Games

Finite and infinite games

From the book by this title, finite games are played according to rules in order to win. Infinite games are played according to rules but also by changing the rules, and the purpose is to keep the game going, precisely to prevent anyone from ultimately winning.

Is democracy an infinite game and fascism a finite one? Fascists want to win, to dominate their opponent, while democrats want to keep the game of self-determination going.

Games often look a lot like work

Steven Poole points out the irony of the phrase “beat the game,”

From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play.

Poole goes on to cite Adorno and Horkheimer on how games (especially the video games which came after Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique) don’t just have aspects of work to them but, in Poole’s words, “replicate the structure of a repetitive dead-end job”:

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.

How, in my experience, such games replicate industrial labor:

• “grinding” is repetitive, usually in service of collecting some raw materials to either sell for currency or as inputs for “crafting” some item or commodity. The game could easily give players the desired item or let them find it as the result of an adventure, why do we like games that make us perform industrial labor to obtain them?
• Games often mimic capitalist growth: you work to obtain more resources which are deployed in the service of further growth to obtain still more resources, etc. There are countless more interesting archetypes for stories, why should this one be so compelling?

This seems related to desire: such games give you something to want_—a high score, a fancy sword, an achievement— and a way to get it. I find such games most appealing when I’m otherwise frustrated in life and work, when I _want to want something achievable. And games like this are most compelling when the things they make you want form a ladder. For example, they make me want the level-1 sword so I can defeat the level-1 boss and get its level-2 key to enter the level-2 dungeon for the level-2 sword to defeat the level-2 boss, and so on. It’s running on the hedonic treadmill for fun.