Ludocapital: the Political Economy of Digital Play
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UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Ludocapital: The Political Economy of Digital Play Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0985k4rw Author Jordan, Will Gregory Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Ludocapital: The Political Economy of Digital Play DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Comparative Literature by Will Gregory Jordan Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor Eyal Amiran, Chair Professor James Steintrager Professor David Theo Goldberg 2014 © 2014 Will Gregory Jordan DEDICATION To my parents, who kept us playing and thinking ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vii Introduction 1 1 Play and Freedom 25 1.1 Play and Procedurality ............................. 29 1.2 Aesthetics of game-playing ........................... 38 1.3 Digital play and the Ludic Posthuman .................... 45 1.4 Case Studies ................................... 52 1.5 Conclusions ................................... 64 2 Specters of Play: Hauntology of Tetris® 67 2.1 Tetris as Symbolic Game Object ........................ 72 2.2 Tetris as Cultural Commodity ......................... 84 2.3 The Idealization of Property in the Digital Age . 96 2.4 Conclusions ...................................115 3 Procedural Literacy: Toward a Programming Public 124 3.1 Procedural Literacy ...............................126 3.2 Critical Code Literacy ..............................148 3.3 Critique of Programming Language Systems . 168 3.4 Conclusions ...................................183 4 The Wealth of Computations: Bitcoin and Play Money 186 4.1 Money and Modernity .............................187 4.2 Play Money ....................................197 4.3 Bitcoin ......................................204 4.4 Conclusions ...................................232 WORKS CITED 237 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank my committee chair Eyal Amiran for his support, guidance and mentorship throughout this project. His deep intellectual engagement with my writing, his constant encouragement and advice while seeing this dissertation through to completion and his genuine interest in my well-being and future success all deserve my most profound gratitude. I also thank my committee members, James Steintrager, whose seminars in critical theory and constructivism sparked a deep theoretical engagement that runs throughout this project and beyond, and David Theo Goldberg, who not only contributed great insights to my work but also exemplifies the critically engaged public intellectual to which I aspire. Kavita Philip also deserves special mention for encouraging my interest in technoculture and for teaching me how to engage technology as political. A number of additional faculty also supported my project in various ways throughout its intellectual formation, including Ackbar Abbas, Paul Dourish, Jonathan Hall, Dina Al-Kassim, the late Mark Poster, and Rei Terada. Thanks to Mark Pangilinan and Jacqueline Way, who organized a dissertation colloquium in 2013 that allowed me to present and refine an early chapter draft. Several grad school friends and colleagues helped significantly shape my academic voice over the years through ongoing conversations and collaborations, including Josef Nguyen, Matthew Schilleman, Rob Schoenbeck, and Ken Yoshida. I have enjoyed enormous flexibility and understanding from my employers throughout my tenure as a hybrid humanities grad student and software engineer, for which I thank Alexandre and Xavier Kral at Javaground, Curt Bererton and Vijay Myneni at ZipZapPlay/PopCap, and Hadi Partovi and Mona Akmal at Code.org. UCI generously provided two year-long fellowships during my graduate tenure. The UC Humanities Research Institute provided fellowships to attend the summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory in 2006 and 2011, both of which were iv formative experiences. Graduate program coordinators Bindya Baliga and Arielle Read both provided indispensable assistance in navigating university bureaucracy on my behalf. I am eternally grateful to my brothers and parents for their intellectual and moral support. Finally, my greatest thanks goes to Jenelle Wagner, who proofread my drafts, organized my scattered thoughts, gave me the strength to press on and filled my long dissertation-writing days with love and laughter. None of this would have been at all possible without her. v CURRICULUM VITAE Will Gregory Jordan EDUCATION Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature 2014 University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA Master of Arts in Comparative Literature 2008 University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA Bachelor of Science in Computer Science & Literature 2005 Yale University New Haven, CT WORK EXPERIENCE Software Engineer 2014– Code.org San Francisco, CA Software Engineer 2010–2012 ZipZapPlay/PopCap Games San Francisco, CA Software Engineer 2007–2010 Javaground Irvine, CA TEACHING EXPERIENCE Instructor, Critical Reading & Rhetoric 2006–2007 University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA CONFERENCE PAPERS Evolution of the Tetromino-Stacking Game: An Historical Sept. 2009 Design Study of Tetris DiGRA 2009 From Rule-Breaking to ROM-Hacking: Theorizing the Sept. 2007 Computer Game-As-Commodity DiGRA 2007 vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Ludocapital: The Political Economy of Digital Play By Will Gregory Jordan Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine, 2014 Associate Professor Eyal Amiran, Chair This dissertation is a contribution to a theory of ludocapitalism, understood as the incorporation of the concept of game-playing into capitalism in contemporary technoculture. The term is derived from the Latin word ludus, meaning game or play. By this compound term, I mean to describe a hybrid or transitional moment of capitalism that describes its processes of commodity production and capital accumulation through reference to play as a central concept of human activity and social organization, superseding the concept of work as the locus of rationality in traditional capitalist labor formations. Through a (post)humanistic study of the discourses and practices of software and game development viewed as paradigmatic instantiations of conditions of ludocapitalism, I develop an approach to engage these practices in ethical-political discourse derived from the critical theory tradition. In this dissertation, I relate this dialectic of play to classical discourses of modernity in order to draw comparisons, contrasts and historical transitions from the liberal human subject of the Enlightenment to a technoliberal, posthuman subject prompted by the computerization of society and the expansion of digital play. A central question of this dissertation is whether and in what modified form traditional vii discourses of critical theory can maintain relevance in this techno-ludic context. Through an analysis of the ambiguity of play and creativity in discourses of game design and software development, and as a complement to textual and rhetorical theories of digital media, I advance a critical approach to digital game and software studies, attentive to the ambivalent potential of specific technical-social platforms upon which these new forms of media are constructed, with an aim to advance and reconfigure the conditions of ludocapitalist society toward better sustaining our collective forms of life. viii Introduction This dissertation is a contribution to a theory of ludocapitalism, understood as the incorporation of the concept of game-playing into capitalism in contemporary technoculture. The term is derived from the Latin word ludus, meaning game or play. By this compound term, I mean to describe a hybrid or transitional moment of capitalism that describes its processes of commodity production and capital accumulation through reference to play as a central concept of human activity and social organization, superseding the concept of work as the locus of rationality in traditional capitalist labor formations. Through a (post)humanistic study of the discourses and practices of software and game development viewed as paradigmatic instantiations of conditions of ludocapitalism, I develop an approach to engage these practices in ethical-political discourse derived from the critical theory tradition. In contemporary information society, play is displacing work as the primary mode of capitalist organization. Creativity, construed as a valuable commodity mined from the intangible cultural resources of everyday life, displaces the protestant, modernist work ethic with a playful hacker ethos of the information age. As Wark illustrates in Gamer Theory, the celebrated player of digital gaming enthusiastically expands into the contemporary subject of the universal gamification of everyday life, marking a transformation from the labor-leisure distinction within industrial capitalism to the hybrid institutions of ludocapitalism: work-as-play environments structured to accumulate creative capital produced by new classes of professional 1 knowledge-workers, and play-as-work commodity forms designed to extract surplus social and cultural value from mass entertainment player-consumers. However, the same concept of play that provides contemporary capital its progressive ludic dynamism also preserves a critical potential for disruptive play