[iDC] Notes Toward a Theory of Ludocapitalism (O Rly?)

[Julian Dibbell]

Hi, folks. Trebor invited me to post a bit about a cluster of topics
that has been the focus of my thinking and reporting for the last few
years: Online games, virtual economies, and the increasingly elusive
distinction between play and production in the digitally networked
world.

Some context: In June I published an article in the New York Times
Magazine called "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer," profiling a few
of the roughly 100,000 young people in China who work in factory-like
gaming workshops, playing massively multiplayer online games like
World of Warcraft 12 hours a day for about US$0.30 an hour. The
material conditions of these jobs are spartan-to-grim, but their
product is a thing of fantasy and light:  From the corpses of the
virtual monsters they spend their work days slaying, the workers
harvest magic armor, powerful weapons, and above all the coveted coins
of precious metal that typically serve as currency within MMO games.
These goods, in turn, can be sold by their employers, for real money,
to online retailers who in turn sell them, for even more real money,
to players in the West who use them to get ahead in virtual careers
that not infrequently take up as much of their time and energy as
their real-life jobs do.

For people who have never played an MMO, it can be difficult to grasp
what drives this peculiar economic circuit -- or to believe that it
supports an annual exchange of well over 1 billion U.S. dollars worth
of real money for virtual goods (a figure that, in some analyses,
extrapolates to a total gross domestic product for the world's MMOs of
about US$28 billion, in the neighborhood of Sri Lanka's or Lebanon's).
But the Times article does a pretty good job, I think, of ironing out
any mysteries, and you can read the full text of it here:

http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/goldfarmers.html

Or if you care to dive deeper into the phenomenon, you could read my
book "Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading
Virtual Loot," an account of the year I spent attempting to earn a
living solely from trafficking in the virtual goods of the classic MMO
Ultima Online. While the attempt met with limited success (my earnings
reached the millions only as valued in UO's local currency, the
Britannian gold piece, which trades at about 300,000 to the dollar),
but it gave me a chance to get to know and write about a rich cast of
characters who've done much better by themselves with the game.

And it also got me thinking my way toward a larger argument I've had
sufficient nerve to call a theory of ludocapitalism but not quite
enough to take altogether seriously. I genuinely think there's
something to it, though, and so, in hopes that the best and brightest
among you might confirm me in (or disabuse me of) that belief, I'm
going to try to lay it out for you now by way of an annotated excerpt
or two from the book:

The argument first crops up in an early chapter about the first known
gold farm, a Tijuana operation set up by a U.S. outfit called
Blacksnow Interactive. "What Blacksnow's story was trying to tell me
about contemporary economic life," I conclude, "was this: It is
becoming play. A game."

The thesis proceeds: "This is not an entirely unprecedented
observation. 'Casino capitalism' is political-economist Susan
Strange's label for an international economic system in which
speculative financial dealings—wagers in all but name—have come to
dwarf in monetary value the global trade in goods and services.  More
broadly, cultural theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord
have argued, in various ways, that life under advanced capitalism
immerses us all in a largely imaginary reality, a media-saturated
Disneyland-writ-large, drained of the heft and consequence that have
historically distinguished real life from play. Or, if you like a
little more kung fu in your critical theory, you can find the same
argument roughed out in The Matrix, where, in an unsettlingly familiar
future, the daily grind of economic production turns out to be no more
than the rules of what is essentially a vast multiplayer computer game
(and where Baudrillard's critique of postmodernity as 'the desert of
the real' is quoted 20 minutes into the narrative, just so you don't
miss the point).

"My point, however, is both narrower and more sweeping. I'm not
talking about games as a metaphor. I'm talking about games as a
symptom; about Pac-Man, Asteroids, Mortal Kombat, Counter-Strike,
Halo, World of Warcraft, and the fast-growing, multibillion-dollar
computer-game industry in general as the side effect of a far
profounder development in the history of play: its decisive
infiltration of that most serious of human pursuits, the creation of
wealth. I'm suggesting that when the economic system of the world has
come to such a pass that the labor of online gamers can contribute
more to the global GDP than 2 out of 3 sovereign nations, then no
proper account of that system can neglect to account for its
relationship to play. And I'm arguing, finally, that that relationship
is one of convergence; that in the strange new world of immateriality
toward which the engines of production have long been driving us, we
can now at last make out the contours of a more familiar realm of the
insubstantial—the realm of games and make-believe. In short, I'm
saying that Marx had it almost right: Solidity is not melting into
air. Production is melting into play."

In the subsequent chapters we meet, among many others, Troy Stolle (an
Indianapolis union carpenter whose nightly efforts toward achieving a
US$750 castle of his own in Ultima Online eerily paralleled the
hammer-pounding tedium of his day job) and the ghosts, respectively,
of Johan Huizinga (whose "Homo Ludens," arguably, inspired Roger
Caillois, the Situationist International, and others to take up play
as both a foundational and a historically transformative element of
culture) and Alan Turing (a man not usually thought of as a social
theorist but whose seminal theories of computation, to say nothing of
his famous Turing test, fairly bristle with latent recognitions of the
ludic mechanisms at the heart of digitally mediated existence). Then,
after the bumpy ride of my brief career as a ludocapitalist has ended,
I return to a final stab at summing up the theory, such as it is, as
follows:

"It was official: Work is play and play is work. The only question now
was what that possibly could mean.

"Not that I hadn't already given that one some thought. By now I had
finally read my Huizinga and my Caillois and the Situationists on
play—and found them bracing in their variously elegiac, analytic, and
inflamed attempts to salvage play from the margins that modernity had
cast it into. They were everything I could have hoped for, in fact, in
that long-ago moment [the moment that had led to my decision to go
into virtual trading in the first place] when I'd watched my
[two-year-old] daughter rapt in play and wondered how it was that
daily life, and work especially, could have fallen so far from that
state of grace without provoking, somewhere, a critique as eloquent as
the howls Lola would have loosed if I had snatched her up just then
from the wonder of her toys.

"Except that this was not that moment any longer, and what I wondered
now was what exactly those impassioned 20th century ludologists—no
friends of the modern productive regime, insistent that 'play,
radically broken from a confined ludic time and space, must invade the
whole of life' ['Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play,'
Internationale Situationniste #1 (June 1958)]—would make of the
invasion that was finally coming to pass. Could the daily grind of a
Chinese gold farmer possibly be the ludic utopia they'd had in mind?
Could they find a way to celebrate the nightly drudgery that had built
Troy Stolle's tower, or make out anything like liberation in the
strange reshaping of production it seemed to herald?

"Consider this: In an essay on work and play in MMOs, the psychologist
Nicholas Yee proposes a thought experiment. 'Given that MMORPGs are
creating environments where complex work is becoming seductively fun,'
Yee asks, 'how difficult would it be for MMORPG developers to embed
real work into these environments?' As one possibility, he suggests
that the screening of diagnostic scans for cancer be outsourced not to
low-wage technicians in India—as is routinely done now—but to players
who would actually pay to do the job, so long as it contributed to the
advancement of their characters. The proposition is at least as
plausible as the Chinese gold farms, and implemented in a
science-fiction world like Star Wars: Galaxies, it wouldn't even
disrupt the players' immersion in that world.

"Nor is Yee's thought experiment entirely hypothetical. The multiuser
online world There, as Yee points out, started out as a sort of
semi-covert test-marketing environment, in which companies like Levi's
and Nike paid There to let its paying customers wear virtual versions
of the companies' products. When this attempt at extracting value from
player activity didn't pan out, There, Inc., renamed itself Forterra
and shifted its focus to a similar exercise in interweaving the
playful and the productive: supplying the U.S. Armed Forces with vast,
multisoldier training grounds in cyberspace, virtual Kuwaits,
Afghanistans, and Baghdads.

"The military, of course—with its rich history of war games dating
back through the 18th century Prussian Kriegsspiel to the Persian
origins of chess—has long been ground zero for the confusion of play
and productivity, but lately it seems to be outdoing itself. Never
mind the military's collaborations with game producers to create
marketably playable simulations like Pandemic Studios' Full Spectrum
Warrior. The rumor these days is that planners at the Pentagon have
adopted as a kind of Bible Orson Scott Card's science-fiction novel
Ender's Game—in which a small army of children believe themselves to
be playing a sophisticated video game when in fact they are
telematically leading a campaign to annihilate a race of ruthless
space invaders. (How many of these planners, I wonder, have read the
sequel, in which the leader of these children spends the rest of his
life atoning for the richly complicated sin of unknowing genocide?)

"And if all this strikes you still as rather more speculative than
momentous, consider, then, the increasingly ludic production of that
most transformative of contemporary commodities: computer software.
There's a website called TopCoder.com, where programmers compete in
juried contests to win prizes for the best computer programs for a
given task, while the site itself sells off the winning programs at a
profit. It's a quirky little business model, not much imitated and not
especially well known, yet it illuminates a similar but much more
talked-about phenomenon: the production of open-source software, in
which dozens or hundreds or thousands of unpaid programmers join in
loose collaboration to create a computer program none of them will own
and anyone can modify. With open-source software running most of the
Internet's infrastructure and the open-source Linux operating system
making serious inroads against Microsoft Windows on business and
government desktops, tremendous effort now goes into figuring out what
 sustains so much and such high-quality 'amateur' product. But what
hundreds of analyses of the open-source software movement have failed
to get a handle on is precisely what TopCoder builds its business on:
the essentially playful urges behind open-source production.

"Why do they do it, the TopCoders and the open-source programmers and
the free-software hackers? Not for salaries, obviously, or for the
cash prizes, really, or even for the high-minded philosophical reasons
most often and most closely examined—the commitments to open-source
methodology as a more socially responsible or technically powerful way
of writing software. No: above all they do it for the agonistic glory
of having their contributions singled out for inclusion in the final
product and the ineffably geeky joys of writing the slickest code you
can. 'Jouissance' is the broad term anthropologist of technology
Gabriella Coleman applies to this ludic impulse at the heart of
open-source creation, but Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has put it
more plainly: 'The computer itself is entertainment,' he declared in
his foreword to Pekka Himanen's 'The Hacker Ethic,' an elucidation of
the ideas behind open-source creation.

"Consider it all, then. Look at Troy Stolle's late-night pointing and
clicking, at Blacksnow's sweatshop, at Nick Yee's cancer-screening
parable, at the military's dreams of death-dealing games and the
hackers' play at writing code that works. Each on its own might not
amount to a historic moment, but looking at them all together I can't
help sensing the emergence of a curious new industrial revolution,
driven by play as the first was driven by steam. As steam did then, so
now play lives among us as a phenomenon long ignored by the machinery
of production—evanescent, vaporous, unexploited—and inasmuch as
production abhors a vacuum, it was perhaps just a matter of time
before it moved to colonize the vacant, vacuous space of play.

"Such were my thoughts, at any rate, in the weeks after the Times
confirmed the existence of the Chinese gold farms. And like I said, I
was at a loss to fit them into the frame of reference I had found in
(and once shared with) Huizinga, Caillois, the Situationists, and
other high-modern champions of play. For all of them, to one degree or
another, the modern system of production was so radically unplayful
that even imagining that system capable of incorporating the energy of
play would have been a challenge: Any such incorporation, in their
view, could only subvert the system or destroy the play.

"And yet, if you think about it, the logic of the system isn't really
so antithetical to play as that. In fact, if you think about it hard
enough, you might conclude that play is where that logic has been
headed all along. Max Weber, for instance, who thought about it very
hard indeed, seems to say exactly that in those final pages of The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism where he denounces the
'iron cage' of meaningless hyperefficiency the Puritan economic
reformation has left us in, in which 'the idea of duty in one's
calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious
beliefs.' Those are the oft-quoted words anyway. Just below them in
the same passage, however, Weber curiously yet much less famously
suggests that dead religious beliefs don't only survive as ghosts: 'In
the field of its highest development, in the United States, the
pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning,
tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often
actually give it the character of sport [emphasis added].'

"Weber doesn't elaborate the point, but it makes sense: Drained of the
religious significance that gave it meaning, the economic system we
inhabit must either bind us to its pointlessness against our wills—a
costly proposition, like any prison system—or contrive new meanings
for our daily grind. And what easier way is there of contriving
meaningful activity than through the mechanisms of play? Add computers
to the historical picture, effectively building those mechanisms into
the technological foundation of the world economy, and the contriving
gets so easy that it starts to look inevitable. The grind must sooner
or later become a game."

(Props to Thomas Malaby, Pat Kane, McKenzie Wark, Keith Hart, and
others on the list who've hit some of these same notes elsewhere.
Special thanks to David Weinberger, whose 3000 words of excerptage
emboldened me to forward my 2000, but who can't be blamed if mine fail
to engage or provoke as effectively as his.)

-- 
Julian Dibbell
www.juliandibbell.com
+1.574.286.7406
juliandibbell (Skype)
DibbellJ (AIM)