Destiny: Capitalism and MMOs

Bungie, the video game development studio responsible for the creation of the multi-million dollar grossing Halo franchise, recently released a new video game for sale. Bungie is one of the most wealthy and famous video game studios in the industry, so their new game understandably had a big budget. The game is projected cost to Bungie an estimated 500 million dollars over the next decade, and its development and launch was surrounded by a lot of media-confected hype. [1]2 By triple-A gaming standards it is critical failure, despite the fact that Bungie and its game’s publisher, Activision, have made a lot of money off of it.

The spectacle of the new video game Destiny should give us pause for thought. It presents itself as an archetype of the mass production of culture under capitalism. In this vein it is a perfect example of Georg Lukacs’ concepts of reification and the contemplative stance. In this essay I will discuss how capitalist cultural forms are reflected inside the famous new game.

Introduction #

I was inspired to write this essay after reading this article about Destiny in The New Yorker. It argues that the endless cycle of commodity acquisition in Destiny, and, more generally, all MMOs, reflects the commodification and consumerisation of life under capitalism. I broadly agree, but I think I can go further than merely critiquing the immediate effects of capitalism. In this essay I will argue that Destiny is a prime example of how capitalism distorts our perception, understanding, and interaction(s) of and with reality. I will also argue that there is a way out of the dilemma, a solution to the distorting and corrupting effects of mass produced art.

This essay will be divided into three parts.

1. The first part will outline how Destiny‘s media hype was confected through advertisement.
2. The second part will discuss how the video game’s execution and design were the result of the bureaucratisation and systematisation of art production; and
3. The third part will perform a discussion of Lukacs’ cultural metacritique of capitalism. This part will show how Destiny, and other MMORPGs, reflects the distorting culture of capitalism.

Georg Lukacs argued that capitalism distorts our interface with reality. Two concepts that he used to describe this distortion are reification and the contemplative stance. Both are ideas linked together.

Reification is a real phenomenon under capitalism. It comes about due to the way economic producers are separated from each other in the capitalist economic system. As production becomes more specialised, the only way agents end up interacting with each other is through exchange of commodities. The effect is that relationships and interactions between humans become obscured and distorted, and it begins to seem as if objects are the originators of interactions of relations between people. The idea comes from the beginning of the first volume of Marx’s _Capital. _[2]5 As Andrew Feenberg says, “reification means, literally, treating human relations as relations between things.” [3]6

There are two ways of digesting and interpreting the concept of reification. The first way condemns capitalism for being an alienating and inauthentic social system. One example I like to give of this is how the consumer culture around Apple Corporation works. It perceived that it is somehow ‘cooler’ to use Apple products than other platforms, and that there is a certain x-factor about Apple phones and computers that improve one’s quality of life. Apple consumer culture has gone so far as to create a cult of personality around Steve Jobs. This first way of interpreting reification is correct, but it doesn’t go deep enough.

A deeper and more incisive view of reification raises questions about how it comes about. Feenberg provides a useful elucidation:

The theory of reification explains how the cultural pattern of capitalism is derived from its economic system and, still more fundamentally, from the practices producing that system. [4]7

From this quote one should have detected a circularity in description, and this observation would have been correct. This is not an error of reasoning, because it reveals the true operation of capitalism. Capitalist cultural structures are bound up with the agency of the members of its society, and one does not, in a one-way fashion, ‘determine’ the other. This is known as “performativity”. In this way, the separation of the producers leads to reified subjective experiences of the world, which in turn impact on further material and objective economic organisation. As Marx says,

[Capitalism] must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather, it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. [5]8

This means that reification is first and foremost practical. It is, as Feenberg notes, “an emergent property of social behaviour, a property that is irreducible to the traditional categories of subjectivity and objectivity because it constitutes them”. [6]9 This allows us to define Lukacs’ concept of the contemplative stance. The contemplative stance is the practical outcome of capitalism’s distorting and corrupting process of reification. Subjective agency under capitalism that has been reified assumes the contemplative stance.

But what does this mean? How does a reified subjectivity interact with the world? Lukacs provides us with an answer.

What is important is to recognise clearly that all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasingly the objective forms of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature. And also, the subject of this ‘action’ likewise assumes increasingly the attitude of the pure observer of these – artificially abstract – processes, the attitude of the experimenter. [7]10

The contemplative stance accepts (or rather, is identical with) the reified operation and appearance of capitalism at its face-value. It evaluates capitalism as an alien, artificial system that presents individuals with no choice but to accommodate themselves to its workings. In this way individuals are supposed to calculate a way to bring about favourable outcomes for themselves based on how the system works. Think: Adam Smith’s invisible hand. What is significant to note is that these calculations are based on formal, abstract, quantified models. Reified subjectivities divorce theory from practical activity and attempt to reproduce reality in thought without ever trying to impact or change that reality. The contemplative stance is so called because the subjectivity in which it manifests itself is critically passive and accommodating.

Manufacturing Hype: Marketing and the Contemplative Stance #

One of the stunning things about Destiny was that it was subject to absolutely no pre-release review. One of the arguments made by Bungie and Activision on this point were that the game’s permanent need for mass human participation through the internet would have made it impossible for video game journalists to fully review the game without the game’s servers being live and populated. This is a very clever argument, but and it attempts to white-wash the truth about the video game Destiny: that it is a commodity. That Bungie and Activision stand to make or lose a lot of money if their commodity isn’t consumed correctly.

Joseph Jackmovich from Playstation Lifestyle reveals how cynically the game was marketed, with review copies of Destiny only being provided to game publications _after _launch:

Destiny’s release sent a clear message to publications: “You’re not needed anymore.” You can be sure that PR departments in large companies across the world are discussing the state of game reviews in the wake of Destiny’s release and none of it bodes well for the people who write about games.

Why were game publications jilted? The answer again lies with the contemplative stance:

Even with the unstated pressure of badmouthing a title you’ve been given by a big company, advertising still comes across as a safer investment — though an initially more expensive one.

It is indeed bizarre that a work of art should be subject to quantification and calculation: an ‘investment’, a piece of divisible property. But this is not the first time that it has happened. The reason why this has happened and its effect will be discussed in the next part. For the time being it is enough to notice that Bungie and Activision made a scientific-like calculation about what would return them the _maximum amount of profit _on their game. At some other point they probably considered that making a piece of art would be worthwhile, but that doesn’t factor into how to sell it. Destiny‘s form (an exchangeable commodity) and the content (its use, its existence as art) get wrenched apart in this artistic ecology (simply: its ‘production’ and its ‘consumption’). Perhaps this is why so many journalists pose the stupid rhetorical question, ‘what is Destiny?’ When the actual quality of a commodity becomes lost in haze of its formalisation and abstraction through marketing, one is probably very much entitled to ask, ‘what actually is this video game?’

The reader might at first be a little apprehensive and may ask, ‘but surely this is about the openness, accuracy and price of information, there should be some sort of policeman who steps in and prevents big companies from lying and twisting the truth’. With respect, I must say this misses the point. The point is that the whole business of capitalism affects the way reality’s very fabric is constituted. The Destiny‘s mass production, and the cultural process from which it springs, is constitutive of, as Marx said above, the mode of life of our society. This means that the way in which art is mass produced (like Destiny) is objective for us right now. Our mode of life is, as Lukacs said above, a form of objectivity. This means that there is no perfect position from which to assail the falseness of this current form of objectivity. It can only be broken down and transformed from within.

Artist as Bureaucrat: The ‘Fun Factory’ #

Destiny is a very peculiar piece of art. Its creation may or may not be dependent on the exclusive genius of a person, or a group of people, but the important thing about it is that it has been produced exclusively for profit. One thing that always happens when art comes to be mass produced is that its ‘production’ (i) becomes divided into many different specialisations; (ii) Articles that describe and explain the various in-game commodities have already started appearing. All of Destiny‘s in-game commodities are, as one would expect in a game that mimics the defining cultural features of capitalism, commensurable in either experience points, the game’s universal currency, or some other commodity. This article, from VG 24/7, for instance, explains what ‘Consumables’ are.

Other articles (also from VG 24/7) explain the various quantified attributes that are attached the player’s avatars.

Still further, some articles (surprisingly, still from VG 24/7) outline guides about how to increase your character’s key quantified attribute, its level:

Level is everything in Destiny. If it’s too low you’re going to be locked out of certain events and instances, and even if you could access them you’d get blasted to smithereens for being the weakling you are.

(It is telling to see how VG 24/7 swims with the tide of sycophantic journalism on Destiny, especially after they released a fairly incisive critique of such journalism here. It proves how cynical and money-grubbing professional video game journalism is.)

==

As Arthur Gies from Polygon notes,

… once you’ve fought a faction once, there’s not really any surprises to speak of. Fights don’t unfold differently over the course of each planet once every unit type is involved. Some of them just take longer.

“Longer” would be polite here, by the way. Destiny’s combat most resembles the MMO genre with its bosses, who are, if you’ll pardon the cliche, bullet sponges that take entirely too long to kill.

Although Gies then goes on to argue that Destiny is atypical of MMOs because shooting and fighting seems to be the only way one can interact with the environment [2]17 (this is corroborated by Vince Ingenito from IGN [3]19), this doesn’t detract from the point that MMOs, and Destiny in particular, operate by constructing a reified virtual reality.

Phil Kollar, the second author of the same Polygon article mentioned above …

Bungie expects players to repeat these few pieces of [end-game] content over and over for the mere chance at a worthwhile upgrade.

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I recognize that plenty of games build successful, long-lasting communities out of end-game repetition — including lots of games I love. But they tend toward less stinginess with loot and generally have a lot more content at launch to pull from.

Endnotes #

1 Leo Sun, Fool.com, “Back in February, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick boldly claimed that Destiny would be the ‘best selling new video game IP in history.’” (http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/09/19/activisions-destiny-and-the-business-of-video-game.aspx)

2 Marx, Capital, vol 1, ch 1, s 4, “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.”

3 Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis (2014) 62 (http://www.versobooks.com/books/1638-the-philosophy-of-praxis).

4 Ibid, 67.

5 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Part 1, Section A, “First Premises of Materialist Method” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2).

6 Feenberg, above n 3, 66.

7 Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (trans. Rodney Livingstone, 1971, 1967), “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought”, 131 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs1.htm).

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2 “Destiny isn’t like other MMOs, because shooting is all it does. There are no character relationships to explore, no crafting to speak of. There’s no monuments to build or spaces to make your mark on. In fact, there’s not even much variety to speak of — each environment in the game feels small, and playing just through the campaign missions, you’ll see the same parts of them multiple times. You’ll spend literal hours retreading the same ground, shooting the same mobs.” (http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/12/6138497/destiny-review-no-fate)

3 “That says a lot considering that fighting is, disappointingly, the only way you can meaningfully interact with the beautiful world around you.” (http://au.ign.com/articles/2014/09/03/destiny-review)