Gamified Capitalism

Globally, some three billion people play a commercial game regularly — usually on their smartphones, and typically one of the top 25 games currently trending on the market. The games industry is said to be larger than the film, television, music and publishing industries combined, with major triple-A game studios pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the development of blockbuster games, from which they earn billions in returns. 

But the massive size of the games industry is only the most obvious aspect of what I will call ‘gamified capitalism’. This term can also help us to understand how struggles around work in the game industry also reflect and reveal class struggle more broadly. 

Exploitation is rife throughout the entire games supply chain, beginning with the horrific conditions of people compelled to extract the raw materials that go into the (quickly obsolescent) digital devices on which digital games are programmed and played. Even those relatively privileged workers who write, code, illustrate and playtest digital games are subject to emergent forms of exploitation.

Much of the less creative work is contracted out to the Global South, where workers are made to compete to work more cheaply to service corporations in the Global North. Even in the North, many who work for the top game companies accept precarious working conditions, gruelling schedules and abusive contracts for a chance to ‘do what they love’ and make games.

The indie game scene, where individuals and small groups make and market their own games, is similarly plagued by exploitation. And while many fascinating and innovative games are being made, a few companies own and have a stranglehold over the platforms where games are found and downloaded. Like Netflix or Amazon Prime, these platforms prioritise products that either pay for the privilege or stand what the platform-masters imagine to be a high chance of success. In such a way, the games industry reveals the horizons of class struggle today.

But the gamification of capitalism is deeper still. It also refers to the way that games and game-like elements have become a key part of everyone’s lives. Apps like Duolingo are the charismatic face of a vast industry that has used play to seduce us into accepting the harvesting of our data, the commodification of our attention and the reshaping of our social world.

As public education budgets have been slashed, schools increasingly turn to corporate e-learning apps that promise to revolutionise pedagogy, but often deliver a banal, standardised experience that has dubious outcomes when measured holistically. Gamified dating apps have revolutionised romance, but rarely for the better; most users struggle with new and old forms of objectification, alienation and disconnection.

Gamified banking and investment ‘fintech’ apps claim to help us better manage our finances and ‘nudge’ us towards a more hygienic economic life — and some working people indeed benefit from them. But they do little to remedy the austere conditions of life and work under a system where workers are getting poorer. Rather, they provide the alibi that these structural inequalities are due to individual failings.

Health and fitness apps likewise encourage individuals to imagine that their wellbeing is simply a matter of reinforcing better habits, erasing the fact that the most consequential factors in health are access to decent food, rest, good housing, a clean environment — all things that are best delivered as public goods, not private responsibilities.

The Unwinnable Game

Here we come to the broadest meaning of gamified capitalism: the way that the system as a whole makes most of us feel like we’re trapped in an unwinnable game. Consider the person trying to navigate the high-stakes maze of an immigration system — especially the UK’s ‘hostile environment’, in which every teacher, doctor, landlord and service provider becomes a border sentinel.

Consider the family trying to work out the riddle of how to get care for a loved-one in the shattered public healthcare system, or through extortionate private insurance schemes. Consider the punitive bureaucratic game of applying for benefits in a system designed to be practically impossible. Consider the worker on the phone to the human resources call centre, or trying to sort out a phone or utilities contract, or complaining about being charged too much by their bank. It’s one unwinnable, absurd game after another — and the house always wins.

The problem in a nutshell is this. For 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has told us that in order to survive and thrive, we need to become ‘players’: savvy, risk-taking, self-managing competitors. Rather than relying on employers and the state to offer us security in return for our productivity, so the logic goes, we should instead embrace the hustle and throw ourselves into the market game. And yet most of us now feel fundamentally cheated, and look for someone to blame as a result.

This is one of the main factors leading people to the far right, whose representatives promise to make the game fair again and punish those they accuse of cheating: the migrant who is allegedly cheating the border regime and free-riding on society’s wealth; the benefits claimant who is opting out of playing the game and cheating the system to sustain their own laziness; the minority subject who is cheating the capitalist meritocracy by ‘playing the race card’ and benefiting from diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

While reactionary demagogues also often complain — vaguely — about ‘elites’ cheating the system, they do nothing about, for example, the billions of dollars of public wealth being stolen in off-shore tax havens, or the innumerable loopholes by which the rich and corporations avoid paying their fair share. 

The Potential of Games

Our assumption in making Billionaires & Guillotines is that, under gamified capitalism, games have a special place and are a vital field for intervention. If we have all been told to become players, then we might learn a lot by appealing to people’s playfulness. Gamified capitalism depends at every stage on us remaking ourselves into active agents, trained and primed to play its competitive game. I believe games can speak to a world of ‘players’ in more fruitful ways. 

But this begs many questions. How to make games that don’t just reaffirm the idea of ‘the player’, but meaningful challenges it? How to make games that reveal the possibility of solidarity? How to make games that direct workers’ anger towards the real causes of it? How to make games which show that there are other ways of being in the world, and that other worlds are possible? And how to get these games past the capitalist gatekeepers?

With Billionaires & Guillotines, we are experimenting with the relatively cheap medium of board games. While these can reach far fewer people than digital games on handheld devices, they have the benefit of bringing people together in real space and time, where critical conversations and radical conviviality can transpire. While Billionaires & Guillotines is a satire, it also experiments with how asking players to take on the role of billionaires can teach us some important lessons about how capitalism works. 

Partly inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s elaboration of Marxian crisis theory in her magisterial The Accumulation of Capital, Billionaires & Guillotines demonstrates how the seemingly rational and strategic actions of individual competitive capitalism creates unforeseen crises. As players of the game gobble up the wealth of the world for luxury assets, their actions inadvertently unleash ecological crises, political upheaval and social calamity, ultimately leading to a revolution. In other words — spoiler alert! — the game ultimately destroys itself from the inside.