Productive Games And Playbour

The "metaverse wind" blows vigorously,making video games once again pushed to the foreground-the declaration that "the entrance to the metaverse is video games" makes people excited and worried,excited with its promised utopian vision,worried that in reality capital can easily deprive the game assets owned by players in the form of closure and so on.The current video game,under the shackles of capitalization and platformization,has been alienated into a machine that captures the player’s life,and if it does not start from the game itself,but only treats it as an established "black box" and explores its external influences,then the game can only make a simple binary judgment between "harmful" and "harmless".This research considers games as carriers of digital capital,using a political economy perspective to explore how they capture players’ lives from both macro and micro perspectives.Among them,"life" has multiple connotations,including time,emotions and the body and other attributes that cannot be externalized,quantified and commoditized.At the macro level,as part of the "connected platform ecosystem",game providers need to rely on the large scale of data flow of platform capital;They often adopt a "free proliferation model" to continuously attract players’ attention at each stage of "drainage-retention-paid conversion",and eventually make it successfully commoditized,that is,paid.Therefore,game operation is essentially a process of attention commoditization,and games are an attention product,which is consistent with the flow logic of digital capital.At the microscopic level,in terms of the game itself,symbols and external rules constitute its cultural appearance,and the player first immerses himself in the landscape in the form of an avatar;The combination of rules and randomness forms an algorithmic order,introducing various time mechanisms with randomness,binding players’ attention from the bottom and softly forcing players to invest time labor.For players,the avatar immersive experience is the threshold that attracts players to enter the game,and the feedback intensity of its key landscape symbols-its beauty,shock,etc.;The space-time experience is "putting a long line",allowing players to officially immerse themselves in the game world that requires various stimuli,and its core rules feedback speed to obtain a smooth real-time feedback experience;What ultimately determines whether the player pays is the emotion of the character,which is actually an emotion/attention commodity.Combining the theory of the duality of commodities and labor,this study argues that games commoditize the player’s time and emotions,and that it is the product of the player’s game labor,because the latter adds use value to it.However,this process is obscured by so-called market exchanges,which reflects the penetration of consumer ideology.At the microscopic level,the player’s body is domesticated in catering to the order of the game’s algorithm;On a macro scale,the mind is softened under the "edification" of pleasure patterns.In this process of self-discipline,spiritual reproduction is embedded in the process of playing games,and the self-construction of subjectivity is naturally included in the web of consumerist ideology-capital is expanding its limits and ruling power indefinitely.