Capitalism, single player games & the heterogeneity of ends
I like to think that videogames, when they are designed to be self-contained little worlds (as when the kind of worldbuilding accomplished in fantasy novels achieves procedural express), manifest a kind of heterogeneity of ends on the part of capitalism. By striving for (even succeeding in) its last end, it circumvents the very same[i].
In capitalism the goal is the reduction of everything to a common underlying basis, to "trade format interchangeable parts"[ii] within an indifferent global medium[iii]. This is possible thanks to the "brothel of [false] commutation"[iv], the reductive [purely usage based[v] and conventional[vi]] system of quantitative[vii] equivalence that is capital… which is a metaphysical first principle, not (in the first place) an economic or social doctrine. Its pretensions to universality cause it to cannibalize external referents[viii], until it stands as a univocal "site of transcription of all possible objects”, a medium whose only law is indifference[ix] and “radical indeterminacy”[x]. Everything is supposed to end up like a stock or token of crypto, whose meaning and value are not physical or ontological, and derive solely from coordinates within a socially-constructed system of meaning.
Making a game like Dark Souls is automatically to make something which cannot be subsumed into this system of meaning: it cannot be market-immanentized or absorbed into the underlying sameness of capital, at least not totally. An economic value is assigned to the material access of the text, surely; one must purchase computing technology, software etc…
But the signified meaning of this text cannot be “reassembled within the terms and function of capital”[xi]. This semiotic terminus, with its contemplative use to you as a rational being, genuinely transcends the very terms of market immanence: public affectation, production and consumption. In fact, this terminus can be continually revisited to the detriment of any social or productive end, even without further economic engagement on part of the player, in perpetuity. It really f*cks shit up, when the goal is the “mathematico-scientific and monetary quantization”[xii] of video game art (and ultimate implementation of a “planetary technocapital singularity”[xiii]), that the worlds people built 10 or 20 years ago fail to perish and continue to attract prospective workers and customers from their role in current events.
I think live service games are a gesture on part of capitalism to correct this problem [of its own creatures escaping its organizational and reductive mechanisms]. "Actually, the game IS reducible to trade format interchangeable parts. It can be quantified"; dependence on licenses and servers, play in terms of time invested relative to cost (not in terms of virtual events and worlds). The makers of such games are rentiers of virtual space.
In any case, it is most clearly demonstrated [by the success of Black Myth: Wukong] that Western video game companies, which spend half trillions of dollars to build and market shit, politically-orthodox games which yet make no money and are played by no one, have brought about their own financial destitution precisely by reducing the things they hope to sell to a profit motive draped in virtual assets.
Western video game media, in turn, propagates the notion that it ought to be this way.
In the very bubble of disgust and frustration this creates amongst players, some random dudes from somewhere outside the West simply have to create a self-contained and novel world to make industry history in the very way the capitalists wish they could themselves. It helps that they told the journalists off publicly too. I bet soon the idea that China will save the world will become memetic and not something only peddled by people like me.
[i] Del Noce Modernity 64+ for heterogenesis of ends
[ii] Land 396
[iii] Baudrillard Simulation (BS) 27
[iv] Baudrillard Death (BD) 31
[v] Dutilh Novaes 65
[vi] GV1 32
[vii] BD 60
[viii] BS 22
[ix] BD 56-60
[x] BD 57
[xi] Land 447
[xii] Land 338-9
[xiii] Land 27, 338, 441