Games of Empire

1) "Inhabitants of Second Life are, in other words, class-divided, property-owning, commodity-exchanging, currency-trading, networking, energy-consuming subjects of a comprehensively capitalist order. Welcome to your second life---much like the first."

2) "Virtual games are exemplary media of Empire. They crystallize in a paradigmatic way its constitution and its conflicts. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois personality required by mercantile colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and just as twentieth-century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet screened some of its darkest depictions), so virtual games are media constitutive of twenty-first-century global hypercapitalism and, perhaps, also lines of exodus from it."

3) "Robinett's addition to Atari's Adventure is legendary in game culture as the first 'Easter egg,' a secret feature designed into a game awaiting player discovery. Such surprises soon became a staple feature in game design. That they originated in an act of protest not only demonstrates how capital gets some of its best ideas from the resistance it provokes but, more broadly, shows the problems that attended the conversion of hacker games into a for-profit industry driven by a new type of wage labor."

4) "While elsewhere male prerogatives were being challenged, virtual games thus congealed as a sphere of cultural 'remasculinization.' As late as the mid-1990s, 80 percent of players were boys and men. The military origins of simulations, the monasticism of hacker culture, the bad-boy arcade ambience, testosterone niche marketing, developers' hiring of experienced (hence male) players, game capital's risk-averse adherence to proven shooting, sports, fighting, and racing formulae---all combined to form a self-replicating culture whose sexual politics were coded into every Game Boy handheld, every Duke Nukem double entendre, and every booth babe at industry conferences, where women appeared only as imperiled princesses and imperiling vixens, a male head-start program, building and consolidating the gender stratification within immaterial labor."

5) "The socialization necessary for populations to endure and endorse such an ongiong condition of life [perpetual war] brings us to the concept of 'banalized' war. In this situation, war becomes part of the culture of everyday life, with 'the enemy' depicted as 'an absolute threat to the ethical order' and 'reduced to an object of routine police repression.' The long-standing interaction of video game culture and the military apparatus is a component in this process of the banalization of war."

6) "Noting that RMT [real money trading] and power leveling are at least as much problems of demand as supply, driven by North American players' desire to buy shortcuts to game success, Yee suggested this virulent distaste for farmers repeated a historically familiar pattern of Sinophobia and, more broadly, of Western racism against mobile, precarious foreign labor."

7) "Sectioned off into multiple distinctly named territories, Vice City's cityspace spans the opulent Leaf Links, an island golf and country club for the city's affluent, with metal detectors at the entrance for their enhanced security, and, at the other extreme, Little Haiti, a run-down neighborhood where you'll find wooden shacks, including one inhabited by a Haitian gangsta matriarch, Auntie Poulet, and numerous dubious, and dangerous, businesses. But the aim of Vercetti's journey through this uneven socioeconomic landscape is to occupy it, activate it, and network it into a setting for optimal capital accumulation. Presenting players with missions carrying injunctions like 'Kill the competition,' and orbiting around 'unlocking' accumulation opportunities, Vice City puts market imperatives and their rewards into playable form."

8) "There is no shelter at all from corruption, violence, and 'cruel segmentation.' The game presents a no-exit situation. GTA contains occasional allusions to the fierce genealogy of radical politics in North American communities of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other immigrant and minority communities---but only to negate their potential. Though the narrative of San Andreas, for example, contains individualized moments of minority alliance against repression, 'these tantalizing possibilities are never fleshed out with actual game-play.' The game's 'narrative dilemma' is, says Dennis Redmond, that the protagonist's 'quest for personal redemption cannot serve as a template of collective resistance to neoliberalism.' It is, in fact, vital to the ideological consistency of the games' demonic satire that brutalization, racism, and greed be ubiquitous. In GTA IV a prominent theme is that of the poor exploiting the very poor. There may be other options; but you can't play them---and that is what makes GTA a game of Empire."

9) "One might say that while games tend to a reactionary imperial content, as militarized, marketized, entertainment commodities, they also tend to a radical, multitudinous form, as collaborative, constructive, experimental digital productions. This schematization is approximate and simplified---but it points to the deep ambivalence of video game culture."