can be effective at getting things done. But what often isn’t stated here is that these hierarchies have to be temporary, and they have to be surrounded by a horizontal social structure to maintain the overall equity of everyone participating in the relationship.

Anarchism is a political philosophy that calls for the abolition of dominance hierarchies. You might hear this as “smash the state,” or “fuck capitalism, go home.” But the goal of anarchism is to arrive at a freer, more equitable world by eliminating the ability of anyone to claim dominance over anyone else and be seen as a legitimate holder of power. Just because the biggest dominance hierarchies are the state structure and economic order doesn’t mean anarchists are solely focused on them. Within the anarchist purview is also the abolition of patriarchy, cishetero- and allonormativity, societo-structural restraints on neurodivergent and disabled people, racism, nationalism and colonialism, and information enclosure. And also, this isn’t The Matrix. Just because we claim these as our watchwords by no means makes us immune to these structures or our places within them. Anyone who claims to be a perfect embodiment of these goals is fucking lying. It’s a constant struggle even just living up to anarchist ideals and most — present company absolutely included — come up way goddamn short.

So, what does this have to do with video games?

The video game industry made about $120 billion in 2019. That’s $120, followed by nine zeroes. $120,000,000,000. In comparison, the music industry only brought in $11 billion, and the movie industry only brought in $42 billion at the box office globally. Book publishing only brought $6 billion in during 2019. It’s not a misstatement to call video games the most profitable entertainment industry in the world. Who’s taking the lion’s share of that money? It’s not indie developers, by far. Instead, you’ve got a handful of console manufacturers and gaming PC/accessory companies making all the money on the hardware side, and on the software side: the AAA publishers. Activision-Blizzard. EA. Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo all double-dipping with their software divisions. Apple. Google. Tencent. Netease. Bandai-Namco. Ubisoft. Valve/Steam. Epic/EGS/Epic Games Publishing. The list goes on, and the pieces of the pie get smaller. By the time indie developers get to even see the pie, it’s basically all gone.

“A more sophisticated conception of Indiepocalypse looks more towards the stats, and notes a gradual consolidation of attention & dollars beneath a handful of huge videogames to the detriment of all others (Fortnite, Minecraft). You can find graphs that look extremely similar to the ones about global wealth consolidation!” 4xisblack writes. “And that’s simply because game publishers, game marketplaces, social media platforms & so on partake greedily & mightily in the grand tradition of consolidating global wealth. Ubisoft is out to make rich people richer; so is Twitter, so is Valve, so is Apple, et cetera. This is just the explicit whole point of what they do.”

The video game industry revels in its capitalist excesses. It openly and proudly admits to abusing its workforce. It has not-so-secretly been promoting bigotry in its audiences. Like the rest of the tech sector, it participates in wildly harmful resource extraction to build its hardware, but unlike the rest of the tech sector, video games aren’t even making many mouth noises in the direction of environmental sustainability (fucking 30 million tons of carbon emission reductions by 2030 my ass. Green nudges my ass). It fucking promotes gambling to kids. Publisher CEOs will make hundreds of millions of dollars a year and, as soon as their bonuses are locked in, fire hundreds from their workforce and close studios down. For no reason.

Against this backdrop, an anarchist’s work is cut out for them. How do you even begin to address a fraction of these issues, much less the issue of stratification between the AAA industry and the indie space? Are we in a situation where the only recourse is to throw the whole industry out? Well… no. Maybe the entire industry isn’t reformable but certainly there’s a vibrant enough indie scene worth fighting for. Even under feet of concrete, a better world can be found.

The first thing that really needs to go, though, is this idea of an “indiepocalypse.” It doesn’t exist, and its invocation simply provides cover for the AAA industry at large to continue its trajectory unchallenged. Yeah, “bad games” end up on Steam sometimes, but what is that to an umpteenth Call of Duty? Which is worse for video games as a creative field? The solution to this problem we’re facing is not to engage in petty digital nationalism, nor to take up Neo-Malthusian fears of an overproduction panic destabilizing the whole party. This isn’t “China’s fault,” it’s not “asset flips’ fault,” it’s not the fault of “ess-jay-double-ews” changing the definition of what video games are. Anarchists are considered radical because they endeavor to examine the root of a particular problem and solve it there, rather than going after sets of secondary symptoms. In follow-up posts, I want to address a few of these symptoms and why they’re not the root of the present problems eating video games.

I’d like to talk about the idea of “too many games.” What does it mean when we say there are “too many games?” Following up on that, I want to address the so-called problem of “too many bad games.” What is a bad game? Why do they receive the focus they do? Are AAA titles ever considered bad games in the sense of, say, an asset flipped game? I also want to talk about the problems of information and access; who gets to make video games? Who has access to the tools to make games? Who are game design college tracks for? Who determines where the lines are drawn between professionals, indie/arthouse devs and amateurs? And finally, before getting to the part where I call for the abolition of the AAA industry and make everyone my enemy, I also want to talk a bit about Chomskyite “manufactured consent” and how it applies to the video game consumer base and the video game media at large.

I thought I’d get this whole thing done in a weekend. It’s been sticking in my craw for about a month now, though some of this stuff originates in my brain way further back than that. I’ll try to get these follow-up posts out as often as I can, but this seems like it’s going to be the next long-term project No Escape takes on. I’ll likely be talking about this for a while so if you want to help douse the fire my brain is on right now, come hang out with me on Twitter.