What type of person, with what type of politics, plays a game like EVE Online—a hardware-intensive MMO, with simulation-like mechanics, effectively about space colonization and the free market, and with a massive player base organized on Reddit and Discord—in the first place?
For an example of the bizarre, impossible-to-parse, often paradoxical politics of videogames, look no further than 2023’s viral hit: Dookie Dash. Advertised as a “skill-based NFT-minting game” and developed by Yuga Labs (whose series of “Bored Ape” images were, for a few unfortunate weeks, the online profile pictures of all the worst people you know), the premise of Dookie Dash might be even dumber than it sounds. Gameplay-wise, it is an endless runner in the vein of mobile hits like Subway Surfers, except for that in order to start the game, players must own a Yuga Labs NFT. The player controls an underwater motorbike and navigates procedurally generated sewer pipes, at the end of which is a key stuck inside one of the Bored Ape’s buttholes. The key, a prize for the player with the highest Dookie Dash score at the end of its month-long playable window, was also, of course, an NFT.
Ridiculous ideas and blatantly predatory consumer behavior aside, Dookie Dash was a hit. Everyone from streaming influencers to journalists to everyday consumers flocked to it, if only to be in on the joke. Meta-messaging about the (literal) shittiness of NFTs and crypto culture aside, Yuga Labs cashed out on Dookie Dash’s buzz—the game allegedly netted them over $60 million and the Golden Key NFT awarded to the high-score-holder was reportedly sold for $1.6 million.
The politics of Yuga Labs, yet another tech startup proselytizing Web3 bullshit, willing to compare their own product to literal shit in the pursuit of a buzzy marketing campaign, are clear. But what is it about the culture of gaming at large, which loves a crude joke almost as much as it loves a new technological gimmick, that not only gave a crypto con job like Dookie Dash a platform, but let it become a phenomenon?
That’s precisely the aim of videogames scholar and leftist organizer Marijam Did, whose new book Everything to Play For bills itself as a broad (rather than deep) look into the rapidly evolving material politics of gaming. That the antics of tech-adjacent companies like Yuga Labs are more important, and sinister, than they might initially appear is a big part of the argument the book is trying to make. As Did puts it in the book’s introduction: “in order to imagine a new kind of politics in videogames and the way they are marketed, perceived, and critiqued, we must first reflect on the modes of production.” Everything from workplace culture to physical extraction of raw materials, in Did’s conception, trickles down into both the contents and cultural reception to games themselves.
One of the assumptions at the core of Everything to Play For is that the right has had much more success than the left in finding not just an audience but an ideological foothold—conservatism for the online age–in videogame culture. Looming large over all the arguments formulated in the second half of the book is “Gamergate,” the mid-2010s online campaign against so-called “forced diversity” in gaming that, as Did tells it, informed not just the future of online discourse but of right-wing rhetoric as a whole. Gamergaters protest diversity and progressive themes in games as “political” and wish for a return to how the industry used to be (adolescent, violent, white, and male). As Did puts it, “the ‘leave politics out of our games’ crowd was, indeed, highly politicized.” This crowd’s tactics range from “review-bombing” to Twitter campaigns and offline attacks like doxxing. Did talks about how the self-righteous, meme-inflected language of Gamergate found itself beyond the world of gaming and into the manifestos of several mass shooters and, eventually, the rhetoric of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
Yet right when Did seems on the cusp of making a meaningful point about the connection between gaming culture and the Right’s populist reinvention, she changes topics. This frustrating lack of depth stems from the book’s form—Did explicitly describes the book as a primer or survey, as the sort of thing she could imagine one day being handed out on a freshman syllabus. But the flipside of this is that the book’s many arguments are rarely synthesized into anything more interesting. After a sixty-plus–page history lesson, the book jumps from topic to topic without ever really giving the reader any space to breathe. There are some pages on Gamergate, then some on race and gender representation, then on misguided attempts on turning games into “edu-tainment.” The most interesting sections—and the ones that seem the most important to Did—are the ones explicitly about production: weaving together programming, crunch culture, conglomeration and the rare earth metals industry. Yet besides repeatedly arguing for meaningful labor organization—as valuable of a first foothold for the left as any—the book reads more like a laundry list of issues than a work actively seeking solutions.
Videogames themselves draw from elements of everything from Silicon Valley entrepreneur-speak to sports fandom to highbrow art to Hollywood movies to toymaking. Yet while all those scenes and industries may be complacent in some shaky politics—outsourced factory manufacturing, writers’ strikes, jingoistic soccer fans—it is important to remember that most everyday fans are oblivious to these processes to even campaign actively to apply (progressive) pressure on companies whose products they otherwise love. Consumers’ tastes are not their political leanings. They buy and use products whose utility and aesthetics appeal to them. It becomes the job of industry actors—designers, publishers, marketing teams, and even journalists—to make the means of production, the human costs, either visible or deliberately not.
Did, not for lack of trying, often misses this. For every analysis she offers of games like EVE Online, where huge groups of online players have organized “guerilla warfare” to redistribute in-game wealth, she glosses over something just as important. What type of person, with what type of politics, plays a game like EVE Online—a hardware-intensive MMO, with simulation-like mechanics, effectively about space colonization and the free market, and with a massive player base organized on Reddit and Discord—in the first place? Did spends pages and pages on questions of labor, manufacturing, organization, representation, and distribution. But very little ink is spilled on what will be most gamers’ own entry point to these politics: the content and the aesthetics of the games themselves.
There are some exceptions to this blind spot. In a section critiquing the predatory workplace culture that can be present in the independent games’ worlds, where a sense of “doing it for the art” can spiral into even worse working conditions than the AAA space she connects these practices to the prevalence of so-called “cozy games.” Kickstarted by farming titles like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing’s success in crossing over to non-gaming audiences, this fad has spawned increasingly bizarre games offering cutified digital work, something with which to turn your mind off after real work. These range from the “simulators” (Trucking, Power Washing) the business-management titles (Cozy Grove, Dave the Diver), and oh-so-many farming-lite Stardew Valley clones. Yet while this new strain of games has found meaningful success catering to a new (read: female) audience, Did articulates how the cutesy, wholesome aesthetic obscures that these titles, just like the aggressively violent ones, are increasingly produced on crunch schedules with funding from less-than-desirable investors. Despite the sense that indie developers are doing “good work,” that work usually comes with less pay, less stability, and the expectation developers have to double as marketing teams, too.
Did makes a similar point about the world of competitive gaming. Esports are huge—in 2021, the Dota 2 championship has a $40 million prize pool. Yet despite evidence that interest in esports is spreading beyond the hardcore scenes they developed in, Did points out how the atmosphere of the events—determined by game developers, sponsors, participants, and fans alike—ooze with last century’s notion of videogames as a teenage boys’ hobby. “The ruling aesthetic mimics those of non-digital sports,” she writes, “with an added layer of pubescent imitation of a man cave.” Yet embedded in that lack of imagination is something even more harmful. Did tells of manipulative advertisements from crypto and energy drink companies, widespread abuse of stimulants like Vyvanse and Ritalin, and how despite superficial diversity initiatives, these companies are still turning around and taking money from governments and financial investors with opposite agendas. As she puts it: “For an entertainment strand so varied and so full of distinctive personalities and traditions, it is regrettable to see it reduced to a hyper-capitalist image of heavy electronic music, energy drinks, booth babes, and adverts, adverts, adverts.”
In a recent issue of Granta, the critic Christian Lorentzen challenged the sociological approaches to contemporary literature articulated in books like Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) and Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (2023). These books and others work to map the encroachment of neoliberal commercial culture into the publishing industry, a process that these critics argue shapes the content of published books themselves. And yet Lorentzen’s objection to these books’ commercially informed analysis is refreshingly simple: he calls it “the dullest possible way to read,” and that when class-conscious critics let these ideas get in the way of actually experiencing the art in front of them, “it amounts to a distracting narcissism, looking in the mirror when [their] eyes should be on the page.” In books and beyond, Lorentzen’s warning not to lose the purpose of art in the disorienting swirl of commerce is a valuable one. It’s certainly one that Did could have used. For all her (valuable) materialist critiques of abusive industry practices, of corporate-mandated misguided swings at diversity, of connections between gamers and defense contractors and military groups, Everything to Play For has next to no critical analysis of games themselves.
Since the right has proven so successful at mobilizing support about everything external in the world of gaming— “forced diversity,” an obsession with gimmicky tech, and kids who grow up loving guns—the left needs to find a foothold elsewhere in the culture: the art itself. An aesthetic foothold, rather than an ideological one, attuned to why an increasingly large proportion of the global population plays some sort of videogame every day.
If Did is so concerned about the industry’s cannibalistic obsession with new tech and progress, why does she not see the rise of throwback genre sensibilities—so-called “boomer shooters” like the Doom and Quake reboots as well as dozens of independent projects—as an aesthetic step in the right direction? She describes how video arcades filled with fighting game cabinets were cracked down on in the 1990s as rowdy hangouts for urban teens, but does not draw the connection between fighting game culture and the evolution of scenes centered around twenty- and thirty- year old games like Street Fighter II or Super Smash Bros Melee. She is critical of how indie developers’ reputations can be used to take advantage of idealistic young programmers, but glosses over how despite these flaws, the mid-aughts wave of independent games truly revolutionized the creation, distribution, critical reception, and aesthetics of the form in ways still echoing today.
This, more than anything, is what is missing in Did’s conception of the gaming world as a potential site of progressive organizing: it lacks a vision of what a left(ish) aesthetic of games would actually look like. And this is doubly frustrating because a growing literature on this very topic already exists. In the last year alone, we have had A.V. Marraccini’s commitment to NPC quality of life in medieval city builder Manor Lords as well as Noah Caldwell Gervais’s similar take on the post-apocalyptic Frostpunk. Hanif Abdurraqib has grappled with his own past through replays of Red Dead Redemption, while Mason Andrew Hamberlin imagines a future where gaming does not have the connotation of being “antagonistic” to literary productivity—with each essay by these writers and hundreds more “cracking the door open a smidge more.”
Which is all to say that if videogames are, at their core, a medium about tapping into the imagination, affording players the ability to interface with a world in ways that books simply cannot, a true materialist critique would not begin and end with the development process. The critics above, meaningfully engaging and sitting with the content of games, even “problematic” ones, understand this. In contrast, Did’s industry-centric critique seems like it is missing half the picture. It is because of this unimaginative, not-quite-materialist lens that Everything to Play For falls flat even as it gestures toward a positive future. For every Dookie Dash—the sort of game whose existence can be boiled down to a history lesson and a crude joke—there are many more with the capacity to genuinely affect the people who play them. So, while Did’s concerns about unsustainable industry practices gobbling up raw materials and manpower alike are justified, it is important not to forget that some of the most meaningful power over what gets played, and how still lies with players.
Martin Dolan is Legal Aid coordinator by day and a freelance writer by night. He lives in upstate New York.
Thumbnail photo by Roger Ce on Unsplash