Theodor Adorno, whom we met in Chapter 1, once observed that the products of mass entertainment secretly had much in common with work in industrial society. “Amusement in advanced capitalism is the extension of work,” he wrote. “It is sought after by those who wish to escape the mechanised work process, in order to be able to face it again.” One wonders what he would have thought of today’s videogames, so many of which themselves have continued to appear to offer little more than a “mechanised work process”.
If games are supposed to be fun, Adorno might have asked, why do they go so far to replicate the structure of a repetitive dead-end job? One very common idea in games, for example, is that of “earning”. Follow the rules, achieve results, and you are rewarded with bits of symbolic currency — credits, stars, skill points, powerful glowing orb — which you can then exchange later in the game for new gadgets, ways of moving, or access to previously denied areas. The only major difference between this paradigm and that of a real-world job is that, whereas the money earned from a job enables you to buy beer and go on holiday — that is, to do things that are extraneous to the work process — the closed videogame system rewards you with things that only makes it supposedly more fun or involving to continue doing your job, rather than letting you get outside it. It is a malignly perfect style of capitalist brainwashing. Even the common idea in many Nintendo games — for instance, in the disappointing Super Mario Sunshine (2002) of being able to take “time off” to play a subgame of collecting fruit can be read, on this analysis, as a cunning subterfuge to keep the masses happy: after all, they are still caught within the system.
In the overarching economic systems of games as diverse as Super Mario Sunshine, Deus Ex (2000), or Primal (2003), everything boils down to a matter of shopping. New skills
—whether they be new physical moves, spells, or the ability to transform into a demon
—are acquired instantaneously and thoroughly through currency exchange. The idea of gradually nurturing and learning a skill is largely absent, although this would be psychologically more rewarding. If I could save up and spend ten thousand dollars to become an instant kung-fu master, that would be cool, but I wouldn’t be as proud of my kung-fu as I would if I had acquired the ability through the normal channels of years of hard training. Even a game as apparently sophisticated as Deus Ex — a role-playing, first-person espionage adventure — can only offer a bland mechanical parody of “learning”, in which the next level of ability in, say, lock-picking can only be bought, not practised and learned for oneself.
Apart from comic early representations of menial jobs such as in 1980s arcade games Tapper or Burger Time, some kind of military position was for a long time virtually the only real-life job represented in videogames, apart from the venerable genre of football management. Yet what we are seeing now is an increasing labourisation of the game atmosphere: from the wry alternative employment market of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s Mafia-dominated world, to the square-jawed life-of-driving fantasy of Toca Race Driver (2002), games become structured around a fictional career.
