"Games" might not cover the interactive convergence in current entertainment media. But might it also be a new political realm as well?
Interesting commentary below from NYTimes’s On Tech with Shira Ovide newsletter:
Everyone is trying to get us to come out — or stay in — and play. Seriously. Peloton, Netflix, Zoom, TikTok, Amazon, Apple and Google are all either experimenting or going much bigger into video games. What’s going on?
The straightforward answer is that globally people already spend a lot of time and money on video games, and established game companies and newcomers alike are eyeing all sorts of interactive digital experiments to grab more of our time and money.
I’m excited for this development, even though my own avid video game playing ended in the era of BrickBreaker for the Blackberry. It feels as if we’re in the middle of reimagining both what a “video game” is and what online idle time can be — more engaging and social, perhaps, and a little less passive doomscrolling. (Or I might be reading too much into this. Yeah, it might just be about money.)
Whatever the motivation, games may soon feel inescapable. New features on Zoom include poker, trivia and mystery games. Peloton, the maker of expensive exercise bicycles, is releasing a game that allows people’s pedal power to command a rolling virtual wheel.
Netflix this week confirmed that it planned to add video games to its online entertainment service. Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, Apple and Google to varying degrees are pitching us video games or selling game subscriptions. (The New York Times is going bigger into digital games and puzzles, too.)
Video games are a big business that grew even bigger during the coronavirus pandemic, so it’s not surprising that more companies want a piece of the action. A recent report from Accenture estimated that global sales related to games are higher than the combined revenues from movies and music. Those figures include sales of conventional video games for computers and consoles, smartphone games, advertising in games and more.
Video games also have cultural relevance, as the Olympic organizers showed this week by featuring game music in the opening ceremony.
We may actually need to change our terminology because many new digital games are different from how we might traditionally define and imagine video games — those cinematic worlds of PlayStation or Xbox.
Just as smartphones introduced us to simpler games that capitalized on unique features of phones like gyroscopes and on-the-go internet connections, many newer games blur the lines between video games and other types of social activities. Pokémon Go, Fortnite and Among Us are video games, but they are also hangouts for friends, pop culture moments, opportunities for political organizing and more.
What’s thrilling about many of the newer game experiments is that they signal a move beyond a phase in which online and smartphone media often mirrored what came before — many podcasts were like talk radio, Netflix was like TV and online news outlets were like newspapers.
I know that games aren’t all stimulating paragons of human social connection, but it feels as if something exciting is happening. There’s more mushing together to arrive at new digital forms that emphasize interaction rather than passive reading, watching or listening.
We’re going to get more sophisticated games on the bleeding edge of technology and more stuff that doesn’t fit the video game box to challenge our minds, bodies and social interactions.
More here. It’s interesting that Ovide doesn’t mention the “metaverse” concept, which business theorists have been proposing for this convergence of games and other media forms (see our blog on this). Various superheroic “DC” or “Marvel” universes, with characters and storylines consistent across many devices and media, are the clear commercial beneficiaries.
But we have since the beginning of A/UK - see our 2018 Brighton sessions on the Politics of VR (here and here) - been interested in the world-building/prototyping potentials, and community-making powers, of digital realms. The NYT hopes that these convergences tilt us towards an active rather than passive relationship to media (though we are tickled to remember Zizek’s idea of “interpassivity” - our interactions with platforms kept within limits, by their conscious design).
Yet our civic migration to synthetic worlds, where the amount of time we spend there translates into economic citizenship, has been heralded for a while (one of us reviewing on it in the mid 2000s). Facebook’s failed attempt to introduce a currency into its interaction space, Libra, may well be completed by other platforms.
Digging into the Dominic Cummings’ effluvia this week - see our Alternative Editorial this week for a deeper dive - we found a recommendation by DC, backing up his idea of “different new network powers” as a coming political force. The Indian crypto-guru Balajis writes, in How To Start A New Country, about the various dissatisfactory ways to start a new country (secession, war, revolution, micronations, etc). “And finally we arrive at our preferred method: the cloud country”:
Our idea is to proceed cloud first, land last. Rather than starting with the physical territory, we start with the digital community. We recruit online for a group of people interested in founding a new virtual social network, a new city, and eventually a new country.
We build the embryonic state as an open source project, we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values.
Over time we eventually crowdfund territory in the real world, but not necessarily contiguous territory. Because an under-appreciated fact is that the internet allows us to network enclaves.
Put another way, a cloud community need not acquire all its territory in one place at one time. It can connect a thousand apartments, a hundred houses, and a dozen cul-de-sacs in different cities into a new kind of fractal polity with its capital in the cloud.
Over time, community members migrate between these enclaves and crowdfund territory nearby, with every individual dwelling and group house presenting an independent opportunity for expansion.
What we've described thus far is much like the concept of ethnic diasporas, which are internationally dispersed but connected by communication channels with each other and the motherland. The twist is that our version is a reverse diaspora: a community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online, and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.
In a sense you can think of each physical outpost of this digital community as a cloud embassy, similar to the grassroots Bitcoin embassies that have arisen around the world. New recruits can come to either the virtual or physical environment, beta test, and decide to leave or stay.
Now, with all this talk of embassies and countries one might well contend that cloud countries, like the aforementioned micronations, are also just a LARP (live action role-playing game).
Unlike micronations, however, they are set up to be a scaled LARP, a feat of imagination practiced by large numbers of people at the same time. And the experience of cryptocurrencies over the last decade shows us just how powerful such a shared LARP can be.
More here. This is, at the very least, beset with assumptions (for example, who exactly allows land to be surrendered to enclaves this way?).
But “alternatives” leap out everywhere from our broken political and economics norms. To sift through to the best of them, a variety have to be considered. The “game-verse”/”meta-verse”/”fractal polity” is worth pondering on.