Figure 5. A map of the convoluted cave system

At present, most gamescommit at least one if not all of the following missteps in their realizationof in-game environments: relegating environment to background scenery,relying on stereotyped landscapes, and predicating player success on extrac-tion and use of natural resources.

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.