Gamers are the most oppressed group of people in capitalism.
Okay, that’s not really true, but our economic system certainly spoils the fun for us, whether you’re making video games or just playing.
Well, I’m not a big gamer myself. I used to be a gamer, but now I’m more of a dilettante. I swear. And I tried hard last week when Nintendo surprisingly released a remastered edition of their classic game Metroid Prime. When it came out I neglected everything and spent hours and hours rotting my brain while playing a favorite game from my youth.
While I was busy shooting virtual aliens in glorious HD, I couldn’t really stop thinking about the workers who made it all possible. The capitalist system is mystifying. When we go to the store to buy a product, we often don’t ask ourselves how the product got there, who made it, or under what conditions it worked. There is simply an interaction between commodities, between things – money and product.
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We have some information about the developers who worked on the original Metroid Prime at Retro Studios 20 years ago and the picture is not pretty. As the game’s release deadline neared, Retro’s staff had to work 80 to 100 hours a week, often sleeping at their desks, and not seeing family for the last nine months of the game’s development.
This phenomenon is all too common in the gambling industry and is often referred to as “crunch time”, mandatory overtime hours usually without additional pay. According to a 2019 International Game Developers survey, about 40% of game developers said they have suffered from stress, typically consisting of 20 extra hours on top of a 40-hour week, at least once over the past year .
The practices of the gambling industry are perfectly summed up by Karl Marx, whose words from over 150 years ago are still true.
“Capital has a single vital impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus value…” wrote Marx in 1867. “Capital is dead labour, which, like a vampire, only lives by absorbing living labour, and the more it lives, the more labor there is Fuck. The time the worker works is the time the capitalist consumes the labor power he has bought. If the worker wastes his available time on himself, he robs the capitalist.”
But capitalism isn’t just a vampiric system for those who make the games—it’s also a disadvantage for those who play them.
Video games are already expensive, many costing $60 or more on top of the high prices of gaming consoles. And when you’ve spent all that money, what do you have left? Often unfinished games push to spend more money on microtransactions and downloadable content (DLC).
Microtransactions or in-game purchases are mostly just for cosmetics – spend a little more and your character can have a cool costume. This in itself seems problematic, but it gets much worse. Some games allow you to spend extra money to gain an advantage over other players, a phenomenon known as pay-to-win.
Gone are the days when you had to gamble a lot to get good at it – now, with the power of money, you can crush your competition with ease.
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Besides microtransactions in games, there is also the problem of DLC. The usual story goes like this: you spend $60 on a game, and a few months later (sometimes less!) the developers announce that you can spend more money on additional content for the game you already bought.
This is an admittedly ingenious scheme hatched by the capitalists. If the only goal is to keep accumulating more and more money, why wouldn’t you release an unfinished product and then charge the player more to complete it?
This is not just any socialist conspiracy theory either. “Super Smash Bros.” Developer Masahiro Sakurai called DLC a “scam” in 2015 and accused the industry of selling unfinished games to make more money.
And so I call on the players of the world to unite for the dismantling of this corrupt and brutal economic system. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have virtual worlds to win.
Jared Quigg (him/her) is a junior majoring in journalism and political science.