Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication.
For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if” – failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a stellar oblivion.
-Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism
"For last 3 years, I can't play games like it was before." is a sentence from a Reddit post titled Another 25+ years' dude with gaming "impotence," posted in August 2022. No game could make this poster happy, have fun, or become addicted like the feeling of the good old days. I share the same dreadful sensation as many others: video games don't bring the same happiness and joy as they allegedly used to. The truthfulness and scale of this phenomenon require more rigorous research, but I am interested in why this poster and I can't play World of Warcraft for hours and months straight like I used to (and not because of the lack of leisure time in adult life). If video games and all our virtual metaverses are the escapist digital utopias they promise to arise, then why are our virtual worlds of entertainment today fundamentally pessimistic?
Video games must lead to fun is a golden rule in video game culture. From the initial conception to the public reception, providing a certain kind of fun had become the singular purpose of computer games under capitalist reality. This is why people in art and culture have often criticized games as the most effective painkiller to keep workers on their treadmills today. To these theorists and creatives, video games and social media make people numb and immune to criticism or pain: a social anesthesia that prevents deeper introspection and the ugly truths about this reality. This generic statement, however, is only partially correct. In fact, the almost religious fear of computer games might be giving the medium too much credit: it would be fantastic if games were an effective tranquilizer for all our modern alienation and isolation. If a game could alleviate the back pain and eye sore of a 12-hour desk job, provide true catharsis after dealing with endless customer rants, spark insight into creative ways of going about physical labor, or allow one to find oneself without the help of opioids. Modern video games are yet another form of labor: grinding the same monster for your next legendary gear, managing your guild to stay competitive on the server, and practicing your aim to get more headshots. This form of playbor goes beyond the traditions of modding and makes its way into the core of gameplay. Even in more “elite” console single-player games, you need to learn how to work the game most of the time for the supposed entertainment: learning enemy attack patterns, memorizing combos or weapon specialties, and internalizing the correct time to counterattack. At the end of the game, the player, you and me, would get up again, linger on our mild digital achievements or failures for dozens of minutes, and sleep knowing we'll be pushing buttons in front of a more boring computer tomorrow. Games are failing to create worlds of true escape they once promised to give us; instead, these worlds are but crude, minimalist mimicries of our grim reality, offering no vision of an alternative other than a visual one.
Video games have long been deemed the best form of art and culture to imagine a brave new world. From Constant Nieuwenhuys's call to move from a utilitarian society to a ludic society to Jane McGonigal's declaration that reality is broken and the only way to fix it is through gamification, dreams of incorporating play as an immense force of liberation promise to be the answer to all socio economic problems. In these dreams, it's past time we agreed that video games as a medium for art and culture have infinitely untapped potential for expression and new ways of dealing with complex emotions. But as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 topped the charts as the best-selling game of 2022 in the West again, a "reimagining" of the infamous game of the same title published 13 years ago, one can't help but wonder: what new digital worlds have the mega publishers and studios been creating if not just more war simulations and eurocentric medieval fantasies? Is there no alternative world that does not involve updating the old to remain the same or intentionally turning living people into gear farmers and rank boosters for petty pay?
Before I go on further rants, I am most definitely paying attention to the plentiful world of the holy Indie Games. All the worthwhile games I hold dear to my heart are more experimental: Disco Elysium, Kentucky Route Zero, and even weird artifacts on itch.io like 2:22 AM or KittyHorrorShow's entire collection. I am, however, hesitant to overtly use the Indie label, as more and more big studios are appropriating Indie aesthetics and Indie allure with help from the likes of ID@XBOX. Similar to other cultural forms, video games have been co-opted by platforms with capital to regurgitate what makes the most money, instead of imagining different worlds. Where did the promised imagination go?
Gamers here may start thinking about SciFi games with a promise of an exciting future. From Metroid to the more recent Cyberpunk 2077, there is no lack of futuristic worldmaking on the surface. In fact, for game worlds, what needs to be improved is a form of narrative realism present in a handful of games, including Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium. Almost all mainstream games are set in imagined universes or parallel worlds. Take the 2003 MMORPG EVE Online, for example, of which I am an avid player. On the surface, it promises a parallel universe: Earth ravaged by catastrophe, with already super advanced technology in space travel, humans set out to explore another galaxy via a mysterious wormhole. The wormhole closed suddenly, destroying almost all technology in the process, and the survivors needed to build their own technological empires anew to conquer the stars again in this new galaxy called New Eden.
The setting for EVE Online seems a perfect place to imagine alternative histories and brand-new worlds. It created two main factions: Amarr and Caldari versus Minmatar and Gallente. Each of these four galactic empires was heavily inspired by real-world powers: Minmatar resembles African tribal culture and used to be brutally enslaved by the Catholic Amarr empire; Gallente takes on the neoliberal ideology of America with a focus on money and biopolitics, at constant war with Caldari, who resembles a conservative, nationalist model of capitalism, much like zaibatsu culture of WW2 Imperial Japan. Shadows of real-world empires are given new life in EVE Online, especially for the Minmatar Republic as an Afrofuturistic imagination of something that never happened. They boast some of the game's most aesthetically striking, agile, and powerful spaceships. Yet far from a utopic New Eden, EVE Online presents an almost dystopian, horrifying universe for players to conquer. Outside of the empire-controlled systems, players can forge their own alliances and take over their own systems to build massive empires. This was the main selling point for the game and a genuinely inventive open-world mechanic that is still rarely used almost 20 years later. The universe is yours, said CCP Games, and their game soon became the national treasure of Iceland. Still attracting tens of thousands of players globally to build and serve their own cyberspace galactic empires.
Beneath the futuristic reimaginations of old-world powers and the innovative player-generated game worlds, however, lies a fundamentally pessimistic specter of economics. New Eden revolves around ISKs, short for Inter-Stellar Kredits, the predominant in-game currency of EVE Online. There are two main ways of obtaining ISKs: via various in-game activities or becoming a Credit-Card-Warrior and buying subscription currency called PLEXs to sell for ISKs in-game. The second method is a generic monetization scheme; what's more interesting here are the in-game mechanics for making ISKs. They all seem exciting at first: bounty-hunting, salvaging, looting other players, gaming the markets, hunting lost Earth technologies, research and manufacturing, and even cargo hauling and asteroid mining. You can do all these in your cool spaceship, even if you are just shooting laser beams at mineral-rich asteroids. Even the most boring activities in EVE Online can become an enjoyable idle game, with the thrill of you being hunted by NPC pirates or other vicious players after your kill mail. But all this excitement exists on an individual level: you will only make a little money mining alone in safe systems, the most lucrative resources are in the player-controlled areas. To get your hands on them and experience the game for all its worth, the game only provides one clear solution: joining a player-run corp.
You must plead allegiance to a player empire or start your own to get the full EVE Online experience. And instead of structuring player powers in new ways, the developers tapped into the survivalist urge and greed of old worlds to design the player-controlled systems. To build and maintain an empire in the game, you need a strong military and a robust workforce; both require you to command other players to convince them to work for you, primarily via ISKs and the promise of war "content." Individual players probably don't care that they don't have a leadership role in the empire; most just want to experience the full extent of gameplay: mining the most precious ore, hunting down the most elusive NPCs, and fighting in the famous million-dollar wars. But the empire's leaders must organize their underlings into mining, research, manufacturing, and security corporations to fuel all the empire’s citadels and war machines: a classic colonial model.
Every infrastructure in EVE Online starts with mining. Players can dabble in mining at small scales, but strip mining with capital ships and a fleet of smaller mining barges becomes the standard when it comes to empire-level operations. Usually, a mining foreman will pilot a giant, aptly named Rorqual class ship, providing mining bonuses to dozens of smaller ships and strip mining entire asteroid belts. From there, the ore is refined into various materials and shipped off to manufacturing hubs of the empire to be built into ships. Researchers of the empire would buy rare blueprints and components found by explorers of various data/relic sites, then build more mining ships and warships. Other players can then purchase these ships and equipment to farm NPC pirate ships for bounty, which is taxed by the empire to fuel its operations. When there is no war, everyone is focused on making money and protecting miners and farmers in preparation for an annual summer war with other empires. EVE Online runs on minerals and ISKs, much like the real world. The developers will sometimes alter the spread of specific resources across the player-controlled regions to fuel an invasion in service of more exciting content. Sometimes player alliances will even wage war just for exciting massive battles to keep their employees subscribed and active, providing value in the game.
Most of my game time in EVE Online is spent as described above: I farm NPC bounties with my guns and combat drones, pay taxes to my alliance, and save up the money I have for better NPC killing ships and equipment to farm more efficiently. When I've finally saved up enough capital, I can buy fancy ships with rare equipment for the fun stuff: hunting other players. Of course, almost 90% of the time is spent making ISKs in a semi-idle mode while I work on my real-world responsibilities (interesting how similar this is to amateur crypto mining), only to enjoy my leisure time in adrenaline-producing battles with other players, fearing the risk of losing my hard-earned ship. If you talk to any longtime EVE player, they will tell you the same thing: that the most exciting part of the game is the player fighting portion. Unlike other games where you simply get to respawn, death in EVE Online is far more punishing than even games like Dark Souls. Your ship explodes, and the other player can loot whatever equipment drops from your wreck. All of your ISKs put towards buying that ship vanish. You would even lose skill points in older game versions if your clone body died. This risk fuels the thrill in EVE Online: you must be calculating, careful, vigilant, and, most of all, a survivalist, hunting down weaker ships while avoiding powerful fleets. Otherwise, you will lose all your investments. Exciting for sure, but if this is what we imagine future intergalactic civilizations to be, it is also fundamentally pessimistic in assuming the failure of other modes of being outside of becoming a survivalist menace.
It is astonishing to think about how long reality has been haunting our game spaces: neoliberal mechanics that preach freedom to own the universe, colonial practices of resource harvest, capitalist marketplaces, and auction houses, violence and the threat of violence as the mode of control, management theories, and organization strategies to run an alliance or a guild – and just like in the real world, game worlds fail to imagine, beyond pulp SciFi and medieval fantasies, fundamentally new ways of existing in different worlds. Both the developers and the players are at the core of this worldmaking model in MMORPGs: game designers and programmers make worlds like EVE Online following by setting a set of constraints mentioned above, while the players in these worlds import their unimaginative ways of seeing and being into them. Although EVE Online, in many ways, did provide newness in video games through its narrative worldbuilding, and even groundbreaking systems of play that allowed players to build their own little nations. But these innovations, in the end, still fall short of the promise by video game studios to bring us new worlds beyond creative novelties. Yes, you can build digital space empires, but only if you are a ruthless survivalist and a conservative capitalist in-game by exploiting other players as digital-human-capital. This design and subsequent participation speaks directly to Wendy Brown’s description of “neoliberalism as a governing rationality through which everything is 'economized' and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm.” There is a failure, for even when we imagine our lives beyond Earth, to assume the human race speaks no language other than money and violence.
This failure of imagination, of course, isn't alone in games. But compared to other forms of cultural narrative, video games, especially ones like EVE Online that exist between military domination and economic superiority, reinforce the systemic thought about making money and waging (profitable) wars. Leaders of the most prominent EVE Online alliances, some of which I have personally served under, you'll find that they are almost always ruthless capitalists IRL too. Take the "emperor" of my current alliance, Noraus. He has become famous in EVE Online for being the biggest credit-card warrior by fueling his alliance with real money. Before he assumed leadership, the Chinese alliance was led by Wind Spirit, who once told us in voice comms that he lives in the same compound as some of the leaders of Imperium, the largest and longest-standing alliance in EVE Online history. I understand that Noraus made his money doing real estate in China's once-booming housing market. And According to Wind Spirit, the Imperium leaders living in the same luxurious Vancouver villa compound were investment bankers or self-employed traders. It is widely known in-game that Imperium leadership doesn't have a day job but dedicates their time to managing the alliance fully. One could only have such leisure time if they've accrued enough capital. Perhaps this isn't leisure for them if we think of EVE Online as a harder-than-life training ground for them and as "serious games" following Harun Farocki's thought. It is a playground to experiment with management, military recruitment, war strategies, economic supply chains, and how to run a mini-empire. Having been trained under rationalism of the neoliberal flavor and individualism IRL, these wealthy players now want to take on the challenge of managing distant, digital subjects whose behavior isn't nearly as predictable as real-life employees trapped by rent, legal contracts, and whom they could easily control via threats of violence. The design of this universe gives them a place to reinforce their already held beliefs, and while the game advertises itself as open and free, what the rules and systems encourage are still for greedy individualism.
There is no question today that we live in gamespaces, playing rational money and power games in both material and digital universes. A cosmic pessimism at our core, where even our playgrounds must operate under the same rules beneath a fantastic facade. Way before Web 3.0's craze about Play-2-Earn, video game publishers mastered the imitation game of creating psychologically exploitative economies within their games. Outside of EVE Online, CS:GO skins and DOTA 2 decorations became a form of digital luxury when Bitcoin was still hovering around $100. Online games are especially prone to copying our real-life economic system of twisted supply and excessive demand. From World of Warcraft's boosting services to Fortnite's movie/concert promos, desirable magic circles are broken by what Hito Steyrl would call correlation games: unlimited, involuntary participation involving you and the invisible algorithms. To connect game economies back to the real one in a serious game of marketing and cultural assimilation: why not pay your subscription with a World of Warcraft limited edition credit card instead of your regular, boring card?
On the topic of MMORPGs, I would like to share my experience with another game, Final Fantasy 14, here. The game had a disastrous release in 2010, followed by an immediate remake, though I'd only started playing in 2018 during its third major expansion, Stormblood. FFXIV, for short, is another haunted piece of culture: the 14th installment, now as an MMORPG, in the ever-running franchise of Final Fantasy featuring all of its hauntological characters and enemies reused in every other installment, while basically copying the dungeon and raid formats of World of Warcraft. When I first entered the world of La Noscea in FFXIV, I expected nothing more than another guilty pleasure MMO to waste a couple of hundred hours of my life on, but the game surprised me in the most unexpected ways.
If you spend any time in MMOs like WoW or EVE Online now, your local chat is filled with bots selling in-game services for real money and almost no genuine social interactions. But within the first 30 minutes of playing FFXIV, I was warmingly invited to several Companies(guilds) in the game, and a crowned(experienced) player picked me up as their mentee, ultimately leading to a great online friendship. For a player who is usually terrified of abrupt online social interactions, I wasn't frightened at all; Instead, the naturally occurring social interactions in FFXIV made me feel good, all the while doing hauntological MMO tasks(killing a few mobs, gathering some materials…). This smooth integration of the Social into an online video game is one of the reasons why FFXIV is still growing after 13 years and the previous disastrous release. There are many theories about how they did this; most attribute its success to director Naoki Yoshida's obsession over vanilla WoW and the roots of exciting adventure. Having played both extensively, I have my own theory: the removal of achievement pressure.
Achievement pressure refers to the psychological trap game designers put in (online)games to drive players to play more content the game has to offer. In EVE Online, it means the pressure to build the most prominent industry, or at the very least join a player-run empire and accrue more ISKs to buy better ships to kill more players. In WoW, it's the pressure of reaching the elite PVP ratings or equipping the best gear dropped from the most complex dungeons and raids. It is the equivalent of social status in MMOs: your number of achievements and the Gear Score of your loadout. It makes sense on paper: you want the players to finish every piece of content in your game to maximize subscription time and profit. However, this design often turns into something more insidious in these gamespaces. If you log on to WoW today and level to reach the end-game content, you'll find yourself barred by item requirements everywhere, and it is almost impossible to find a guild willing to accept you. You are socially banned from enjoying the ultimate content because of your status and in-game image, unless you pay with real money for boosting services or spend several weeks grinding for rudimentary gear. Much like how people look up to influencers on social media and their image of success, the pressure exerted by continually chasing the best equipment or ranking is yet another pessimistic imitation of real-life toxic competition and hustle culture. In FFXIV, however, this pressure is almost nonexistent. Of course, there are extra brutal raids in FFXIV, too, with the best loot, but unlike other MMORPGs, you can also get close to the best gear by doing much more casual activities. But more importantly, beyond equipment, the developers put in the effort to fill the world with activities beyond grinding raids: you can become a craftsperson as an entirely new class to play, spend a day in the casino playing minigames, or find hidden treasures scattered around the world. Most of these were inspired by old-school WoW, but FFXIV puts these casual and relaxing ways of playing on par, if not on the forefront, with their raid content.
Unlike other online games, FFXIV doesn't try to actively push you to do raids or compete with other players outside of a few story-related dungeons. Some would argue that you could also be a loremaster or explorer in WoW or even EVE Online, but the game makers put increasingly little care into what they deem "side" content that doesn't resolve themselves in status changes or competitions. In FFXIV, the game actively encourages you to try out side quests, to level up another class, to learn a craft or go fishing, to talk and dance or even play music with other players, or if you are like me who enjoys playing alone, get into all the single player adventures available in the open world. Without the pressure to rush into the ultimate content, an almost restorative effect takes over the gamespace of FFXIV, allowing players to respect, enjoy, and socialize through different ways of playing.
All this is not to say that FFXIV somehow imagines a brand-new world. No, it still forces you to consume all of its content, competition still exists, it is still the same haunted quasi-medieval fantasy, and often the social interactions can feel burdensome. Whenever you log on to FFXIV, you'll still see bots and spammers offering real money trades. This world, too, cannot escape from our bigger gamespace(reality). Gameworlds are born from a desire to escape reality but ultimately crack open as everything becomes a flat circle. Even in a gameworld that tries to escape from our burnout society, the company must keep producing new content, raids, and stories of more of the same to keep up the engagement. FFXIV cannot escape its fundamental similarities to WoW or EVE Online and fall into the same pattern of perpetual content generation; only it does so in a more intimate way.
In many ways, I prefer EVE Online's almost purist way of approaching the fissure between gamespace and reality: it admits neoliberalism as the ultimate reason and truth to our universe and thus puts its players, me, into its survivalist, power-hungry frenzy. EVE Online puts its purported correlation with reality to the forefront, while FFXIV does a great job of actively hiding it in pursuit of pure escapism. In fact, I would argue that EVE Online is an almost accurate expansion of our Capitalist Realism: real in its power structure and how it copies the hidden algorithms of a neoliberal society into its own minuscule clone. Since "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.", one might argue that EVE Online is a much more realistic image of our future than the somewhat tame and harmonious world of FFXIV. Almost accurate because while capitalist realism survives to produce more updated MMORPGs, EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, and all games that came before or during, slowly decay into emptiness as player-consumers move on to upgraded shinier gameworlds. Every gameworld is dying from the moment its servers go online, but before the final vacancy, digital workers or farmers providing previously mentioned boosting services often start filling these worlds. Some may think paying for in-game equipment is absurd, but it is no more ridiculous than the broke influencers standing next to an Aston Martin working for an image of success and farming likes and follows in this hyperreality, where reality cracks into gameworlds and vice versa, the image of positivity and of success is paramount.
The workers providing these boosting services or in-game currencies are often from outside the First World countries (but not too far outside so as not to have access to the video game), correlating directly with local income. China, Russia, and South East Asian countries are infamous for providing almost all these frowned-upon services to First World players. Every new game attracts boosters until its dying day, a parasitic relationship for sure, but for many, a decent source of income just by playing (extensively) a video game. And with the rise of this shadow industry, game worlds crack, generating their own evil defense mechanism: the gamer Redditors who spam REGION LOCK CHINA in every post.
So it was in the summer of 2020, during the height of anti-Asian hate crimes amidst the pandemic, these Redditors and their alliance, Test Alliance Please Ignore, waged war on our predominantly Chinese alliance, Fraternity, in EVE Online. It would be that year's big summer war in the game. They allied with Imperium and remnants of Russian alliances, under the righteous banner of driving out CHINESE BOTTERS from the international server. Our alliance had gained many systems (land) in the previous year by crushing the former Russian alliance, which was filled with actual ISK-farming bots. But for some unknown reason, the U.S. alliance Test took the Russian botters under their wings and turned hostile towards us, who had strict rules against botting. In fact, the only reason Chinese players fled to the international server was that they were overrun by money-farming bots and the alliance that used them to take over the entire map. Most of us were digital refugees who had even more reason to hate botters, but because we were proliferating and were, again, Chinese, they labeled us a botting alliance nonetheless. The reality correlates further with the supposed unreality of games: Western gamers could finally unite against Chinese gold farmers in an actual (digital) war.
My protective attitude here defending my in-game alliance in this made-up war is because I'm riled up by the overt racism under the excuse that “it's just a game bro”. But taking a step back and thinking about the ridiculousness of an online holy war by White gamers against Chinese gamers, this whole thing is no more than another game of mimicry and correlation. EVE Online, again, copies the real-world anti-Asian sentiments during the pandemic. I would also argue that even though the developers did not intend this to happen, the game's design fueled this act by glorifying a conservative mindset of defending your homeland against foreign threats through militaristic and economic means. The whole war became a joke when the Chinese server unexpectedly shut down, and the alliance that was actually botting also came to the international server. Test Alliance Please Ignore took them in and used their old grudge against us to strengthen their forces in the war. All while still advertising online that we were the hideous botting alliance ruining EVE Online. It is as if Jean-Luc Nancy's prophecy about the death-afflicted world had come true, only in a space war simulation:
In the end, everything takes place as if the world affected and permeated itself with a death drive that soon would have nothing else to destroy than the world itself.
The correlation between EVE Online's in-game turmoil with reality in endless online and offline wars is another proof of death for social imagination. Though this death is present across all forms of culture like film and music, game cultures stand out because of their demand for participation and work from the player. Additionally, I have focused this discussion on multiplayer online worlds not because the same pessimistic worldbuilding gets better in single-player games(in fact, they are mostly worse, think about The Last of Us or GTA) but because of MMORPGs' inherent engagement with the Social. Despite the promises by supporters of increasing gamification, looking at how MMORPG players behave in general should be a convincing argument against the thought that video games are imagining new worlds, but new types of video games can.
I almost quit EVE Online after fighting a war that cost millions of dollars worth of ISKs. I felt like I was recruited into a nationalistic fervor against Western stereotypes. At first, it felt good - fulfilling whatever masculine fantasy I had about myself. But soon, the hours of spaceship battle became dull and sluggish; instead of playing, it increasingly felt like work. I did not let this interfere with my IRL job, but it did start to feel like I was a gold farmer, nonetheless spending hours and hours whenever duty called. At some point, it stopped being enjoyable at all. It has always been a tricky challenge for game designers to balance grind versus reward: you must keep players in the flow so they are psychologically addicted to the gameplay loop. This pretty much sums up all of modern, profit-maximizing game design philosophy, and this is also how industry professionals define fun by making players addicted to spending more of their diminishing leisure time in gameworlds.. It is a failure in creativity to resort to cybernetic traps instead of chasing the sublime or transcendental. Of course, this is present in other forms of culture, but video games' participatory nature allows for more in-depth psychological traps than a fancy Marvel movie opening sequence.
It is also important not to equate technological or mechanical innovations with the New. Every AAA game or a new Bennett Foddy game will have something novel; in the case of the AAA game, many new technologies will be used or implemented to better graphics, animation, and realism of the gameplay (taking off clothes in The Last of Us 2, for example). In indie games like Ape Out or Kentucky Route Zero, these novelties are often so creative as to become the core of the gameplay (QWOP) or aesthetics (KRZ). The pessimism I have been discussing does not refer to the lack of technological newness but rather what rules or conceptions ultimately govern these game worlds. Some single-player games come close to imagining an alternative using realism in their narratives, separate from graphical fidelity. Games like Disco Elysium, Kentucky Route Zero, and, more recently, Norco all build their worlds based on realistic human characters suffering under reality's oppressive systems. Through this intimate form of realism, these games speak directly to the material reality instead of hiding away from it. They could make more powerful attempts at imagining an alternative future, though, for most of these games, the future is also a nihilistic nightmare slowly consumed by the Gray. But these games are solitary in their participatory structure and cannot provide a social simulation like MMORPGs do. MMORPGs on the other hand employ a different form of realism on top of looking more photorealistic: they extract rules of play from the supposed rationalities of reality and base player interactions around money, power, and violence. By putting these forces into a magic circle, there is a cracking of reality into what was supposed to be worlds of fantastic imaginations. And of course, the magical worlds would crack again as real money and real politics infiltrate what was supposed to be sacred playgrounds.
Unfortunately, MMORPGs are haunted by their glorious past. From Everquest, WoW, and FFXIV to Amazon's New World, the governing rules of these old worlds still revolve around killing monsters, mining resources, hunting other players, or scrambling for loot. They have no financial incentive to revolutionize an established genre, though everyone claims they did. And even more unfortunately for us creatives, to make an MMORPG requires massive capital. Thus there is a quiet acceptance of a stagnant online games culture; more Amazons will make more of the same MMORPGs in an already established, market-proven system. This directly relates to yet another failure in cultural production, a haunted failure that prevents anything radically different from happening online or IRL.
So why did I mention the possibility of new types of games to challenge our current pessimistic game worlds? If failure is a breakage within the heart of relations (and correlations), artists, cultural workers, and even gamers ought to chase that breakage. To make and play outside of the rules as a strategy of defiance. Because if these game worlds have one thing in common, it's that beneath their glossy surfaces and polished mechanisms, they offer a boring view of games and reality. Since game studios do not believe gamers would enjoy radically different online interactions, maybe we should be more playful, artful, and less self-righteous or self-assured in making new types of games. And instead of challenging or subverting the status quo to chase a restorative future full of depth and meaning, maybe we should try and exist outside of the entertainment sphere with a voluntary breakage of relations.
I have been ranting a lot about what game worlds can't do, what they are doing, and what's wrong with them. So what can games do? To paraphrase Baudrillard, what games can do is defy reality to be more: more imaginative, more nonsensical, more pessimistic even, more realistic, or more haunted. No artist on itch.io would ever have the means to build a mainstream MMORPG, but instead of distancing experimental games or alternative games away from bored gamers, why not embrace this ironic and almost seductive reality to make something that breaks from what we know about games?
This is not a prescription or a call to action but only a hope for (game)artists and culture workers to take the medium less seriously. Because even a serious empire-building game like EVE Online doesn't take itself that seriously: our alliance is now allied with Test Alliance Please Ignore to fight against the "tyranny" of Imperium. The big anti-botting war during 2020 became a joke. At the end of the day, game worlds and the reality they are attached to all revolve around content and money. These pessimistic game worlds show nothing more about us than we already know—that we are a species prone to violence and power. If anything, our mainstream gamespaces are showing us the building blocks of neoliberalism facade while making tons of money. But although they might have succeeded in providing valuable entertainment over the past three decades, even regurgitated ghosts like World of Warcraft's reboot of its vanilla version can't give people a feeling of the good old days anymore. So instead of making another counter-game, or a serious game, or a novelty game, or a meaningful restorative game, why not do a little remix and summon some ghosts radically differently, add a little or a lot of noise to play, be as boring or as addictive as you want, and build something without even thinking about the rules of game design or of capital.
Did you like this post? Tell us
Leave a comment
Log in with your itch.io account to leave a comment.