The Pixel Revolution

Jamie Woodcock, Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle

Why should Marxists care about videogames? Perhaps even better, why should videogamers care about Marxists? The digital play world has gotten along spectacularly without interference from a cadre of po-faced academics who interpret the world through an industrialized economic lens. Yet Dr. Jamie Woodcock, Oxford University researcher and lifelong videogamer himself, decided to approach his two passions together. The result is surprisingly uplifting.

Woodcock approaches videogames from two angles. (And he spells “videogame” thus too, as one word. It looks weird to me, but let’s stipulate his spelling for now.) The first and longer section considers how games are made. This sounds straightforward, especially given recent revelations about the near-sweatshop conditions games studios famously maintain. In the latter section, Woodcock looks at how we play games—which proves more difficult and loaded.

Discussions of videogames often begin with Atari and “Pong,” introduced in 1972. But Woodcock cites an early mainframe computer designed especially to play simple games as early as 1940. Is that, he asks, an example of a videogame? Which leads us into questions of definition, like what exactly is a videogame? What even is a game? These questions prove more difficult than you’d expect, and also more rewarding.

Games of various kinds grew alongside computers, which means they inevitably grew alongside the American defense network. This relationship between videogames and the military-industrial complex recurs throughout Woodcock’s book. But Woodcock notes early programmers devised their games as ways of resisting the regimented hierarchy of military contractor life. So early hacker culture was deeply controlled, yet simultaneously anarchic by nature.

This contradiction spills into game-making culture. Hackers and coders, being innate individualists, refuse to unionize. But without collective bargaining abilities, games workers are routinely exploited by management, who demand high-handed control, marathon hours, and few contract benefits. Woodcock isn’t the first to notice the contradiction between “individualism” and individuality; without a union, hackers get reduced to cogs in the machine.

Not that hackers take management demands quietly, no. Woodcock describes various ways programmers have written anti-capitalist messages into their videogames. Much of Woodcock’s book expounds upon a side mission written into Assassins’ Creed: Syndicate, where the player has an opportunity to join Marx himself in organizing textile workers and sabotaging management. The metaphor is too spot-on to be coincidence.

Dr. Jamie Woodcock

In a later chapter, Woodcock explores a recent development: Game Workers Unite (GWU), a hackers’ grassroots activist… um… event, where several game-makers banded together to expound, for lack of a better term, class consciousness. It isn’t a union really, not yet, but Woodcock admits events are progressing so rapidly, he can’t keep abreast of them; by now, hackers could, after two generations, finally be organized to fight the system.

Woodcock’s second section, dealing with game play rather than game creation, runs shorter. It also has a different tone from his first section. Where Woodcock interviews several game-makers, including forward thinkers engaged in organizing the industry, he doesn’t much speak to fellow game-players. Though he occasionally quotes reviewers, he mostly just analyzes the game experience, similar to Michel Foucault.

What he analyzes, though, is remarkable. In my youth, moralistic elders criticized videogames as isolating and lonely, stealing youth from communal outdoor play. But since around 1997, videogames have become increasingly team-oriented, a shared experience. This has only become more so as improving internet technologies make streaming games worldwide realistic. Games have elaborate, cinematic storylines, detailed graphics, and a team experience more nuanced than football.

This doesn’t make games socially neutral, though. Many games, particularly first-person shooters, tend to glorify war, and travel hand-in-glove with American military imperialism. Woodcock even describes how, with only minor modifications, the military has repurposed popular videogames as recruitment tools. Games cannot shed hacker culture’s roots among military contractors, apparently.

But that doesn’t make games relentless war machine propaganda. Since around 2010, an increasing number of first-person shooters have emphasized war’s futility. Early games stressed World War II, where American GIs fought an explicitly evil enemy, or the Cold War, where evil was implicit. Recent games have shifted focus to World War I, Vietnam, or the War on Terror, foregrounding war as interminable, degrading, and bleak.

In games, as in game-making culture, Woodcock sees potential for social engagement and expanding consciousness. Marxists, he admits, have often avoided addressing issues of play, and what the proletariat does after hours. But videogames are increasingly the way people organize themselves into communities and groups. Coupling his sophisticated research with plain-English writing, Woodcock opens games as a legitimate forum for social analysis.