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

[Keith Hart]

Thanks, Julian, for that riveting piece. I am currently trying to write 
something on virtual worlds, games as a form of education and the 
diffusion of community currencies, so you really hit the spot with this 
one. Go for it. Ludocapitalism is OK. The only problem is the capitalist 
part which has become almost empty of meaning by including everything.

Since you brought up Weber on work, religion and sport, I thought I 
might add Durkheim's notion that religion is where we get our ideas 
about society from: beliefs internalised in the heightened emotional 
states brought on by ritual ('effervescence'). I have long thought of 
games as a form of education or socialisation to use an old-fashioned 
term. The general proposition is irrefutable, but, as with varieties of 
religion, the interesting question is how different games reproduce 
different kinds of society or relations to society,

When I was a kid, I did little else that play ball games outside and 
card games inside (with reading providing a solitary escape to virtual 
worlds). What did this train me for? Obviously I learned motor skills 
from the first and various constructions of the individual in community, 
ranging from soccer and cricket to tennis and golf (I was upwardly 
mobile in my adolescence). But what did I get out of all those hours 
playing cards? I haven't been able to confirm this, but I think it was 
how to operate in a market economy: make calculations and partnerships, 
take risks, compete and count the result as wins and losses.

I have also wondered why card games were so omnipresent in my youth, but 
not now. Perhaps it was a phase in the development of capitalist 
societies, one that you can still see in Mediterranean squares. Or the 
games have moved on, perhaps training players in similar skills or for 
different social ends altogether.

It matters to come to terms with the specifics of each game. The 
historian, AJP Taylor, who also came from Lancashire, wrote in a memoir 
that the only thing he learned from his dad was how to play dominoes. 
But in Jamaica, for example, that would be a big deal now and it was in 
Lancashire then. My dad taught me to play cribbage when I was three. I 
was seven years old before I beat him. Deep play indeed.

The reason we have not examined the serious work of society performed 
while playing games is because of the split between work and leisure or 
market and home on which capitalism's moral economy is built. It has 
seemed fairly clear to me and to many others that developments of the 
last couple of decades or so are undermining that split, not least 
because of the chance to work from home given by the internet. The 
erosion of the contrast is manifested in the online gaming and virtual 
money you have focused on. There is a huge field opening up here and I 
would encourage you to stake out a big patch for yourself. Hey, this is 
capitalism after all.

I have been betting seriously since I was 12 and financed my higher 
education that way. I have often tried to engage people with the idea 
that gambling offers a reliable livelihood, if not often a way of 
becoming rich. They don't want to know because it would be too painful 
to admit that all that soul-destroying work was not necessary. (Actually 
most forms of scientific gambling are also mindbogglingly tedious, but 
at least you work for yourself). Rather they cling to the notion that 
only the bookies or casino owners win and they bet in ways that 
guarantee they lose themselves in the long run.

People who wish to promote community currencies (make your own money 
circuit) usually come up against similar attitudes. The slave has too 
much at stake in his own enslavement to think of freedom. My response is 
to say that, instead of asking if LETS really works or could replace 
capitalism, we should ask what political education people get from 
participating, however briefly. And, if we want to change society, we 
should not despise games as a way of helping people to learn how or at 
least to imagine different social forms.

This reminds me of Monopoly, invented as part of Henry George's Social 
Credit campaign for a land tax by a follower to show how ruinous it was 
to put the ownership of our common land into the hands of capitalists. 
Parker Bros stole the idea and marketed it as a way for everyone to 
practice becoming capitalists themselves, the American way. The inventor 
lost the court case and the rest is history...

It would be easy enough to say that MMOs like Second Life and Everquest 
simply reproduce American capitalism online. But what do people really 
learn in Durkheim's sense by playing and could this change how they 
think of their relationship to society or even of what society could 
become. At the very least, the blurring of the boundary between life 
online and off it is telling them something. My guess is that, as you 
imply, ludocapitalism could well be a way of entrenching capitalism ever 
more deeply. But there are other possibilities and it would be 
interesting to tease them out.

Keith





Julian Dibbell wrote:
> 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.)
>
>