Soon after reading this (via Chris’ post) I read this (bia BoingBoing). I would pay good money – albeit probably only a small amount – for a videogame designed by Horkheimer and Adorno.
“”We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”
“This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.”
{ 21 comments }
Salient 11.09.11 at 5:04 pm
…reminds me of Harvest Moon (for the N64 I think?), the only non-Zelda videogame my parents ever played; it somehow kept track of how long you’d been away since your last play and cluttered up the farm with a number of annoying things (weeds, rocks) proportional to the time you’d been away. They felt a real sense of responsibility to the game world.
(Which they would repeatedly say, with a grin, was exactly the kind of work they were playing a game to get away from. But I think that interpretation’s incorrect. Activities that follow consistent simple logic with a well-understood rewards structure and no practical opportunity to bypass the activity, that require negligible strain or exertion, and that allow arbitrarily many retries with no penalty for failure, are actually quite soothing. Like bouncing a ball against a wall and catching it, but after every Nth catch you get to choose from a wider selection of balls to bounce and N increases by 10, and maybe whenever the new N is divisible by 3 you get to choose a new wall.)
It’s really too bad that so few non-videogame activities follow that structure. Though I guess it’s better to say, a lot of videogame activities have provided a previously unavailable type of soothing activity to engage in. (Interesting dichotomy here — it’s the can’t-practically-bypass part that breaks down for artificially constructed activities, like carrying a sack full of tennis balls out to the garage to bounce, since nobody’s stopping you from choosing whatever ball you like at any time; it’s the consistent-reward part that breaks down for naturally occurring activities, like taking the stairs for exercise instead of the elevator. Wildly off-topic hypothesis: maybe this is part of why points-based artificially-constructed but socially-enforced systems like Weight Watchers are successful.)
bert 11.09.11 at 5:05 pm
See also Cow Clicker
bq. Cow Clicker developed an active player base–-people who missed the humor and attached to it as if it were a “real” game. These players unquestioningly spent real-money Facebook credits to enjoy their cows and sent Bogost innocent player feedback in the hopes of improving their experience … “I never expected that would happen,” reflects Bogost. “A lot of the serious players… just like clicking a cow sometimes. It’s very innocent; they just like clicking a cow. Maybe they have a point.”
Colin Danby 11.09.11 at 7:10 pm
Are we *sure* that
http://www.the-utopian.org/post/12034084404/towards-a-new-manifesto
is not a cruel parody?
William Uspal 11.09.11 at 9:23 pm
Colin:
William Uspal 11.09.11 at 9:24 pm
(sorry for the double post)
Colin, the original piece is was in New Left Review:
http://newleftreview.org/?view=2860
nick 11.09.11 at 9:26 pm
oh for fuck’s sake, why is it every middlebrow asshole who once enjoyed a jazz record thinks that makes him smarter than Theodor Adorno?
John Holbo 11.10.11 at 12:33 am
Jazz record?
john c. halasz 11.10.11 at 12:59 am
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Theodor-Adorno-Jazz-Quartet/76202717547
Lancelot Link 11.10.11 at 1:39 am
Sounds like a couple of professional intellectuals nostalgic for the manual labour of others.
john c. halasz 11.10.11 at 1:52 am
@9:
http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Manual-Labour-Labor-Epistemology/dp/B000IGFD2Q
garymar 11.10.11 at 3:45 am
…smarter than Theodor Adorno?
The dialogue reads so strangely. Like listening in on a conversation between Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus.
John Holbo 11.10.11 at 4:39 am
I am aware that Adorno is notorious for hating Jazz and Mickey Mouse and for generally giving people that Barton Fink feeling. I am also aware – and agree – that Mad Man Munz’ critique might be said to apply, mutatis mutandis, to Adorno’s interventions in American music: “The trouble with you, Theo, is you DON’T LISTEN!’ Adorno was simply too traumatized by events in the Old World to come to grips with the cultural distinctiveness of the New, seems to me. That said, I thought I was posting about video games and utopias, not jazz.
Lemuel Pitkin 11.10.11 at 5:05 am
Cow Clicker
That can’t be real. That can’t possibly be real. Can it?
Colin Danby 11.10.11 at 5:23 am
Sorry for the derailment JH … though thanks JCH @10 for that reference.
john c. halasz 11.10.11 at 6:03 am
Still, those Dutchmen,- (I think),- claimed affiliation with the “Technical University of Mother Wit”, if I got the translation right, which is a joke that even T.W. might have appreciated. (They reminded me of a YouTube video I once saw, featuring Greek youths from an roof-top high above Athens, “playing” folded umbrellas to an over-dubbed rembetika tune. Who’s sorry now?) But as for video games, the “market” for virtual commodities or objects, i.e.”things” purchased as furnishing for video games, has now reached $9 billion.
john c. halasz 11.10.11 at 6:45 am
(Computer problem). Wouldn’t A & H have been amazed at such a prospect? Or not. The “object” mentioned in their colloquy is in accordance with their shared “code”. The object is what is reified and repressed by its subordination to its concept, under the “illusion of constitutive subjectivity” and thus an entirely instrumental comportment toward objective existence, which dis-integrates both its independent existence and its non-instrumental relation to human existence. Hence the relation/attachment to the “object” is lost behind the subject/object split, which is why there is no longer any (mimetic?) experience of objects and their diverse and separate “natures”. What that would have to do with either “virtual reality” or “utopia”, I haven’t a clue, except as a plea for releasement from both.
ajay 11.10.11 at 11:17 am
I would pay good money – albeit probably only a small amount – for a videogame designed by Horkheimer and Adorno.
Meanwhile, “Also Sprach Zarathustra” is pretty much a first-person shooter already.
Kaveh 11.11.11 at 5:21 am
John Lanchester in this LRB article is (I think) citing Stephen Poole’s argument about some of the sophisticated games like Grand Theft Auto and The Movies that:
The people who play them move from an education, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, to a work life, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, and for recreation sit in front of a computer screen and play games full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others. Most video games aren’t nearly irresponsible enough.
I’ve been thinking off-and-on about how to think about videogames as art (is the art limited to the writing/sculpture/painting within the game, or is there more to it? it seems like there should be more to it…), and where I’m at now is that I think of them as extreme versions of Barthesian texts, meaning that you are not only invited to interpret and add meaning yourself, you are forced to do this in order to continue playing the game. In this way, I suspect they are similar to divination (with tarot cards or whatever) in that they cannot be experienced without variable and intentional (if restricted) input from (part of) the audience. Joshua Wise suggests a similar interpretation here. Obviously, the amount of creative flexibility you get within different games varies a lot, in quantity and quality, across the whole range of games from Minesweeper to non-commercial persistent worlds. But I think that is part of the appeal of labor-like games: they are soothing for being repetitive and low-stakes, at the same time they let us inscribe new meanings into laborious activities. Real life skills–skills you use in a very mundane, banal way–are used in a videogame to make you the leader of a powerful, glamorous criminal gang, or fantasy/scifi equivalents of same, or a conquering ruler, or whatever. It changes how you feel about doing the things that you do.
Lemuel @13, I wonder if all those people who supposedly took the game seriously weren’t actually just taking the irony for granted, not feeling the need to mention it. And paying money for a game like that would be supporting the ironic statement and the guy who made it, and so on… And maybe some of them were spoofing him, too.
Kaveh 11.11.11 at 5:29 am
Salient @1: It’s really too bad that so few non-videogame activities follow that structure.
Long-distance cycling and hiking are maybe a bit like that? They require a certain level of physical fitness and aren’t available all year-round, and you need to be able to block out a whole day or weekend that you’re away from home, and then the scenery in videogames may be better, depending on where you can hike/bike. But there is definitely something soothing about the monotonous pedaling and making gradual progress towards a destination. No power-ups (apart from your own skill increasing) unless you spend real-life money, though.
Jeremy 11.11.11 at 6:23 am
That can’t be real. That can’t possibly be real. Can it?
It was. It was meant as a joke, though, commentary on FarmVille and the like. The Kotaku piece was fantastic.
Zamfir 11.11.11 at 9:53 am
Activities that follow consistent simple logic with a well-understood rewards structure and no practical opportunity to bypass the activity, that require negligible strain or exertion, and that allow arbitrarily many retries with no penalty for failure, are actually quite soothing. Like bouncing a ball against a wall and catching it, but after every Nth catch you get to choose from a wider selection of balls to bounce and N increases by 10, and maybe whenever the new N is divisible by 3 you get to choose a new wall.)
Juggling
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