Play and Consumption

My apologies for the lateness of this blogpost. That is, assuming it is late; since time is a subjective and social construct, your forgiveness would of course reposition it temporally as right on time. Anyway, instead of presenting any coherent argument about this week’s readings, I’d like to gesture at what I see as a potentially fruitful relationship, between theorists of spatiotemporal consumption practices and the nascent field of game studies.

This week’s readings regularly made use of terms familiar to games scholars, such as play, game, ritual, avatar, simulation, competition, and rules. Urry described postmodern landscapes as “simulated spaces which are there for consumption” (21), a fitting description of videogames and virtual worlds. Bauman wrote about the social use of shared rules (21) and avatars (22), how society has become just another player, “as erratic as all players are” (23), and the desire of tourists to escape from the routines, hazards, confusions, and uncertainties of daily life (26); all of these themes are, in one way or another, familiar to game players and scholars. Canclini talks about how rituals and competition both help groups select and pin down the meanings that govern their lives (39), and how the thought-facilitating potentials of consumption often go unrecognized, due to the conflation of consumption and the “supposedly free… game of market laws” (45). And Ritzer and Liska frame contemporary vacations in a decidedly game-like way, as highly predictable, efficient, calculable, and controlled experiences (99-100), then discuss the social implications of “the coming of virtual reality,” and the increasingly common desire for simulation and the inauthentic in our tourist and leisure practices (107).

Games have lately become one of our most privileged leisure and tourist practices, and it’s no surprise that these theorists, to some extent, saw this coming. But it is a bit surprising that they so richly understood play and games. Though their discussions of play and games are certainly implicit and brief, undercurrents running beneath their theoretical foundations, they are nonetheless there, as decidedly current undercurrents. And I would argue that these currents need to merge more directly with games studies, and wash away some of the muddy thinking in games-related scholarship.

Games studies has, from its inception, neglected to deal with the practical implications of studying play—a radically subjective and free imaginative practice—and have instead focused upon specific aspects of commodity forms and consumable objects. Certainly, videogames are very often simulated spaces designed for consumption, and more specifically consumption distanced from its real world spatial analogues, so this focus is not inherently a problem. But as the readings from this week show us, consumption is itself an imaginative, playful practice, which necessarily involves critical thinking, subjective distance, and real freedom. It is because of this that (as several of the readings point out) we must constantly be trained and retrained, at great cost, to think and act like good consumers. To study games as commodity objects is, then, to misunderstand the nature of consumption.

If instead we could understand videogames as imagined spaces defined through consumer practices, we might then be capable of positioning play at the center of our analyses of games without subverting those analyses entirely. The potential for subversion is always a part of both play and consumerism, as our readers recognize. The question which follows such recognition, and which I'd pose to games scholars, is: where do we locate such subversion, in relation to the "videogame" as commodity form?