“Clash isn’t especially addictive (I know what that looks like), but it puts me in constant low-grade anxiety”
“There is a trite-and-true political argument that’s often made about such games: how they’re capitalism simulators, models of military-industrial neoliberalism, ideologies encoded as entertainment”
“This capitalist angle gets a lot more interesting when you consider that Clash’s purpose is to extract the world’s most important resource from its player base (this time, read: money). Gameplay largely involves waiting for things to finish building. If you don’t want to wait, you spend.”
“Many of the top players are wealthy, disproportionately Middle Eastern folks who’ve spent upwards of $16,000 on the game; game developers call these high-spenders “whales,” and one Saudi whale in particular was rumored to have spouted over a million dollars on the game.”
“Clashing on the cheap imposes a discipline on your life. I like to start upgrades right before bedtime so that my builders can take advantage of the natural eight-hour waiting period called sleep.”
“So the most interesting thing about Clash isn’t how it’s an allegory for late capitalism. (Isn’t everything? Isn’t that the point?) It’s that Clash makes especially clear how everything is interchangeable under such a system.”
“Time is life is work is death is money is property is time.”
“Technology fuzzes the distinction between real and virtual.”
“Like almost every game with a death mechanic, the true currency of Clash isn’t virtual gold but actual time. Dying in a game forces you to waste your time trying again, “spending” part of your limited lifespan on a failed effort.”
“One can discern in mainstream game writing a common strain of anxiety, quick to either reassure us of gaming’s artistic legitimacy and utility, or else its corrupting effects (recall the “hand-eye coordination” vs. “Nintendinitis” think pieces of the ’90s).”
“In movies, a character playing video games alone is understood to signify that he—always “he”—is lazy, neglectful, depressed, antisocial, unambitious, and/or emotionally stunted. (A few games have cheekily internalized these archetypes—consider Grand Theft Auto V’s insufferable gamebro Jimmy De Santa, or Uncharted 4’s Nathan Drake, who dismisses the PlayStation as a “little TV game thing.”) House of Cards stands as an exception: Frank Underwood demonstrates range, erudition, and hipness in his fondness for both Call of Duty and Monument Valley, though he also demonstrates being a multiple murderer.”
“The suggestion is that virtual life is an immersive escape fantasy, one in which your humdrum assigned existence is exchanged for other, more interesting, powerful, or liberated ones.”
“But more often, video games, in the way they structure our behavior and obtrude into our lives, are less escapes from reality than they are metaphors for it.”
“If modern life often seems like it’s about making money for large corporations just to pull in enough resources to buy things, collect experiences, form good connections, have fun, and improve yourself, all against a backdrop of nonstop worldwide violent conflict and plunder (especially in the Middle East), then Clash is more lifelike than life itself.”
“In that sense, it’s not just a war simulator played on your phone but a success simulator played on your life, one whose achievements can be more consistently rewarding than what our suboptimal social reality offers.”
“The pleasure of games like Clash is not joy, excitement, or catharsis, and certainly not material gain. It’s focus and achievement—the steady drip of progress, of constantly gaining and spending currency.”
“Like cultivating a bonsai, building your base is a means of externalizing self-improvement.”
“Though you lose battles quite often, in Clash there is no concept of loss. Destroyed buildings are rebuilt in seconds, troops can be replaced with identical ones in minutes, and your looted resources can be easily regained with a bit more warfare.”
“Clash guarantees that your property only improves, nothing ever breaks or obsolesces or depreciates. Upgrades are highly conspicuous, inviting you to compare your dingy stone walls with other players’ purple crystal bulwarks, or your rickety wooden towers to another’s iron parapets—here, luxury is not just power but military power. The only thing that’s irreplaceable is the time you spend, the time you kill, playing it.”
“It’s a lot easier to call gamers (or bookworms) weak-minded misfits than it is to countenance the idea that art, even bad art, is richer, deeper, more meaningful than what’s available under certain shitty conditions of life: poverty, oppression, exclusion, illness, or even plain old distaste.”