Contra Commodity Gaming

“Gaming” as the “Gospel of Game Pass”[i] (or any corporate entity, brand, economic or political entity) presents it is denial of “the real” (an extramental, transobjective or subsistent strata of meaning) to facilitate “a reinterpretation of the world for internal consumption”[ii]: the actuality of the artwork is “dismantled” into “minutely-adaptive behaviors” become commodities, reduced to “tradeable value”[iii]. In fact it reduces the poetic being or game to the very “locus of consumption”, the “immanent, closed, abstract sphere of the private”[iv], a “minutely analyzable global space and universal time”[v]. The artwork is never encountered in its ontological constitution[vi], but in [its exchange value, in] terms of human use or experience: reduced to trade-format interchangeable parts. It is brought into relation with the a mythic “average type”: the “consumer”[vii], who can experience “fun”, participate in transactions of “value”, transmit the “image, sign or message” of the work. Any transobjective content of the work is reduced to its instrumental applications.

But the “consumer” [like an irrational animal incapable of perceiving being beyond immanent relationality] lives “sheltered by signs, in denial of the real”, proliferating word-things[viii] and images of “gaming”, while reveling in the “profound pleasure” of “not being there”[ix], not in fact perceiving a created form in a game, not performatively becoming another essence by [intentionally] adopting its specific characters in virtual ritual[x]. Instead the gaming consumer is oriented only to his own phenomenal experience of the work and its socio-economic ramifications. The concept of “gaming” [a homogenous sludge to be acquired in bulk for the cheapest price] is, like capital”, a "brothel of [false] commutation"[xi], a purely quantitative metric of equivalence for all things [xii] that enables the translation of “transcendental elements” or intelligible content of games into commodities. A “metaverse” comprising all virtual space wherein users can purchase digital nike shoes and use them between games is the perfect token of this reduction of semiotic content of the work to “trade-format interchangeable parts”[xiii].

References
[i] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/06/28/the-gospel-of-xbox-game-pass/?sh=17857702e1b1

[ii] BC 53 (https://www.amazon.ca/Consumer-Society-Jean-Baudrillard/dp/1473982383)

[iii] Land 446

[iv] BC 52

[v] Land 430

[vi] BC 80

[vii] BC 81

[viii] https://greendragoncvr.com/blog/2021/2/8/on-using-quotes-appropriating-language-amp-concepts-mike-porretta

[ix] BC 52, 81

[x] https://greendragoncvr.com/why-do-we-play

[xi] BD 31 (https://www.amazon.ca/Symbolic-Exchange-Death-Jean-Baudrillard/dp/1473907586)

[xii] BD 60

[xiii] Land 396