the term “anthrome”suggests that human beings have had such an enormous impact on theEarth’s surface that it no longer makes sense to speak of our world withoutreference to our planet-changing ways. Unlike regional biomes dictated pri-marily by climate and terrain, anthromes are also determined by the densityof human settlement and human activities such as farming and herding.An important corollary to this reclassification, in Ellis and Ramankutty’sview, is ridding ecology of the antiquated but persistent notion of our envi-ronment as “natural ecosystems with humans disturbing them.” Instead, asthey explain, “Anthropogenic biomes tell a completely different story, oneof ‘human systems, with natural ecosystems embedded within them.’ Thisis no minor change in the story we tell our children and each other. Yet it isnecessary for sustainable management of the biosphere in the 21st century.”

Being a pro-gamer in China means much more than just making a living through gaming, and impliesdemands to be presentable, charming and interactive in order to satisfy the expectations of fans.As fan reception is one of the most significant factors in assessing the success of a gaming team,nowadays each LPL team uses its Weibo social network account to announce news, report gameresults and, most importantly, to interact with fans.

In January 2014, player RapingNinja hurled racist insults at player Strider, on account ofhis partner being black.28Unlike the Penny Sparrow affair, whose monkey insult is light relative tothe language used in this case, there was no trial, fine or forced apology. In fact, despite some playersclaiming to have discovered his identity, nothing happened beyond a few concerned writers penningtheir opinions.29In the wake of this 2014 incident, serious, concerned discussion began in the first Facebook group,“DOTA 2 South Africa,” with players detailing their experience of racism and the problems withinthe community. Some players considered the discussion to be somewhat productive, but within a fewhours, the entire thread was deleted by a group administrator: Dota was “just a game”

For Weber,sovereignty is the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” as a defining characteristic of thestate.26Sovereignty appears to be a defining feature of a state, and it is noted that a state is not just agovernment, as a state rules over a defined area and continues to exist even if the government changes.In EUIV, historic states which exercised sovereignty over their territories are usually defined withsome detail and are potentially playable nations, while “empty” or “blank” territory which is ripe forcolonial expansion was inhabited by people who had patterns of land use and systems of governmentwhich did not register with a Eurocentric concept of sovereignty. An infamous example from historywas the British and White Settler Australian legal understanding of Australia as a “Terra Nullius,” anempty land which was used to deny the sovereign rights of the Indigenous Australian and Torres StraitIsland people in Australian courts until the 1990s.

Not only in Korea but in many areas worldwide, the first wave of cybercafés gaveway to the development of LAN centers, which further helped to expand the reach of gaming andencourage multiplayer interactions through local area networks (LANs; see Image 0.10).

While pirated media can be found the world over, they are the standard rather than the exceptionin much of the global south—for example, in the Middle East, where the level of piracy is amongthe highest worldwide—,69“the majority of video games, no matter their origin, are either purchasedas pirated copies or played in public venues where one copy suffices for tens, if not hundreds, ofgamers.”70This democratizing effect, spreading access to players with less disposable income whosegame consumption lies outside the margins of official market data, is key to understanding theimpact of piracy. Studies from Brazil and China show that piracy comes into being largely to helpovercome the significant obstacles between consumers and content, such as tremendously high tariffson imported tech goods.

Consider voluntary “permadeath” playings of games (Keogh2013a), in which a player agrees to the new rule that theywill stop playing a game entirely if they die. This enormouslyintensifies all violent acts in play by restoring a sense of riskand mortality to each moment. Various games have sought tofold this spirit of play into their rules with some success, fromDayZ’s literal permadeath to the punishing grind of Dark Souls,making them a more consequential experience of violence.I’ll end with a hopeful note care of my game design idol,Robert Yang. There are seeds of something very powerful in hisgame Hurt Me Plenty. In it a violent act—striking someone—isreframed by the intimate and erotic world of BDSM. Yang’sdecision to have a cool-down period for the virtual partner torecover is both tender and an acknowledgment of the physi-cality of the act.

Contemporary controllers have buttons called “triggers”for a reason: shooting is one of the more common actions

From the formal technicalities of parameters tothe warm glow of a sunset across a limpid pool, virtual wateris both technology and story, code and emotion. Most of all,in a gallery setting you can appreciate the water itself, withoutthe distraction of having somewhere else to be or someoneelse to kill.You may find your understanding of real, wet water chang-ing too. When I returned to my hometown of Wellington,New Zealand for a visit after making the game, I sat by its har-bor and stared into the water. I watched caustics I only knewthe name of thanks to making a video game; I blinked intothe dazzling reflections of the sun; I thought about the “pro-cessing power” of physics itself, capable of such refractive bril-liance.

Computation is a key part of how a game means what itmeans.

Long after you have moved on, if you have been kindenough to leave your computer on and the game running,CPU Sisyphus will push ever onward, making computationafter computation on that infinite hill (see figure 3.6).CODA: THE VIEW FROM THE BOTTOMVideo games, or, perhaps more to the point, computer games,are fundamentally made of computation. The system runninga game, whether it’s a PC, a PlayStation, or a pocket calculator,sends electrons streaming though logic gates in just such away that, up at your end of things, the show goes on. For thatreason, making a video game is very much about a conversa-tion with the stuff of computation. Developers must think interms of what a computer does well, from tireless repetition toprodigious memory to lightning-fast mathematics. We mustspeak their language.

The term “stuff” is rather hard to pindown, and I don’t plan to try. Anthropologist Daniel Miller(2010, 1), who studies diverse cultural uses of everyday objectsand who literally wrote a book called Stuff, takes the same line.He opens his discussion of the idea with: “don’t, just don’t, askfor or expect a clear definition of ‘stuff’.” And yet, as Miller’swork emphasizes again and again in studies of key artifactsfrom diverse countries, it’s the stuff all around us—from saristo cellphones—that shapes how we think and live.

As games scholars we should ask, is it fair to some game playersthat they are specifically targeted for monetization and personalization?Are existing monetization processes clear and transparent to players? Whattools can be provided to younger and vulnerable players to navigate theconduct and speech they encounter in multiplayer games? Indeed, the complexadvertising infrastructure underpinning many online games, especiallyfree-to-play (Nieborg, Poell, and Deuze 2019), raises many policy challenges.Many European countries policy makers and regulators are asking if gamesare crossing boundaries into gambling and banking

in the absence of any opportunity toacquire stable employment, personify a form of soft capitalism that seemsat once both inevitable and individually fulfilling.As McRobbie (2016) points out, underlying this forced entrepreneurshipis a dispositif of creativity that places all the risk on these mostly youngpeople by holding out an unlikely promise of ‘making it’, of being able to oneday reap the rewards of creativity without having to ask the hard questionsabout sustainable livelihoods.

Our company hosts a game club. Every week we choose a new game,play it for a week and then we get together during a workday to discusswhat it was like. And then we play the next one (Patrik, game designer).

Leo, operations manager responsible for project management and employerwell-being, described the pedagogical value of playing together:When you play a console game and others gather around you, it is interest-ing to see what kind of observations different people make. Some peoplemay focus on a beautiful animation whereas others look at mechanics, orwhatever is their thing. Someone may have special expertise in certainissues and it’s instructive to focus on one thing at the time together.You learn much more than with your own eyes alone (Leo, operationsmanager).Importantly, playing together can help to accumulate shared vocabulary thatis useful when collaborating in game development related tasks. O’Donnell(2009, para. 1.6) uses the term ‘game talk’ when referring to the processthat ‘provides discursive resources for developers when trying to describeabstract concepts like game mechanics’.

I played a lot when I was younger. That’s when it all started. But when Istarted to code seriously at the age of 15 or 16, I played games less. I becameinterested in games in a different way. It was more about dismantlinggames and learning how they worked. Of course, I still try a lot of games,but I don’t necessarily play them for their entertainment value. It’s moreabout research work, has been for the past twenty years. It’s a bit of adifferent starting point compared to actual ‘gamers’ (Hugo, CEO).

Interviewer: Where is the divide between what the teams have to do forthemselves when it comes to marketing, and what you do? Which partof this outreach, marketing, meeting the right people-work is theirs,and yours?Respondent: So, they have to do all the work. I don’t do work for them.I’ll do an introduction, or I’ll tell them something is happening. Atthat point, it’s their choice of what they’re going to do with thatinformation. I won’t hold their hand through the process: I put theimpression in front of them. I led them to the water, they have todrink. And if they choose not to attend the event, and not to set upthe meeting, not my problem. For us, it’s like we’re mentoring andwe’re teaching and we’re providing opportunities, and we’re puttingthe right people in front of them, but we don’t tell them how to runtheir businesses. We don’t own equity in any of the companies, andso, it doesn’t matter what choices they make: it’s not our business.

Thisdelineation of leisure in relation to Arendtian action, regardless of monetaryrecompense, is key to disrupting the work ethic’s compensatory morality,thereby contributing towards the legitimization of basic income.

Reformulating the work-leisure binary is not simply a matter of hybrid-izing polarities into a neologism (Chia 2020). For example, in sociology,the concept of prosumption emphasizes productivity harnessed fromthe rationalization of consumptive practices, while in games research,playbour looks at how digital environments extract commercial value usingtechniques and ideas about play to engage users and workers in repetitive orlaborious tasks (Kücklich 2005)

the past, even though the work itself was routine,workers could gather in the pub at the close of the day to exchange storiesabout their jobs and colleagues, often over a lifetime. In comparison, theNew Economy workplace was increasingly fissured and marked by fleetingand impermanent relations (Weil 2014).

In various countries, it was the student communities,homebrew scenes, and demoscenes that birthed and developed the videogame form (see Jørgensen, Sandqvist, and Sotamaa 2015; Švelch 2018; Swalwell2012). This point cannot be stressed enough: video games, and video gamemakers existed before the video game industry, and ‘amateur-game designis by and large the norm by which game development occurs, and out ofwhich commercial game production continually emerges, reacts and shifts’(McCrea 2012, 179).As a video game industry formalized through the 1970s and 1980s inselect parts of the world, hobbyists and amateur game making activityremained common.

trophies, the effect of these mechan-ics becoming so solidly integrated into videogame culture is that theirgravitational pull changes how games are played and interpreted. Lea-derboards are a clear place where players are compared with one an-other. A former highly competitive Madden NFL player writes thatleaderboards are “a devilish feature,” as they transform “Madden froman escapist pastime into another stage on which to prove your self-worth.”36 Gamerscore is a measure that turns abstract effort in a gameinto concrete results that are intelligible to others at a mere glimpse.

Actually judging skill or effort is ridiculouslydifficult to do, as it necessarily also assesses relative starting pointsand social advantages

The idea of a meritocracy generally concerns social orderand how to allocate resources. Backers of meritocratic norms typicallybelieve that skill should be measured, that effort should be tracked,and that those who demonstrate the best combinations of talent andhard work should rise to the top of the social ladder.

German soccervoted against installing goal-line technology because of cost and theargument by many purists that the inevitable human error is a classicpart of soccer.9 Mistakes ensure debate and discussion, one of the ele-ments that typify reaction to what is often called “the beautiful game.”The central line of appeal by those in favor of using technology insport to double-check human decision is that additional review canmake contests more accurate. Underlying that belief is the premisethat the person or team with the most skill should win and that er-rors in judgment necessarily reward the undeserving.

As Katherine Sierra, awoman who has suffered frequent and sustained harassment, puts itabout technology culture more broadly, “A meritocracy is exactly whatI and so many others believed tech to be. ‘After all,’ I wrote nearly adecade ago, ‘the compiler doesn’t care if the person writing the codeis wearing a black lace bra.’ I was wrong. Embarrassingly, naïvely,wrong. Because while the compiler doesn’t care, the context in whichprogramming exists sure as hell does. To ignore that context is theessence of privilege blindness.”

Theindividual impact on your rating within LoL fosters the perceptionamong some of an “Elo hell” that is “populated by griefers/trolls and‘bad’ players that prevent them from moving up the ranks.”13 A guideto ranked games in LoL contends that Elo hell is a figment of players’imaginations, since “a large misconception is that it is always team-mates that is bringing you down [sic],” and the answer is that “ratingsbecome more accurate the more games are played [sic]. Think ‘big pic-ture.’ It can take hundreds or thousands of games to be consistentlymatched with similarly skilled players.”14 Although incredibly rationaland likely true, this kind of thinking is much harder to remember inthe moment when you believe some other player has cost you some-thing through his or her inactivity or poor performance.

The process turned participation in desired activities intopoints that could then be spent on rewards. Silverman and Simon dis-cuss how some of the best guilds in the world rejected DKP becauseit focuses players on rewards, rather than on group accomplishments

Leveling ensures the appearance that weall start from the same place and then allows us to see how we stackup against other players, as we know they are going through the samethings we are. The status inequality Castronova believes we seek istranslated into a number that grows slowly over time and broadcastsour efforts and skill to everyone we encounter. However, the notionthat we all start from the same place requires deliberate inattentionto the resources players bring to a game in the first place.

one of the cofounders of thegaming site Kongregate, Emily Greer, posted about the harassmentshe has received for her participation in the game industry. Promptedby GamerGate to reflect on the difference between messages sent toher and her brother, she wrote that she had assumed the harassmentshe received was “normal for a co-founder of a game site” and wassurprised to hear that her brother and fellow cofounder did not havethe same experience. Counting up their messages, she found that shereceives about four times as much harassment as her male sibling.

The most frequently cited touch point for GamerGaters was theinsistence that a key part of their movement was about journalismethics.70 The most constructive read of the group is as a consumerboycott of people concerned about journalistic coverage that insultedtheir target audience instead of providing objective coverage of rele-vant news.71 The most common flashpoint in this regard was a flurry ofarticles that appeared shortly after the #GamerGate hashtag was bornthat decried the death of the gamer. The two most widely circulatedand referenced essays were those by Leigh Alexander and Dan Gold-ing.72 The argument about the end of gamers had three key claims.First, video games were reaching a broader audience than ever beforeand, as such, game publishers need not focus on the classic gamer ste-reotypes as their primary audience. This argument largely followed ina tradition of cultural criticism that proclaimed the death of the authoror a variety of other subject positions, and was backed up by data thatclearly indicate the audience of videogame players is far more diverse agroup than the white males of means who match the typical stereotypeof a group of gamers.73 Second, the term “gamer” was at one point akey reclamation of space that reframed people away from being a nerdor some other insulting label into something more positive.

community, fueled by a strong desire to re-tain what already exists. Typically, the cases are carefully swaddled inappeals to skill, to being good enough, and to working hard enoughto make it. All these tropes are at the center of any sort of merito-cratic appeal. If the harassed were tough enough to take it, then theywould be able to reap the rewards of success. Systemic harassment setsthe terms on which players engage, giving stark advantage to thosewho are not targeted and retaining power for those who have alreadyclimbed the ladder.

More recently, the psychol-ogist Paul Piff has conducted research on a modified Monopoly gamewhere one player is given substantial advantages over the other as de-termined by a coin flip at the beginning of the game.113 This experi-ment, in conjunction with other experimental research, leads Piff toan argument that being wealthy affects behavior in profound ways.114Across multiple measures, his research has found that being in a pow-erful position leads a person to be less empathetic, less supportive ofothers, and more likely to ignore structural inequality.

The dominance of Korean players ingames like Starcraft and League of Legends is due in part to the largesystems of support to back them, from state-run organizations like theKorean eSports Association (KeSPA), the large infrastructure and re-wards enabling players to improve, wide broadcasts and support fortournaments, and financial rewards that enable players to focus onplay.106 All of these elements produce a system where some are led tobelieve they are better than others and those who struggle are led tothe conclusion that it is their own personal failing, rather than poten-tial systematic issues that ensure the deck is stacked. Structural fac-tors are occasionally acknowledged—Todd Harper finds that somefighting game players justify certain players’ performance based ontheir “Asian hands”—but these elements are tied to creating an envi-ronment where a particular kind of skill is praised.

McCoy andMajor conclude with the argument that “subtle cues to meritocracyin the cultural environment may encourage members of low statusgroups to construe personal and group disadvantage as deserved andto minimize the perception that such disadvantage is due to discrimi-nation. These system justifying responses to meritocracy cues may bemost likely precisely when individuals would least like them to occur:in the presence of clear, meritocracy-violating inequality.”1

Recent economic analysis in the UnitedStates shows that “even poor kids who do everything right don’t domuch better than rich kids who do everything wrong.”78 As a differentcritique observes, “The truth is that the meritocracy was never morethan partial,” and it goes on to argue that selective admissions systemsat elite colleges ensure some kinds of diversity, but rarely in terms ofeconomic class or parental occupation.79 Colleges in the United Statesalso fail at social status equalization, as getting into and succeedingin college still leads to lesser life outcomes for graduates who happento be black, Hispanic, or raised poor compared to their classmates.80For Jo Littler, meritocracy “functions as an ideological myth to ob-scure economic and social inequalities and the role it plays in curtailingsocial equality.”

Much like a standard-ized test can be hard to see as a problem if you score well on it,video games that cater to one’s own skills, abilities, and habits canbe hard to see as a systemic problem. Hardcore gamers can oftenbe seen calling for more video games that suit them, rather than fordiverse games that draw in more players or test new kinds of skills.The creative director at Ubisoft argues that this predictability andconsistency in video games is “less about familiarity than it’s just en-joying the content.

Instead of developers branching outin new directions, a risk-averse approach to game development anda lack of diversity in the community of people making games cre-ates an echo chamber where recycling content and ideas ensures thatthose who are part of the community already are rewarded and theirsuccess is justified under the guise of merit. Weerasuriya’s positionthat as a gamer he is interested in making “cool things” is not neces-sarily wrong, but it does elide key dynamics of videogame consump-tion and production. Producing the kinds of games he wants to playmeans that he is increasingly speaking to an audience of people likehim, which undercuts any idea of a true meritocracy by building keyassumptions into the “workplace” of games.

Insteadof paying attention to systems and structures, meritocracy emphasizeseach person and what they have done or not, which leaves the priv-ileged left to enjoy their earned status and the unfortunate to blamethemselves for what they lack.A clear place to see this dynamic in video games is to explore thecase of Geguri and her skills at Blizzard’s first-person shooter Over-watch. Rapidly ascending into the top ten players in the world, Geguriwas extraordinarily successful in tournament play but was accused ofcheating because other players thought her aiming was too good tobe done without some sort of assistance.

one of the biggest problems a contemporary defender of a merito-cratic order can see is the fact that parents of means are not willingto let their children fail, even if, by the logic of merit, they should. Atthe point that parents can prop up future generations, skill and effortbecome less relevant than birthright and inherited position, subvert-ing the meritocracy with the very aristocratic dynamics that skill pluseffort was designed to reject and continuing the cycle seen through-out China’s history with meritocracy.

Detailed in a lengthy article by Robert Guthrie,prison servers are described as a “dystopian experience unlike any-thing I’ve ever experienced in a video game.”36 Prison servers, whichare run outside the bounds and rules of the primary version of Mine-craft, work differently than most other instantiations of the game. In-stead of jumping into an open world, on a prison server players startout with just a pick and perhaps some basic gear and must then setout to do hard labor, repeatedly working in stone mines to ascend togreater status on the server. Working hard enough eventually awardsplayers with special titles, privileges, resources, and maybe even a placeon the leaderboard. These servers are funded by donations, so a wayto move up more quickly is to spend money to skip out on the grind,which offers an aristocratic approach for players with means. Guth-rie was surprised to find that players did not object to other playersbeing able to buy their way ahead; instead, they stuck around, “hop-ing for handouts or an opportunity down the road to make their wayinto the upper echelons. Occasional generosity from wealthy playersand lottery-style games seems to be what keeps these players engaged,but there really isn’t a path to the highest ranks without paying realmoney.”

fixing these problems is an issue of design and in-tent, rather than one of management of a community headed off therails. Much like Whitney Phillips argues that the systems and struc-tures are at least as big of a problem as people trolling, meritocraciesencourage norms and behaviors that lead to a toxic environment fortheir subjects and have to be addressed at the level of design.25Beyond Overwatch, meritocracy is also tightly integrated into mod-ern Western business culture, where “stack ranking” employees be-came all the rage at General Electric and then spread throughout thebusiness world. Although the practice is waning in popularity, it stillhas advocates, including prominent technology companies like Ama-zon.26 The logic of ranking employees is predicated on the belief thatbusinesses can readily identify their best and worst workers

Patricia Hernandez breaks the process down in her review ofthe game, noting that, upon launch, Overwatch first awards a “play ofthe game” and displays the player who executed the maneuver alongwith a video clip; then it shows a bunch of statistics from the matchand highlights four of the twelve players in the match for their con-tributions; players are then prompted “to ‘like’ their favorite matchcontributors, and everyone gets to see who got voted the most.”11 Thisis an incredibly meritocratic approach to assessing what happened inthe game, ultimately terminating in a popularity contest.The feature that received substantial scorn upon Overwatch’s re-lease was the play of the game, largely because it takes one momentout of context and then chooses to only celebrate one of twelve play-ers when the efforts of the other members of the team often madethe moment possible.

Embracing meritocracy makes allocating resources seem straightfor-ward: as soon as a system for judging merit is established, it becomeseasy to assess who finished at the top and is most deserving of thegreatest rewards. In addition to its utility in economics, supporters ofmeritocracy argue that it “is considered by many to be an ideal jus-tice principle, because only relevant inputs (e.g., abilities) should beconsidered and irrelevant factors (e.g., ethnicity, gender) should be ig-nored when distributing outcomes. Thus, meritocracy is bias free

Ranking hate speech or trying to assess which oppression is worseis a regressive activity that does not fix problems, but analysis of vir-ulent sexism is perhaps the easiest starting point for a discussion oftoxicity in games. The use of the term “rape” is omnipresent through-out the discussion around games, popping up almost any time certainplayers either win or lose in spectacular, or sometimes even ordinary,fashion.

if you are one of those people with such a degree you still haveninety-three fellow villagers who have not had the same opportuni-ties. If you have access to a computer, you would be one of twenty-twothat do, numbers that are largely matched by the seventeen who areunable to read and write, the twenty-three with no shelter from windand rain, and the thirteen who do not have safe water to drink. At thepoint that you are fortunate enough to be in a position where you canhave the ability, the time, and the resources to read a book about videogames, you are one of a very small group of people in the world withthat opportunity.

The growth in development costs createsa situation where companies betting $100 million or more on a gamefocus more on what has worked than on what could be.Focus on meritocracy reaches beyond the design of games andinto the narrative stories they typically tell. Most major game sto-rylines, from Grand Theft Auto III to Uncharted to Restaurant Story,enable players to grow from a relative weakling into a strong, powerfuldemigod.

Claude, left shot and betrayed by his girlfriend while robbing a banktogether. Claude manages to survive but is captured, placing players ina position where they are alone and on their way to a ten-year prisonsentence for bank robbery. The game’s narrative unfolds from rockbottom for Claude, who transforms into a leader of the underworldwho successfully outfoxes the mafia, a Columbian drug cartel, andthe Yakuza in the space of a few hours of player-led intervention andexploration. By the end of the game, Claude has eviscerated the car-tel and exacted his revenge on both the mafia don who sought to killhim and the girlfriend who initially betrayed him.

To put it in theterms of this book, slow games de-emphasize pressureand emphasize meditation.

As Sarah Sharma argues,5 the speed of one grouptends to depend on the slowness of another. Manualwork takes time, and enjoying chill moments tends to

Boku no Natsuyasumi

Thosewho cannot afford innumerable booster packs, war-game units and paint,role-playing accessories, or many rolls of quarters cannot participate in thesetraditional settings in the same way as those who can. Those who cannotafford innumerable loot boxes, character skins and equipment, or a varietyof in-game resources cannot participate in contemporary digital gameplay inthe same way as those who can. Of course, those who can afford more gamesin any setting can participate in more gameplay.

Game controllers represent a “control technology” and “control revolu-tion” in response to the “crisis of control” resulting from the need to inter-act with digitalized gameplay. Controllers determine how gameplay inputscan be processed and communication reciprocated to make some form ofgameplay possible. That is, controllers are a revolution because we didn’tneed them before gameplay became digital, but also because they mediate,remediate, and make possible familiar gameplay elements, activities, andoutcomes within a digital setting.Bolter and Grusin describe how remediation is “representation of onemedium in another.”10 They write, “Every act of mediation depends on otheracts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, andreplacing each other,”11 or at least are becoming more popular.

swaths of Black communities across Africa, Europe, and North Americamust accept default, white-body-fits-all prostheses if they hope to receive anyat all (figure 4.23).

Kelly Hacker and I described these posts and reviewsabout Rust as expressing a “privilege of rejection,”63 an idea that is similar yetcomplementary to Passmore et al.’s privilege of immersion. We characterizethis privilege of rejection as when (predominantly white-masculine) playersneed not accept—or learn to be neutral about—playing as demographicallyunaligned embodiments simply to participate in the medium of games. Thatis, rejecting demographically misaligned characters has little influence ontheir options of games to play.

Several groups of observations on the presentation of race and gender in games withparametric configuration

players to freely project or occupy diverse or at least undefined racial, gen-dered, or other identities into their gameworlds. However, when these char-acters exist within familiar narrative tropes, a representational landscapedominated so pervasively by white-masculine defaults, or are adopted intowhite families when gameplay begins, certain interpretations become morelikely.

Sexual orientation is challenging to code reliably in any context, for rea-sons described in greater detail by scholars such as Adrienne Shaw and Eliza-veta Friesem. Writing about the creation of the LGBTQ Video Game Archive

The discs and cartridges of digital games, which can also be analogousto collections of physical pieces, can be sold, lent, borrowed, or stolen inmuch the same way. Even when these activities violate terms and condi-tions, for games that are not digitally distributed or networked, such termsand conditions were/are hard to enforce. However, game software and digitalplatforms and their collections of assets and code do not belong to players,and lending or imposing our own terms of use on them is explicitly prohib-ited and technically challenging to implement.

Digital games, on the other hand, have long had issues withfinite life cycles on electronic media, circuit wear and malfunctions, obsoles-cence, and basic technological and/or legal preservation.41 A dedicated collec-tor of older digital games must do more than gather games; ignoring the legaldimensions for a moment, they need to actively maintain a broader hard-ware ecosystem that permits access to those games

The more efficient or forgettable the experience, the morelikely users or players are to assent and move on without considering whatthey have authorized, in a clear demonstration of why the common mantraof interface design discussed in chapter 1 of aiming for unnoticeability canbecome problematic.Optimizing inattention

Start “buttons” are not always literal/physical buttons; they may simply bemenu prompts. These buttons or prompts are a common feature of digitalgames with an incredibly straightforward function. Explicitly, although Iwill not suggest actually, they are the inner edge of the periludic thresholdbecause interacting with them means starting gameplay.

Pagination does not inform readers about textualcontent, but it can influence how they interact with a book. Knowing howmany pages remain in a chapter, for example, can help readers better decidehow best to allocate their time—when to continue reading or when to putthe book down and go to sleep. Even if they provide no information aboutnarrative or other content, completion percentages and similar informa-tion help players make similar decisions about their participation in digitalgameplay—helping prioritize tasks or allocate real-life time.

Play in scientifij ic research is seldom discussed in print. Perhaps wescientists take it for granted. Or maybe we are a little self-conscious andtry to hide it from others. After all, we don’t want taxpayers to thinkthey are subsidizing adults who are acting like a bunch of kids, therebysquandering hefty amounts of public money. Play in science is thus anelusive and difffijicult topic. (Laszlo 2004, 389)There is a great diffference between how science and artefacts are presentedto the ‘outer world,’ and how they are actually produced in workplaces suchas laboratories. This is important to acknowledge if we want to open newpotential for citizen science games. Play is crucial to processes that precedethe formation of scientifijic artefacts, but we, as ‘normal’ citizens, are notsupposed to see this. Playing is an intrinsic part of scientifijic knowledgeproduction, yet it is mostly covered up, or ‘black-boxed’ for outsiders, for thereasons sketched above

Citizen science projects and biohacking activities are both activitiesperformed by non-professionals, artists, or citizens, but with a diffferentmode of appropriation. While the intent of citizen science projects is tocontribute to research experiments and contributors are expected to ‘followthe rules,’ biohacking is a bottom-up movement that is based upon subvertingexisting knowledge structures.

function is both constitutive and symbolic, as instrumentslike microscopy served as “a means to and a symbol of mechanical objectiv-ity” (Daston and Galison 2007, 139). With the microscope as an objectivemediator, scientists tried to eliminate the subject. The epistemic messageof the microscope is a tool for creating objective knowledge. Today, moreinvolvement and subjectivity of scientists in microscopic image productionis common practice. Using software programs to correct, to crop, or to alterimages is a commonplace. For instance, color is often added in order tohighlight specifijic elements of an image.

The focus of this chapter is on ‘activist simulation games,’ which aremotivated by an activist or political intention on the part of the game-maker, and which attempt to harness simulation and procedurality in thegame to convey the maker’s political critique or message to the playingpublic. Schleiner argues that that the ‘toyness’ of the world of such games,the miniature abstraction of the model that announces itself as game,not life, contributes to a nullifijication of the game’s critical impact. Tobreak away from this situation, she argues, requires a ‘broken toy tactic’of interruption or sabotage that breaks the spell of games’ procedural,operational logic.

The brokenness of September 12thmanifests in that playing well delivers loss, subverting the expectationof the player to master a rewarding challenge of eliminating terrorists. InMcDonald’s Video Game, on the other hand, the very operationality of themodel of fast food production cycles transmitted to the player overcomesthe game’s critical impact.

toy-like, cheerful cow and hamburger world that the ironic subtext of thisbeing an unethical business practice is often missed by players. For instance,when my game design students in Singapore played McDonald’s Video Game,they seemed largely unconcerned about the detrimental side efffects of thistype of production on workers, animals, consumers, or the environment.

A tactical recipe for the activist simulation game consists then of twosteps, fij irst a positive, then a negative; fij irst to constructively programa simulation of a harmful operation from the world into the game, fol-lowed up by either a game-maker, or player instigated interruption, orsabotage that breaks the spell of the game’s movement and procedurality,thereby illuminating its operationality in a critical light.

The conventions of a conspiracythriller for example, require that the complexities of a historical situa-tion—such as energy transition—are simplifijied in a kind of morality playin which bad characters (such as Chen and, to a lesser degree, Jack) embodybad behavior, and good people (such as Tony and Vera, unraveling theconspiracy) defeat them in the end.

Impact of different energy sources

petro-capitalist,authoritarian states with a questionable reputation with regard to democracyand human rights. Countries such as Russia, Iran, and Venezuela use theirenergy supplies as a political weapon to defend their strategic interests.

his discoverythat China is indeed delivering weapons to Iran;

To better understand the persuasive power of Collapsus as a whole,we can direct our attention to what documentary theorist Michael Renovcalls “the four fundamental tendencies or rhetorical/aesthetic functionsattributable to documentary practice,” which are to express, to analyzeor interrogate, to reveal, and to persuade or promote (

Collapsus isan important case to discuss because it succeeded—back in 2010—in imagining the social andpolitical implications of global warming in an innovative way. It was aimed at a predominantlyyounger and connected generation. Statistics show that it is difffijicult for documentary fijilms toreach young audiences; only 18-20 per cent is younger than 34 years old. Collapsus reached 41per cent of that age category.

Smaller game jams are occasionally even ‘designed’ and leveraged as toolsfor political participation themselves. For instance, the GeziJam was held inJune 2013 to support and raise awareness of the protesters trying to stall thedestruction of the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul. The conceptually related#JamForLeelah reflected on the suicide of Leelah Alcorn in December 2014and challenged participants to tackle the issue of transgender sensibilitiesthrough the creation of games. In some cases, game developers are trying tomonetize this awareness and create games to raise funds for socio-politicalcauses. For instance, the game Kubba was created by Ahmed Abdelsamea(2012), an Egyptian indie designer, to generate revenue benefij iting therefugees of the Syrian civil war (Curley 2012). The game mimics the moreor less iconic Western game franchise Cooking Mama (Offfijice Create 2006),challenging players to prepare the eponymous Syrian dish, Kubba. Thegame is a variation of the earlier Flash game Ta’mya (2012); yet, while theoriginal has English text and is available on Kongregate

The role of intellec-tual property rights has massively increased since the late 1990s.This is no longer just about copyright but huge numbers of pat-ents and micro-patents that cover software, protocols, operat-ing systems, algorithms, data feeds, and so on.64 This allows theplatforms to stay way ahead of smaller, later competitors whohave little chance of reaching the scale of data collection andcomputing power available to the giants. It also allows themto effectively charge “rent” (economic actors receiving rewards“purely by virtue of controlling something valuable”) on thosesystems, platforms, and infrastructures.