Videogames are often discussed under the concept of play, but this is not always how

gamers themselves talk about their experience: they use instead vocabularies of
desperate competition or violence. Take the very common expression of satisfaction
after completing a game: I beat the game. What exactly does it mean to beat a game?
You cant have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the games
point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted
you to do, every step of the way. You didnt play the game, you performed the operations
it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From
this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play. 1
Of course work is a large component of many types of game. The professional chess
player competing in a tournament game does not have the carefree, leisurely attitude
sometimes implied by the term playing: she is performing massive amounts of
cognitive work. Similarly with poker players or tennis players: they are not merely
fooling around but labouring mightily. Because it has rules, a game is never just a game
but also a system of coercion, freely entered into. This in itself is not surprising: as
Johann Huizinga reminded us, the idea of play can comprehend, and is not threatened
by, a fanatical seriousness.2 And the workload of videogames in particular is recognised
in their description by some scholars as a species of ergodic literature.
But videogames seem more and more to resemble work in a different sense: working for
the Man. They hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of
real-world employment. And this represents a surprisingly literal fulfilment of the
criticism Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer advanced of industrial entertainment
more than 60 years ago:
Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape
from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it
again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a mans leisure and
happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his
experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is
merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized
operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from
by approximation to it in ones leisure time.
All amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because,
if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in
the worn grooves of association. No independent thinking must be expected from the

audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which
collapses under reflection), but by signals.3

If games are supposed to be fun, Adorno and Horkheimer might have asked, why do
they go so far to replicate the structure of a repetitive dead-end job? Increasingly,
videogames seem to aspire to a mimesis of the mechanized work process. I mean by this
something different than the external recruitment process observed in the phenomena
of beta releases and the mod scene, where players become unpaid testers and then
contributors to the profitable extension of the corporate product. 4 Rather, I want to
point to the way that the classic single-player game already represents an after-image
of the work process itself.