Annotations ¶
Our hypothesis, then, is that video games are a paradigmatic media of Empire—planetary, militarized hypercapitalism—and of some of the forces presently challenging it. But investigation of this claim requires setting down some intellectual foundations.
To a greater degree than perhaps any previous media other than the book, virtual games are a direct offshoot of their society’s main technology of production. From their origins in nuclear-age simulations, games have sprung from the machine system central to postwar capital’s power and profit—the computer. Born out of the same military research matrix that generated the personal computer and the Internet, virtual games continue to be a testing ground for some of the most futuristic experiments in digital technology: online play worlds incubate artificial intelligences, consoles are linked into grid computing systems, and games are the media of choice for neurobiological experiments in emotional stimulation and telekinetic digital devices driven by brain activity alone. More mundanely, games once suspect as delinquent time wasters are increasingly perceived by corporate managers and state administrators as formal and informal means of training populations in the practices of digital work and governability (see Beck and Wade 2004). A media that once seemed all fun is increasingly revealing itself as a school for labor, an instrument of rulership, and a laboratory for the fantasies of advanced techno-capital; all the more reason, then, to subject virtual games to political critique through a theoretical optic whose key concept is Empire.
By Empire, we mean the global capitalist ascendancy of the early twenty-first century, a system administered and policed by a consortium of competitively collaborative neoliberal states, among whom the United States still clings, by virtue of its military might, to an increasingly dubious preeminence. This is a regime of biopower based on corporate exploitation of myriad types of labor, paid and unpaid, for the continuous enrichment of a planetary plutocracy. Among these many toils, immaterial labor in information and communication systems, such as the media, is not necessarily most important. But it clearly occupies a strategic position because of its role in intellectually and affectively shaping subjectivities throughout other parts of the system. This Empire is an order of extraordinary scope and depth. Yet it also is precarious. It confronts a set of interlocking crises—ecological (global warming), energy (peak oil), epidemiological (HIV/AIDS and other pandemics). Its governance is threatened by tensions between a declining United States and a rising China that could either result in some supercapitalist accommodation, consolidating Empire, or split the world into warring Eastern and Western empires. Its massive inequalities catalyze resistances from below. Some, such as al-Qaeda, are disastrously regressive. Others, like the global justice movement—whose complex diversity Hardt and Negri’s multitude gets closer to than any other category their critics can offer—contain the seeds of a better alternative. Empire is flush with power and wealth, yet close to chaos. This is the context in which we place virtual games.
Eugene Provenzo’s Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo (1991),
Marsha Kinder’s Playing with Power (1991)
Julian Stallabrass (1993), “Just Gaming,” later included in his book Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (Stallabrass 1996)
Virtual games simulate identities as citizen-soldiers, free-agent workers, cyborg adventurers, and corporate criminals: virtual play trains flexible personalities for flexible jobs, shapes subjects for militarized markets, and makes becoming a neoliberal subject fun. And games exemplify Empire because they are also exemplary of the multitude, in that game culture includes subversive and alternative experiments searching for a way out.
The era of this multiscale corporate organization is, however, winding down, with current trends favoring the biggest studios. One explanation often given for this is that the latest generation of platforms has doubled, if not tripled, the average cost of developing a console game (BBC 2005). Each new platform throws those developing titles for it on a steep learning curve, requiring they learn how to program for the new machines and how to optimize on the expanded affordances of the latest consoles. This relates to something Vercellone (2007b) says about communication technologies in general: they “correctly function only thanks to a living knowledge that can mobilize them—because it is knowledge that controls data processing, information remains nothing but a sterile resource, like capital without labour.” Producing console capital therefore “rests on the knowledge and versatility of a labour force able to maximize the capacity of training, innovation, and adaptation to a dynamics of continuous change.” Cultivating knowledge of the new consoles consumes time and thus raises the labor costs of game development, costs that in turn are more easily absorbed by the multinational studios with deeper pockets and bigger staff (Nutt 2007).
Accumulation of cognitive capital involves the conversion of “living knowledge” into “dead knowledge” (Vercellone 2005). A predominant form of dead knowledge under cognitive capitalism is that of intellectual property, and EA is, if anything, a corporate empire of intellectual property. This is an empire that expands through a highly calculated approach to intellectual property, the strategic cornerstones of which are direct purchase, licensing deals, and franchise management. Guiding all of these is a sentiment that EA’s Riccitiello expresses well: “The developer today is right at the edge. In many ways, it is create a hit. Or else” (cited in Androvich 2008a).
In all of this, EA, as cognitive capitalist, economizes on production costs by buying the rights to faces, images, and names that have already been cognitively worked up, and of which players are, we might say, precognizant.
In all of this, EA, as cognitive capitalist, economizes on production costs by buying the rights to faces, images, and names that have already been cognitively worked up, and of which players are, we might say, precognizant.
For EA, licensing is hardly a one-off deal: “we look for properties where we know there will be multiple iterations” (Probst, cited in Florian 2004). When Probst made that remark, more than 70 percent of the publisher’s annual releases were “based on established brands” (Pomerantz 2003). This strategy of studied unoriginality is explicit, with EA perfecting a method of risk aversion, preferring clones of proven hits to experimentation. EA, as one commentator summarized its corporate history, “became the world’s biggest maker of video games by relying on a formula now widespread in the industry: pumping out sequels of familiar franchises that consumers bought almost on cue” (Ross Sorkin and Schiesel 2008)
in recent years bellwethers like Electronic Arts have come to treat the process of game making as a virtual factory: X dollars invested in graphics technology combined with Y dollars in marketing resources should yield Z return on investment. … Electronic Arts, once known for its bold vision, has stagnated both creatively and financially, reduced to churning out an uninspiring litany of sports sequels and run-and-shoot knock-offs. (Schiesel 2008a)
By operating studios in multiple locations simultaneously, says one company executive, EA has the flexibility to “easily expand there or here, depending on the tax outcome”; the world that EA sees and cements is smooth but striated, ordered around different “tax jurisdictions” (Wong, cited in Hasselback 2000, 143).
“If a 60-hour work week is your maximum, then this isn’t the place to be” (cited in Lazarus 1999). “It’s not unusual for these guys to work 21 hours, sleep on the couch and get up and start working again” (cited in Littlemore 1998). Pausch is therefore quite correct when he warned his students, “EA employees must be willing to work very hard” (2004, 12). But he might have amended that remark, adding that EA’s norm of “performance” depended on the routinization of unpaid hours as an expected part of work—fulfilling, in other words, the classic definition of exploitation.
In the United States, the Fair Labor Standards Act exempts companies from paying overtime to computer professionals engaged in a strictly defined set of tasks and making over a certain amount per hour: this is often interpreted as a blanket excuse to withhold all such payments. However, each state has its own regulations; the employer must follow the law or rule that provides the greatest protection to the employee. Labor law in California, where EA and other major publishers have studios, stipulates that companies do not have to pay overtime to software programmers if they make more than US$41 an hour and engage in advanced creative or intellectual work. In Canada, British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario also have overtime exclusions for high-tech workers, and in British Columbia, EA and other game companies lobbied vigorously to secure this deregulation.
Focus groups had shown that “people always associated green with technology”: “It is wizard-like and magical. Think of witches stirring a pot of something secret, or the blood of aliens in movies” (126, 159). Microsoft marketers invented a “brand mythology” for the machine with a story about Antarctic explorers discovering “glowing green pods” marked with an “acid-green X” that transport them through a wormhole to an energy source on the other side of the universe: “This X is peeling open and revealing the access to this energy” (156–60).
Technical machines are, however, themselves components of larger “social machines” (398). A social machine is a functionally connected assemblage of human subjects and technical machines, people and tools. So, for example, the curved saber is part of an assemblage that includes the armored warrior, the trained horse, the stirrups stabilizing the striking rider—a whole military apparatus or “war machine” (391–404). Seeing social formations as machines is not unique to Deleuze and Guattari;
Indeed, the most radical aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s machine theory is that humans themselves are “desiring machines” (1983, 1). Subjectivities are not natural or given but assembled from biological, societal, and technical components in an incessant process of “becoming” that produces new alignments of bodies, cognition, and feeling. Take, for example, the male warrior, the “man of war,” a figure that has dominated Western culture for centuries. This subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari argue, was generated as an assemblage of specifically sexed bodies, skill with carefully crafted weapons (swords, lances, bows, armor), relationship with animals (think of the importance of horses to war, as mounts or totemic symbols), and social projects of colonization and conquest (1987, 353). Over the centuries, this military identity changes as its elements alter—with, for example, guided weapons and computers superseding swords or muskets. Subjects are fabricated, machined, made up from elements that include, among others, technical machines.
When Hardt and Negri say that Empire “appears in the form of a very high-tech machine” (2000, 39), they are using the term “machine” in the expanded sense proposed by Deleuze and Guattari to suggest how global capital assembles itself from interlinked social, technical, and subjective components. Console play displays the fusion of these elements. Guided by Deleuze and Guattari’s machine studies, we open up the Xbox and its console rivals as state-of-the-art technical machines made of chips and circuits; as components of giant corporate machines; as time machine for profitably using up software and other virtual commodities; as generators of machinic subjects, mobilizing the passions and practices of hard-core gamers; as contenders in the competitive machine wars of video game capital, but also at the same time of the transgressive, subversive war machines of nomadic gamer hacking and piracy; and last, through all these preceding machine moments, as part of the global biopolitical machine of Empire.
Capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari say, is a planetary “production machine” (1983, 226), assembled from flows of labor, finance, and technology. This “world-wide capitalist machine” (231), they say, operates through processes of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” (259). The quest for profit generates new technical machines, conjures up fresh products and practices, breaks down old habits, and throws all bounded domains—“territories”—of life, geographic, social, and subjective, into upheaval. Yet capital simultaneously “reterritorializes” this flux, enclosing innovations as property, drawing around them new legal boundaries, and policing access so that new technical machines and cultural creations appear as commodities produced and sold for profit.
Time Machine: Surplus Value
Here we invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “machinic surplus value” (1987, 458). Observing the importance of media in the capitalist machine, they suggest that while Marx wrote about workers being exploited at the point of production, the same idea could now be applied to audiences. Television advertising, for example, captures people’s time and attention even when they are not officially working, a process Deleuze and Guattari describe as “machinic subjection” or even “machinic enslavement,” in which people become “intrinsic component pieces” in “recurrent and reversible human-machine systems based on internal, mutual communication” (458–59).3 We want to suggest how the Xbox and game consoles generally function, in a way related to but different from television, as devices for the extraction of machinic surplus value.
As Hardt and Negri observe, “Machines and technologies are not neutral and independent entities. They are biopolitical tools deployed in specific regimes of production, which facilitate certain practices and prohibit others” (2000, 406). The Xbox, the PS3, and even the charming Wii are machines of Empire; their technological assemblages of circuitry and cell processors build the corporate territories of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, which in turn are components in the worldwide capitalist machine. Earlier we referred to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “machinic subjugation.” This may seem absurd in regard to game consoles—which are, after all, fun, are they not? Even if playing video games does sometimes have a compulsive aspect, we don’t intend a discourse about game addiction shot through with double standards and moral panics. But to say that consoles are enslaving is not to deny that they are pleasurable; it is to say that pleasure itself channels power.
When Microsoft designers referred, rather eerily, to the prototype 360 (then known by the science-fictional moniker “Xenon,” after a colorless, invisible, pervasive gas) as “a living entertainment experience powered by human energy” (Thorsen 2005b), they unknowingly came very close to articulating the theory of “machine enslavement” in which people become “intrinsic component pieces” in “recurrent and reversible human-machine systems” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 458).
Deleuze (1992) wrote of a “society of control” that shapes its subjects, not primarily in distinct, formal, disciplinary institutions, such as schools, barracks, or asylums, but in a diffuse, infiltrative, molecular way, for example, via networks that permeate our everyday spaces and saturate apparently private time. This society of control is coextensive with Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000, 23). Alexander Galloway observes that that video games fit well this apparatus of what Deleuze termed “ultrarapid forms of free-floating control” (Galloway 2006, 87).
For the moment, we will end with a quote from Guattari (1996b, 221) apt to the gamer-console assemblage: “Something of the machine seems to belong to the essence of human desire. The question is to know which machine, and what it is for.”
Then came 9/11, followed by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The aftermath—the war on terror—provides a fuller illustration of Hardt and Negri’s thesis that, in Empire, war is waged not to resolve disputes between states but to maintain order within a global territory where “there seem to be minor and elusive enemies everywhere” (2000, 189).
Full-spectrum dominance is a concept whose centrality to Pentagon thinking was announced in Joint Vision 2020, a planning document released in 2000 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its opening pages declare the U.S. military aim over the next two decades to be the achievement of “full spectrum dominance: persuasive in peace; decisive in war; preeminent in any form of conflict.” It goes on:
The label full spectrum dominance implies that U.S. forces are able to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with combinations of forces tailored to specific situations and with access to and freedom to operate in all domains—space, sea, land, air, and information. Additionally, given the global nature of our interests and obligations, full spectrum dominance requires that the U.S. “maintain its overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide.” (Joint Chiefs of Staff 2000, 6)
The possibility of full-spectrum dominance is opened by what U.S. war planners know as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), a transformation in military practices occasioned by the shift from industrial to informational warfare. The possession of overwhelming strategic, operational, and tactical advantage is determined by superiority in high technology, especially in communications and computing, rather than numbers of troops or even equipment. RMA identifies a situation of “virtual war,” fought out “onscreen,” in which the enemy becomes visible, knowable, and destroyable through the mediation of digital technologies, from satellite-generated maps to heads-up display systems and computer-controlled and dispatched weaponry.
What causes the greatest disquiet to U.S. war planners, however, is the threat of low-tech opponents and “asymmetrical conflict.” The NATO and Red Army forces that faced each other in the Cold War were “symmetrical” enemies, mirror images, each with missiles, tanks, artillery, air, and infantry, as well as tactical and operational doctrines, which, though distinct, fell broadly within the same plane of military logic. But the U.S. troops fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan face “asymmetrical” foes: insurgents massively outgunned in terms of high-technology firepower, far less well trained, but retaliating with practices, such as suicide bombing, assassinations of civilian collaborators, and other forms of terrorism, that seem to imperial eyes alien, uncivilized, and inhuman. Joint Vision 2020 identifies such “asymmetric approaches” as “perhaps the most serious danger the United States faces in the immediate future” (Joint Chiefs of Staff 2000, 5).
Associated with asymmetric conflict is yet another acronym: MOUT, or Military Operations on Urban Terrain. Pentagon strategists, as Mike Davis (2004) has noted, now consider the “Third World city” to be the “key battlespace of the future.” The view that “the slum has become the weakest link in the American empire” is based not only on the disasters that befell U.S. occupations of Mogadishu and Beirut but also on Israeli experiences in Gaza and the West Bank. If “the future of warfare … lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world,” then special training is required for the soldiers who will fight in such conditions. MOUT tactics are applied on a daily basis in cities such as Baghdad, Fallujah, and Nadjaf, and preparation for such fighting involves incessant war games, both physical and virtual (see Dawson 2007; Graham 2007).
This is a complex geopolitical story. But it is basically irrelevant. All the parts are familiar from innumerable CNN reports, news photos, and movies; the political premises, the allotted roles, and the desired outcome are all predictable. Writing about the first Gulf War, Brian Massumi observed how the legitimation of state violence operates primarily in “an affective register, through the mass media” (1998, 44). This “affective circulation” depends on a series of conversions, elisions, and blurs. On the one hand, the enemy combines attributes of military opponent, despot, terrorist, thug, and genocide perpetrator—omni-purpose evil. On the other, there is an implied identification between U.S. soldiers and media audiences, and foreign populations supposedly being philanthropically aided by “our” side. As Massumi puts it, “All you need do is feel—a oneness with the prospective dead hero, and, based on that, hostility for the hypothetical enemy” (45).
Such is the universe of FSW. “Zekistan” is Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iran; “Al-Afad,” bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; the “Zekistan Liberation Front” are composite tyrannical, ethnic-cleansing, weapons-caching terrorist malefactors. You, the player, are “our” troops, at once defending the homeland and liberating oppressed inhabitants of invaded countries. One of the U.S. soldiers, whose position the player adopts, displays on his helmet the letters NYPD. Is this a cue that U.S. soldiers in Central Asia are, indeed, planetary police? In a moment of scripted dialogue, after a ferocious firefight has left bodies strewn all across the streets, one of our infantrymen reflects, “I think just by being here we help.”
Sometimes fire can be summoned from the sky. A crucial role for Alpha and Bravo is not directly defeating the Tangos in firefights but spotting for devastating air or artillery strikes. Here the role of the infantry is thus, in Crandall’s (2004) words, “to act as a direct human interface to a machine that cannot yet fully interface with all of the ambiguities of a material world”—a function performed in-game by placing a special green bomb icon on target. After a few moments the screen is rocked with spectacular explosions, providing a pyrotechnic gratification acknowledged by one virtual soldier’s scripted comment: “Ahh never get tired o’ that.”
It is essential to FSW that time can be reversed, and every mistake undone; the “save-die-restart” sequence makes Alpha and Bravo immortal. This is, of course, the big lie of war-as-video-game.
There are other subsidiary lies in FSW’s virtual war. That missions end if you have more than one serious casualty reflects the U.S. military’s well-known concern for (and success in) minimizing politically volatile losses to its highly trained post-Fordist techno-soldiers. “The U.S. Army has zero tolerance for casualties!” the manual sternly declares (FSWIM 2004). But it also means you never witness the annihilation of large numbers of your own troops. And—need it be said?—this is war where no one lies for hours gut-shot and shrieking for his mother; has his testicles blown off; or wakes in the hospital finding he has lost a limb. It is war without mutilation or post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also war without moral dilemmas. And there are almost no civilians. The miracle of Zekistan is that its streets are deserted and houses empty, apart from the ubiquitous Tangos (who all die instantaneously when hit). Air and artillery strikes do not hit wedding parties. There is no collateral damage. War is peace.
Full Spectrum Warrior suggests aspects of contemporary warfare beyond simply the firepower and discipline of U.S. light infantry, aspects specific to new media of visualization and virtualization. In an incisive analysis of “armed vision,” the artist and media theorist Jordan Crandall (2004) posits that in the history of visual technologies such as photography, cinema, and video, one can distinguish two major perspectives: “horizontal” and “vertical.” The horizontal orientation is set at “ground level” and is concerned with “the advance or retreat of sightlines and perspectives along the terrestrial expanse of the earth.” The “vertical,” or “aerial,” orientation is concerned with “looking downward rather than sideways.” The vertical dimension is in origin an optic of surveillance and command: “Mapping changes and discovering patterns, the objective was to understand what moves (troops? construction materials?), how it moves, and how that movement can be intercepted or exploited.” It adds to our visual experience “an orientation that is somehow ultimately not ‘for us’” but rather is “the perspective of a militarized, machinic surround,” an eye involved in “positioning, tracking, identifying, predicting, targeting, and intercepting/containing.”
In 2005 Pandemic had joined with the Canadian video game company BioWare to create a new “superdeveloper” studio, a $300 million deal financed by the venture capital firm Elevation Partners (Thorsen 2005a). One of the main investors was U2’s front man and celebrity activist, Bono. Shortly after the formation of the new company, Pandemic announced a new game, Mercenaries 2: A World in Flames, a game that follows soldiers of fortune as they topple a “power hungry tyrant” who “messes with Venezuela’s oil supply” (Mercenaries 2, 2007). Responding to that obvious allusion to the troubled relationship of the United States with Venezuela’s socialist leader Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan Solidarity Network (2006) wrote a letter to Bono, pointing out Pandemic’s FSW connection to the Pentagon, criticizing the anti-Venezuelan propaganda of Mercenaries, and petitioning him to use his influence to cancel the game: “Our concern is that this game will only deepen an already antagonistic relationship between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. Millions of Venezuelans fear an invasion from the U.S.; knowing that a company that works for the U.S. military has created a game in which their country is completely destroyed will increase those concerns.” These concerns were echoed by a Venezuelan congressman, who said, “I think the U.S. government knows how to prepare campaigns of psychological terror so they can make things happen later” (cited in BBC 2006a). Pandemic, apparently feeling a little liberated from even putative military authenticity, shook off the objections, saying, “One of the key reasons Venezuela was chosen for the setting of Mercenaries 2 is that it is a fascinating and colorful country, full of wonderful architecture, geography and culture” (cited in Buncombe 2006). Despite the furor over the funding of FSW, on November 20, 2004, the U.S. Army awarded ICT a new five-year, $100 million contract.
Full Spectrum Warrior also has a context beyond the institutional linkages we have described. Here we return to the notion of full-spectrum dominance and the role of the banalization of war within that. Implicit in this doctrine is an understanding of war as a project with not only military but also ideological and political dimensions. Maintaining an imperial populace’s will to fight is as important as battlefield dominance. In a U.S. context, this is reflected in neo-conservative determination to cure the so-called Vietnam syndrome of peacenik disaffection to which the country’s historic humiliation in Southeast Asia is ascribed. From this point of view, whatever the success or failure of simulators such as FSW in preparing soldiers for Baghdad, their role in habituating civilians to perpetual war may be as, or more, important.
The boundary between the barracks and the living room is thus imploding, and we enter the war on terror version of what Deleuze (1992) called “the society of control.” Hatred toward an officially designated enemy, triumph in his death, or at least indifference toward its necessity, vigilance against his wiles, acceptance of casualties in the course of struggle, uncritical loyalty for “our side,” and so on, all become values promulgated across a wide social bandwidth, on a full spectrum, from the president’s podium to daily news reports. In the era of the war on terror, this is the situation in the heartlands of Empire.
In this setting, games such as FSW generate subjectivities that tend to war. They prompt not atrocities of gothic delinquency but displays of loyal support for “staying the course.” Their virtualities are part of a wider polyphonic cultural chorus supporting militarization, a multimedia drumbeat for war. Dissonance is still possible: tens of millions marched in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, we cannot forget. But the battle song is loud. FSW contributes to the broader banalization of war by promoting uncritical identification with imperial troops; by rotely celebrating the virtue of their cause and the justice of their activities; by routinizing the extermination of the enemy; by diminishing the horrors of battle and exalting its spectacle; by forming subjects of, and for, armed surveillance; by investing pleasurable affect in military tactics and strategy; and by making players material partners in, and beneficiaries of, military techno-culture. Virtual involvement of civilian populations in actual imperial war makes military games a home-front component of full-spectrum dominance. “Don’t bring out the General in you!” warned Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 24–25). As one of the developers of Full Spectrum Warrior said of this game, however: “The bumper sticker version is, ‘Everyone’s a general’” (cited in Silberman 2004).
Both Under Ash and Under Siege are made by the Damascus-based Afkar Media, a subsidiary of the Syrian publishing company Dar El Fikr. Commentators have remarked on the similarity of these games to Full Spectrum Warrior (see Frasca 2005; Ghattas 2002; Oliver 2004a), but the games’ author, Radwan Kasmiya, rejects the comparison, saying that players will be able to “tell the difference between a history game based on lives of real people trying to survive ethnic cleansing and a political propaganda that is trying to inject morals in future marines to justify their assaults on nations far away from their homeland” (cited in Oliver 2004b).
Hardt and Negri’s analysis of Empire retains its cogency on a central point: a global capitalism with “no outside” is unable to control the technologies that uphold its supremacy. The fears aroused by “weapons of mass destruction” and nuclear proliferation in Iran and elsewhere register a dawning awareness of this situation. The seizure of the digital by militant jihadis demonstrates the same dynamic. The powers that created Full Spectrum Warrior to train soldiers to fight shadowy, nameless, faceless opponents—“the Tangos”—in the dusty streets of strange cities confront a dreadful reality: the Tangos have got game.
To do justice to the likely destination of such projects takes comic book writers such as Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman (2007), who in their brilliant graphic novel about militarized regimes, Shooting War, envisage an Iraq war ongoing in 2011, where U.S. forces include the “Tenth Infantry Division Remote Battlefield Operations,” running miniature tanks controlled by a roomful of cubicled adolescents on “PS4s.” One has only to imagine the encounter between such forces and jihadis trained on their own game-derived simulators to see the war on terror for what it is—a death match between Empire and theocracy in which most of the planet’s population loses.
The concept of biopower is used by Michel Foucault to describe regimes that administer and discipline “life itself” (1990, 143). Such regimes, he says, emerged some three hundred years ago with the rise of the modern state. Previously, feudal sovereigns had based their power on coercive force, spectacular torture, and the threat of death. But beginning in the eighteenth century, an increasingly rationalized government apparatus emphasized its powers to organize and sustain social existence—“to foster life or disallow it” (138).
Foucault identifies two types of biopower. The first, a micro-biopower, involves an “anatomo-politics” of optimizing, extorting, and disciplining bodies, for example, by drill in barracks, labor in factories, or constraint in prisons (139). The second, a macro-biopower, is “situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race and the large-scale phenomena of population” (137). It focuses on “propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary” (139). The establishment of clinics and hospitals, the eugenic management of heredity, and official codifications of race and sexuality are all instances of a power “bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them,” one that “endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulation” (136, 137).
Foucault broke sharply with classical Marxism’s focus on the factory, but he emphasized that “bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism” (140–41). The era in which the rationalized administration of populations began was precisely that of capital’s founding moment. As Foucault observes, “The exercise of biopower makes possible the adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit” (141).
Choices about a character’s race and class do shape “the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces … its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls” (Foucault 1990, 139).
The astounding scale of this project is documented in the film Manufactured Landscapes (2007), featuring the photographs of Edward Burtynsky, whose images of China’s city-block-sized factories, decapitated mountains, moonscapes of waste, and ancient neighborhoods overwhelmed by proliferating skyscrapers convey the gargantuan transformation more vividly than any analytic account. Nonetheless some of its elements can quickly be enumerated: the dismantling of communal agriculture, triggering huge migrations from rural areas to cities; the establishment, often on abandoned agricultural land, of new industries, such as the electronics assembly nexus in the Pearl River; megaprojects such as the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam, whose construction displaced between one and two million people and whose reservoir is so large that, as it is filled, the earth momentarily wobbles on its axis (Manufactured Landscapes 2007); and the formation of a whole new set of cultural norms, habits, and proclivities among a freshly minted urban consuming class. This is indeed an exercise of power “at the level of population as a whole,” complete with panoptic surveillance and a disciplinary security apparatus to repress the many unrests it engenders.
Insofar as Azeroth has an actual referent, it is presumably to the archaic societies on whose myths and legends it draws for its heroes, ogres, and dragons. In such premodern, precapitalist societies, resource allocations were organized around familial or feudal obligation, barter, and plunder. Markets and money, though not completely absent, occupied a minor role. Yet “neofeudal” MMOs tend to be dominated by market exchange (Stern 2002). Barter is possible and looting important, but virtual currencies—gold in WoW, platinum in EverQuest, adena in Lineage—are, by virtue of their convenient convertibility, at the core of economic activity, vital for acquiring goods, such as weapons, armor, or spells. The supremacy of this “play money” (Dibbell 2006) is, it should be emphasized, not something that affects only the venal or acquisitive player: it shapes the whole game ambience. For example, underequipped players cannot participate successfully in raids and other groupings or reciprocate favors or demonstrate generosity, so that even those who play mainly for the social aspects of the game are drawn into a web of market transactions. The wealth of Azeroth, its Nightstalker Daggers, Helms of Wrath, Earthstorm Diamonds, Ogremind Rings, Black War Steeds, and Moonglade Raimants, presents itself to the player as “an immense collection of commodities” (Marx 1867, 125).
In MMOs that include player versus player (PvP) options, farmers may “kill” those who intrude on their operations. Farming enterprises also increasingly use automated programs—“farmbots”—to scour game worlds, gathering gold or salable items without human monitoring, turning virtual communities into resource-extraction sites for acquisitive roving game golems.
Alexander Galloway (2006b) has suggested that the mythopoeic universe of WoW can be seen as a nostalgic “utopia for the before,” imagining life “before capitalism.” This surely explains much of the promise of Blizzard’s games and other “neomedieval” MMOs (Stern 2002). But it neglects the extreme betrayal of that promise in the actual unfolding of these digital universes. The controversy over gold farming displays the dystopian realities of social existence so saturated by commodification that it is impossible to escape even in play. WoW’s gold-farming crisis is a symptom of hyper-subsumption. “Subsumption” is a term used by Marx (1867) to describe the way capitalism gradually envelops the entire social environment, extending itself from the workplace into ever-expanding areas of culture, changing life habits, consumption practices, political practices, and interpersonal relations, creating what autonomists term “the social factory” (see Negri 1991; Vercellone 2007b) and making capitalism a fully Foucauldian regime of biopower. MMOs carry this process into virtual worlds. By recapitulating the accumulative structures of consumer capitalism within the archaic dream worlds of MMOs, game companies unleashed a profit-taking dynamic that exceeded their grasp. They let loose a viral, molecular microcommercialization that both destabilizes publisher control of game economies and threatens the communal ambience on which these games depend. Instead of the military-industrial complex, WoW gives us the Alliance-Horde gold-farming complex.
In the conclusion to his study of “synthetic worlds,” Castronova (2005a, 274) expresses the conventional concern about MMOs—that such games will become so attractive that people will steadily abandon quotidian actuality to addictively sojourn in virtual fantasy. Perhaps so; but is this more disturbing than the converse possibility: that virtualities such as WoW will increasingly coincide with the actuality of Empire’s biopolitical regime—a game of chimeras, populated by cyborgs, governed by capital?
Neoliberalism is a central concept in radical analysis of contemporary geopolitical power: Hardt and Negri (2000, 313) speak of the “neoliberal project of global capital”; Retort (2005, 14) of “military neoliberalism”; and David Harvey (2007, 2, 1) of “an emphatic turn towards neoliberalism” remaking “the world around us in a totally different image.” The “neoliberal doctrine,” Harvey explains, rests on a belief that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2007, 2). Often introduced by violent “shock” rather than electoral choice (Klein 2007), this doctrine consolidated politically in the 1980s through the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Reagan and institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. Familiar components of neoliberal policy include the privatization of state-owned industries, the reduction of social programs, the orientation of the state toward ensuring a “frictionless” business climate, the enhancement of trade and international capital mobility, the deregulation of industry, the lowering of corporate taxes, the assault on organized labor, and the elevation of entrepreneurialism to a higher ideal. Under neoliberalism, in other words, the imperatives of capitalism are almost completely unleashed—which ensures an extraordinarily volatile and, many argue, unsustainable socioeconomic order.
Critical geographers argue that the metropolis is an especially intense site of neoliberalism. What Neil Brenner and his coauthors (2005) call “neoliberal urbanism” is characterized by the evolution of the entrepreneurial city, with deindustrialization and budgetary cutbacks from national governments “forcing” cities to think more like businesses maximizing their competitiveness through revitalization initiatives, private-sector partnerships, and place-marketing strategies (see Harvey 2001). Cities are increasingly subsumed by the rule of capital, with business interests integrated into local policy and development, and the “creation of new spaces of elite/corporate consumption” (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2005). This is accompanied by deepening spatial segregation, marked by, on one side, “gated communities, urban enclaves and other ‘purified’ spaces of social reproduction” and, on the other, the marginalization of the urban poor. These “polarizing consequences” stoke fear of crime and a law-and-order agenda promoting “new strategies of social control, policing, and surveillance.” “The overarching goal” of neoliberal urbanism “is to mobilize city space as an arena for both market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices, while at the same time securing order and control among ‘underclass’ populations” (11). This dual goal reflects capitalism’s “uneven geographical development,” a contradictory dynamic that reveals itself within cities and across the planet as a whole in the accumulation of wealth in one area as poverty flourishes in another (see Harvey 2001, 2007).
Paul Barrett (2006), in a study of how neoliberalism suffuses GTA, calls attention to the respective roles of market and state in its ludic universe.3 Within GTA, he says, “the state has absolutely no presence aside from a carceral role,” and “other than the police, the military, the ATF and other similarly violent, disciplinary organizations … is completely vacant from the game.” In the main action, there is, as Barrett says, nothing “remotely resembling a democratic, public state … no government representatives and no larger social institutions through which to pursue any sort of assistance” (104–5).4 Vercetti is, in keeping with neoliberalism’s preference, a self-reliant economic subject, and the city, the setting of dense commercial networks, formal and informal, is the optimum place to perform that self-reliance. In contrast to the diminished state presence, the market reigns supreme in Vice City: “not only does the player earn money for completing tasks, but there are a wide range of shops and malls in which the player can spend that money” (105). GTA is a ludic fulfillment of “the neoliberal dream in which the market becomes the apparatus around which all institutions are organized.”
Vice City constructs a virtual town in which urban space is defined first and foremost as a venue of profit extraction, networking is the path to commercial success, and consumption is the dominant reward system. There is, simply, no countervailing logic. As Barrett observes, GTA “does an excellent job of representing a ‘pure’ neoliberal order, as any form of collective social responsibility is subordinate to the profit motive and market law” (105). So, paradoxically, Vice City may depict a deviant criminal subculture, but the game works through the habitual logic of the dominant order.
bell hooks (1995), reviewing Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, observes that the director “makes that shit [sexism, racism, oppression] look so ridiculous you think everybody’s gonna get it and see how absurd it all is. Well, that’s when we enter the danger zone. Folks be laughing at the absurdity and clinging to it nevertheless.”
GTA is a cynical game that simultaneously satirizes, indulges, and normalizes individual hyperpossessiveness, racialized stereotypes, and neoliberal violence in a self-cancellation that allows these elements to remain intact, a structure that is, in a very precise way, conservative. This cynicism makes GTA undoubtedly complex, and certainly more ambivalent and interesting than, say, the unabashed affirmations of imperial power in Full Spectrum Warrior. The world city that most fully actualizes Rockstar’s vision of ferociously violent, ethnically segregated gang war is American-occupied Baghdad. It is no wonder a marine records his urban experience in Iraq in the following terms: “I was thinking just one thing when we drove into that ambush … Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of the windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was fucking cool” (cited in Wright 2005).
The multitude is the social force that is at once the motor and the antagonist, the engine and the enemy, of Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004). It can be defined in three different but connected ways.
First, the multitude refers to new forms of subjectivity (Hardt and Negri 2000, 195–97; Virno 2004, 75–93). It is based in emergent individual and collective human capacities, the fresh ways of producing, communicating, and cooperating that global capital requires to run its vast and complex Empire. The example central to our topic is the technological and cultural know-how energizing immaterial industries such as the video game business, though there are also other, and not unrelated, instances, such as the cosmopolitan literacies of the massive mobile migrant labor flows integral to the world economy. Capital needs and, up to a point, fosters these new ways of being human. Empire is, however, a thoroughly ambivalent system. To use an old metaphor from Marx and Engels (1848, 85–86), capital is like the sorcerer’s apprentice, conjuring up forces it cannot fully control. Multitudinous subjectivity is not only technically astute and culturally creative but also potentially subversive because its skills, aptitudes, and desires exceed the uses to which Empire tries to confine them.
This takes us to a second manifestation of the multitude—new movements opposing global capital (see Notes from Nowhere 2003 for an overview). Hardt and Negri’s main theme is the way Empire’s subjects refuse to submit to its bottom-line logic. Despite all the apparent victories of the world market, time and again resistances to the total monetization of social relations and the primacy of profit erupt. Because corporate power has enveloped society so completely, there are myriad points around which insurgencies spring up: the environment, citizenship status, housing, employment, education, public space, art, and media. Grassroots mobilizations against corporate globalization from the jungles of Chiapas to the streets of Quebec City, international resistance to the invasion of Iraq, the struggles of nonstatus people, and the wave of ecological activism around global warming are all instances of a multitude contesting Empire.
Such movements open up a third dimension of the multitude—a capacity not only to resist Empire but also to develop, protect, and propose alternatives. Hardt and Negri (2000, 400) say the “political project” of the multitude is nothing less than constituting a world other than that of global capital. They have been—fairly—criticized for not providing a full account of this large task. But they do sketch some elements of a program: a “global citizenship”; the right to a social wage and a guaranteed income for all; and free access to, and control over, “knowledge, information, communication and affects” (396–407). Of particular importance to our discussion is the importance they give to wresting control of the means of communication away from capital. The “indymedia” of the counterglobalization movement, with their famous slogan “Don’t hate the media, become the media,” are a key expression of the multitude’s “powerful desire for global democracy” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 305).
When all three dimensions of the multitude—subjective capacity, social movement, political project—coalesce, Hardt and Negri suggest they become a utopian arrow, pointing to a possible future life beyond Empire.
Retort’s point that contemporary spectacular life is a “self-administered reality” (2005, 187): subjects already deeply immersed in a commodified and militarized regime are provided the means to animate, elaborate, refine, and extend their own commodification and militarization, all the while having empowerment-through-interactivity trumpeted in their ears by acolytes of corporate power. People no longer just view wartime capital “accumulated to the degree that it becomes images” (Debord 1967, para. 34) but insert themselves into this image, labor at its accumulation, as its self-spectacularizing cocreators (see Wark 2007, para. 111). This is not a break with spectacle. It is an ever-deeper affective and intellectual investment in it.
Twenty years ago, Bill Nichols, in his study of “the work of culture in an age of cybernetic reproduction,” suggested that video games had an emancipatory aspect that arose from the gamer experience of “seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole,” engaged in an activity where one’s individual activity was “regulated at higher levels to conform to predefined constraints” (1987, 112–13). In Nichols’s view, this was an engagement with “the set of systemic principles governing order itself.” This insight into the constructed, rule-governed nature of systems had, he argued, a liberatory potential to give an intuitive glimpse of “the relativism of social order.”
A decade later, Ted Friedman (1995, 1999), drawing on the work of game designers such as Will Wright and Chris Crawford, elaborated this theme of play as systems cognition. Digital games, Friedman wrote, require players to reorganize their perceptions to perceive “complex interrelationships,” whether of spatial geometry in Tetris or urban planning in SimCity. In the latter case, “the result, once the game is over and you step outside, is a new template with which to interpret, understand and cognitively map the city around you.” Friedman takes the term “cognitive mapping” from the Marxian theorist Fredric Jameson (1991), who argues that under globalized capital—what we have been calling Empire—a prerequisite for oppositional movements is “an aesthetics of cognitive mapping, a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.” Friedman explicitly builds on Jameson’s concept to suggest that “playing a simulation means to become engrossed in a systemic logic that connects a myriad array of causes and effects. The simulation acts as a kind of map-in-time, visually and viscerally (as the player internalizes the game’s logic) demonstrating the repercussions and interrelatedness of many different social decisions” (1995, 86). He goes on to make the politically radical implications explicit by observing that while the hopes of the Soviet revolutionary avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein to make a film of Marx’s Capital were doomed to be frustrated by the narrative conventions of Hollywood, “A computer game based on Das Kapital, on the other hand, is easy to imagine” (86).
Alexander Galloway builds on Friedman’s work when he observes that “the gamer is not simply playing this or that historical simulation” but instead is “learning, internalizing and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system” (2006a, 90–91). He suggests that this makes the “problem of political control … coterminous with the entire game. … Video games achieve a unique type of political transparency” (92). Ian Bogost’s (2006a) suggestion that digital play is driven by a “simulation fever”—the gap between a game’s source-systems logic and the gamer’s subjective understanding of that logic—points to a similar dynamic.
Circulating between the metaverse and the mines is, of course, the money. At the end of the writing of this book, Empire was dealt a blow—and perhaps a boost—in the form of a financial crisis of a magnitude that is eliciting comparisons to the Great Depression. The fiscal meltdown is obviously a blow to global capitalism, because some of its largest corporate entities vaporized, and serious, potentially fatal doubt has been cast on casino-style commerce. Yet, less obviously, it may ultimately prove a boost, because massive devaluation of assets clears the decks for the renewal of accumulation, as national leaders of many of the world’s largest economies speak of the need for a properly global (read: imperial) regulatory architecture for the financial system in the hope of lending it an extended lease on life.
there is the gloomy likelihood that the financial crisis will, sooner rather than later, exact a cost on the games industry (Kalning 2008). Some observed that the credit crunch would make it harder for independent developers to access the all-important advance monies that fund prototyping and production—the risky ventures that often generate the most-experimental games. At the bigger studios, an environment of uncertainty, some commentators predicted, would lead to an even stronger “focus on known profit-generators (i.e., sequels) and less on innovative … projects” (Erickson 2008). Others noted that, after a long stretch of employment expansion, the major publishers, like EA, and midsized developers, like Avalanche, were laying off workers by the hundreds (Erickson 2008). Whether the financial crisis was the catalyst of the firings or just a timely explanation for long-planned corporate restructuring was a matter of some dispute (Gaither and Pham 2008). Still others noted that game consoles are costly consumer machines, and as working people are forced to tighten their belts, the console market may expand more slowly, undermining growth across the industry.
In his Empire of Indifference, Randy Martin (2007) links the informatic risk management strategies of war and finance capital. Video games are part of this conjugation. Their golden age was the time not only of Reagan’s first-strike nuclear options but also of deregulated banking, junk bonds, debt escalation, and stock market populism. Making a financial play is a perennial theme of early video and computer games: Wall Street Kid, Inside Trader, Wall Street Raider, Speculator: The Futures Market Game, and Black Monday all gamed actual investment practices that were themselves becoming virtualized as global money circulated in networks second in sophistication only to the Pentagon’s. On one side, these games blend seamlessly with software tools abetting the “financialization of daily life” (Martin 2002): as Atari created its hits, it also made “Bond Analysis” and “Stock Charting” (see Kaltman 2008). On the other flank, these trading games form a continuum with the commercial empire-building tycoon play genre; with the world of The Sims, where consumption proceeds divorced from work in the perfect virtual parable for the invested classes of long-boom America; and with the fully monetized economies of MMOs built around the fictive capital of digital platinum, gold, and Linden dollars. It is, we suggest, no coincidence that in the early twenty-first century, “virtual trading” means both online stock market speculation and the buying and selling of digital game goods.
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