Games Of Empire Research Articles

Unravelling Narratives of Empire in No Man’s Sky

Many scholars have looked at how players engage with games of Empire in ways that both reproduce and subvert capitalist-colonial narratives of resource accumulation, war, and conquest. This article examines the 2016 release of No Man’s Sky, and how the colonial conquest and resource gathering that are central to the gameplay quickly unravelled as players spent time with the game. Firstly, this article will explore how the release of No Man’s Sky initially replicated the myth of terra nullius, as well as an understanding of the environment as resources-in-waiting. This is contrasted with the fact that No Man’s Sky did not replicate the traditional triple-A structure of action, which leads the player to a playthrough that focuses on ‘bearing witness’ to the environment, rather than harvesting its resources to strengthen the player-character and progress through the game. However, major updates to No Man’s Sky fundamentally changed the player’s relationship to the game-world, further obscuring many of the moments of speculation that the initial release provided. This analysis demonstrates how games of Empire can create affective experiences that can inadvertently challenge the very narratives that they are enmeshed in. These moments are fleeting but provide a valuable insight into the role that games play in the crises of the Anthropocene.

Feminist and Furious: Diversity Work(ers) Against Game Studies of Empire!

This article builds on Games of Empire by centering the experiences of diversity workers in Game Studies of Empire. Our data were gathered through qualitative mixed methods of in-depth surveys and semi-structured interviews. Participants self-identified to be included in the study, all thinking critically through the definitions of “diversity,” “diversity work(er),” and “game studies.” Thus, this study reports on a tapestry of knowledge and experiences from the various educators and advocates of diversity across academia and the games industry. Diversity workers in Game Studies of Empire are often exploited by their affective attachment to diversity and perform significant unrecognized and uncompensated affective labor. Empire uses diversity workers to produce a quantifiable and tokenizable product of bodies and lived experiences that can be used to further profits for companies, universities, and other institutions. Diversity work(ers) against Game Studies of Empire unite! We will have nothing to lose when we become unchained.

GAMES OF EMPIRE TEN YEARS ON

The panel will retrospectively evaluate the significance of the seminal text Games of Empire (2009) for new media and game studies, reflecting on the contribution of autonomous Marxism to the study of digital culture today, as well as the methodological move it performed in tracing continuities and discontinuities between sites of production and play. Each paper will take one or two key concepts from the original book, including Empire, multitude, ideology, and cognitive capitalism, and apply them to the contemporary moment in the games sector. Our aim is to explore the strengths and limitations of these concepts, as well as identify the salient ways in which the sector has evolved over the last ten years. For example, we will examine efforts at unionisation in the sector; how gender and race have emerged as key concerns in the last few years in sites of game work; how apps are affecting the representation of capitalist and military systems; and how ‘multitude’ in the sector has assumed new forms in the wake of new distribution platforms. The panel will make a case for integrating social theory with the analysis of production cultures and textual practices, as well as situating the analysis of games within the field of new media and internet studies more broadly.

Politics of Production: Videogames 10 years afterGames of Empire

2019 marked ten years since the publication of Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire, which has become a seminal book in videogame cultural criticism. Ten years later, there is still a pressing need for cultural and materialist criticism of the politics of production within game studies. In putting together this special issue, our hope is to identify new developments in the game industry and academia that are emblematic of 21st-century capitalism. Just as Games of Empire popularised critical political-economic perspectives ten years ago, we encourage others, as the authors in this issue did, to continue and maintain investigations into questions of ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations and radical struggle. Such analyses are necessary not only to trace but also to open up new directions in game culture and academia for decades to come.

Hypermodern Video Games as Emblems of Empire or How the Gaming Multitude Adapts to Hypermodernity

To demonstrate how Games of Empire (Dyer-Witheford, N., & de Peuter, G. (2009). Games of empire. Global capitalism and video games, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota) elaborated an important standpoint within critical game studies, this article discusses the thesis that a specific type of video games perfectly converges with our contemporary modes of representation and praxis, which are best situated within the paradigm of hypermodernity (Lipovetsky, G. (1983). L’ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris. Gallimard, coll. «Folio essais»; Lipovetsky, G. & Charles, S. (2004). Les temps hypermodernes. Paris: Bernard Grasset, «Nouveau collège de philosophie»). Hypermodernity radicalizes modernity because, within hypermodernity, values such as progress, reason, and happiness are overly ( hyper) actualized rather than surpassed ( post) (Aubert, N. (2006) (dir). L’individu hypermoderne. Toulouse: Eres, coll. «Sociologie clinique»; Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press). Based on an archetypal account, that is, a theoretical model rather than a case study, this article will show how hypermodern video games' commercialization and use within a capitalist context are emblematic of hypermodernity. We will also evaluate how these games promote adaptation to hypermodernity toward an "ideal" becoming-player for Empire. In conclusion, if playing can be seen as the multitude's escape hatch out of the dominant order, this article will explain how hypermodern video games, as a media, may also be viewed as a key site where asymmetrical and unequal relationships replicate within Empire.

Postscript: Gaming While Empire Burns

Responding to a journal issue revisiting Games of Empire, this article begins by surveying the state of digital play amid a conjuncture of pandemic lockdown, anti-racism protest, and looming recession. We go on to address criticism of our book’s outlook on “games of multitude” in the face of the reactionary side of gaming culture expressed by Gamergate. We next outline elements of a research itinerary, were we to update our book’s project, including climate crisis, platform proliferation, organizing and organizations, and video gaming’s violent intersections. We conclude by reasserting the need to attend to emancipatory currents within—and against—game cultures. While gaming’s complicity in energy overconsumption and cultures of domination raises serious questions about its contribution to any postcapitalist future, the struggles that might bring us to this point will be waged by combatants whose subjectivities have been formed within the digital complexes of which gaming is now an integral part.

Game Workers and the Empire: Unionisation in the UK Video Game Industry

This article investigates some of the key debates that have emerged within the nascent union organising project Game Workers Unite, with a specific focus on its UK branch (GWU UK). The analysis is based on a period of participatory observation and a series of interviews with board members of GWU UK. This article evaluates Game Workers Unite (GWU) in relation to other recent attempts at unionising the game industry. It concludes that the strategies adopted to counter the hyper-visibility and individualisation of the game worker are key contributions of GWU in contemporary video game labour. This article draws on the work of Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) Games of empire: Global capitalism and video games to evaluate the historical specificity of GWU and the importance of the organisation for the contemporary video game industry.

Apps of Empire: Global Capitalism and the App Economy

This article interrogates Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter’s Games of Empire. Since its publication in 2009, the game industry evolved significantly, adding billions of players, dollars, and devices. One of the driving forces of this transformation has been the global diffusion of mobile media. This raises the question: Do mobile platforms and the app stores operated by Apple and Google allow for a radical departure from global hypercapitalism? This question will be explored by taking on three themes: shifts in labor, the political economy of platformization, and the capital-intensive mode of app production and circulation. Doing so addresses two gaps in Games of Empire’ s approach: a dearth of empirical economic analysis and the acknowledgment of work in critical platform studies and mainstream economics. It is concluded that rather than providing a staging ground for dissent or collective action, apps of empire signal the foreclosure of an exodus from global hypercapitalism.

White Masculinity, Creative Desires, and Production Ideology in Video Game Development

Game workers have a problem. They code values and ideologies into games, but they are either not aware of it or deny it. Through a constructive and critical engagement with Games of Empire, I propose the concept of “ludic religiosity” to reveal how white masculinity informs game workers’ professional discourses, technological practices, ludic desires, and imaginations. Drawing on three-year-long ethnographic research and in conversation with cultural studies, philosophy of technology, and postcolonial game studies, I revisit desiring machine and ideology, two major concepts from Games of Empire. My goal is to demonstrate the racialized and gendered discourses and practices behind game developers’ desire to produce cognitive capitalism’s “escapist” commodities and rethink ideology within white masculine production cultures. Foregrounding how racialized and gendered practices and imaginations inform the desire behind the global game industry is crucial, especially in the aftermath of Gamergate and the rise of authoritarianism.

The master’s digital tools: Cognitive capitalism and non-normative gaming practices

Abstract In Games of Empire. Global Capitalisms and Video Games (2009), Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter mobilize the concept of cognitive capitalism as central to the intimate intermeshing of the medium and the late capitalist business practices. Using this concept, the article extends their discussion to a range of non-normative gaming practices and initiatives that have often been presented as subversive or alternative in relation to the dominant gaming regimes. Using the theory of cognitive capitalism, as outlined by Carlo Vercellone and Yann Moulier Boutang, as well as elements of Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s argument, the article links these practices to gauge the degree to which they are complicit in the global capitalist practices and contends that while many non-normative gaming practices cannot be subsumed by the same mechanisms of cognitive capitalism that operate in relation to game designers’ ideas, they ultimately contribute to an increase in value of industry-controlled locked IP and have firmly established positions in the circulation of content.

Between War and Play

Between War and Play

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of empire: Global capitalism and video games

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, <i>Games of empire: Global capitalism and video games</i>

Book Review: Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. By Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peuter. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009

Book Review: Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. By Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peuter. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009

Book Review: Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Videogames

Book Review: Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Videogames

Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

Games of empire: global capitalism and video games

Acknowledgments Introduction: Games in the Age of Empire Part I. Game Engine: Labor, Capital, Machine 1. Immaterial Labor: A Workers' History of Videogaming 2. Cognitive Capitalism: Electronic Arts 3. Machinic Subjects: The Xbox and Its Rivals Part II. Gameplay: Virtual/Actual 4. Banal War: Full Spectrum Warrior 5. Biopower Play: World of Warcraft 6. Imperial City: Grand Theft Auto Part III. New Game? 7. Games of Multitude 8. Exodus: The Metaverse and the Mines Notes Bibliography Index

Legal Aid Service in the Criminal Courts

cases of murder and official corruption. Such cases, hideously exploited by a large section of the press, seem to satisfy that same cruel lust in men that made the games of the later Roman Empire so popular. Not even a good old-fashioned hanging, with the crowd alternately jeering and cheering the last speech of the doomed, could compete in cruel mockery with a prolonged modern trial of first page, double headline attraction.