“DEPRESSION and addiction are hard to distinguish when they happen simultaneously; they seem to overlap and reinforce each other, becoming an endless cycle.”
“Though Dota 2 is entirely built around multiplayer engagement and teamwork, the first genuine feeling of social togetherness and empathy I ever got from the game was when I read these reviews/cries for help. I also only read these reviews because I was stuck in the Steam marketplace waiting for Dota 2 to redownload, after I had uninstalled it 20 hours earlier in a hopeless attempt to be free.”
“FOR those blissfully unaware, Dota 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), which is a strategy-game subgenre somewhere between MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft) and RTS (real-time strategy games such as Starcraft II).”
“MOBAs take multiplayer gameplay, vast player populations, and RPG-style leveling up from MMORPGs and join them with the resource management and direct head-to head competition of an RTS.”
“The map is always the same, the creeps always spawn in the same pattern, the available items are constant, and in general the game setup is static. The field, rules, and goals are always the same, which makes Dota and other MOBAs similar to traditional sports.”
“But that basic stasis is also a key part of the game’s addictiveness: Every match is simultaneously totally identical and completely different.”
“With so many possible combinations of heroes, items, and scenarios, most of them coming to a head in split-second confrontations reliant on intense mouse and keyboard speed, there is an almost infinite learning curve (not to mention the fact that the game is regularly patched, with the developers changing the nature of abilities, items, and heroes). An entire game can be won or lost by the particular order in which one of the 10 players decides to purchase their items, or by one player being a few steps out of position and getting caught out before a crucial fight. The game is hard—really hard—and the most famous introductory guide to it is called “Welcome to Dota, You Suck.””
“When you’re playing with a good, well-coordinated team (or just playing well on your own) you can enter an almost euphoric state of competitive flow. But most of the time you’ll watch teammates—or yourself—wander aimlessly around the map, getting killed seemingly for no reason, all the while telling each other to buy wards, throw their ultimate, or stop being such noobs.”
“And beyond the game-related insults, there is the homophobia, racism, and misogyny endemic to any space dominated by well-off white boys, who, in the case of Dota, also yelp xenophobically about the Peruvian, Filipino, or Russian players who are well-represented in the Dota community.”
“In other words, Dota 2 puts players in a dysfunctional and horrifying social space while offering an addictive set of opportunities to grow individual skills and exhibit mastery in competition. No wonder it can feel so familiar. No wonder there’s so much money in it.”
“Video games, and addictions generally, give depression an explanation: “I’m not emailing anyone because I’m spending all my time playing this game.” This is still really depressing, but at least it makes sense. You know where the time goes—you can see what happened, the hours are (depressingly) tracked in game. Without the metrics of addiction, the days just melt in a morass of incapability, a catatonic ennui that consumes your time without reason.”
“Addiction as a response to depression is, in a certain way, the response of a perfect capitalist subject.”
“The system’s requisite growth depends on the generalized principle that our pleasure comes from increasing consumption: More will make us happier.”
“The addictive impulse attempts to salvage this ideology from the disappointments it repeatedly delivers. Rather than reflecting on the fact that consuming more never provides the promised happiness, addiction just keeps upping the ante: just one more game, one more win will do it.”
“Addiction is thus an effort to reconcile yourself with an abusive society that makes unlimited demands of its subjects.”
“But it gives the game away that these addictions are seen as pathological only when they make you unproductive—i.e., drinking becomes a “drinking problem” when it interferes with your work or the reproductive labor of your personal relationships.”
“Addiction is a produced, fully anticipated response to the vicissitudes of consumer capitalism and a diagnosable pathology of legal consequence.”
“This makes it an incredibly effective weapon of control. Not only is addiction presupposed, but if you are not addicted in the right way, the state can intervene with punishment.”
“Contraband drug markets (and the concomitant wars on them) produce optimal consumer-subjects while also generating a social “crisis” that allows the state to intervene and enforce the racialized, gendered, and classed stratification necessary for maximum profit production for the few who benefit from the system.”
“THE addict, then, can be recognized by her overidentification with capitalism’s ideological promises.”
“From this vantage point, drug addiction appears as a sort of utopian version of consumption: There is no use value to drugs except enjoyment; you directly buy “pleasure.””
“This validates the promise that consumer goods can provide pleasure without complications, mediations, or social relations to facilitate that pleasure.”
“If the drug addict, in this sense, is the too perfect consumer, whose extreme consumption ultimately makes them unfit for further productivity and consumption, the video game addict is the too perfect worker.”
“To see this, it helps to recognize how many video games are utopian work simulators: You advance and progress by getting better and better at an expanding series of repetitive gestures.”
“As you put more time into the game, the keystrokes transition from deliberate and difficult into muscle memory, and you go from being focused on what your hands are doing to making choices on behalf of your character, eventually inhabiting the fantasy of their power and ability.”
“The repetitive gestures become your skills, your abilities, rather than those of a diegetic avatar. You become capable of making instantaneous decisions and acting on them with maximum effectiveness.”
“This is the pleasure of learning, of “building knowledge,” even if done within a closed system that makes it both more reliably achieved and more meaningless.”
“There’s a reason both marketers and game reviewers always discuss how many hours of gameplay you’re liable to get from a particular product. It is desirable to lose countless hours memorizing and studying an intricate system of rules and effects, to imagine endless combinations of outcomes of different wizard battles.”
“That this learning occurs within the closed and technologically mediated context of a video game makes it difficult to transform the skills into something meaningful, consequential, potentially liberating or socially constructive.”
“Video games rechannel what would otherwise be an impulse toward real unproductivity into a form of consumption that reinforces the pleasures of work.”
“In video games, discipline is pleasurable, designed and done for fun, and it places you into a fantastic and fictional world in which you are empowered beyond human possibilities. In the midst of gameplay, you enter that vaunted neoliberal state of flow, you achieve Malcolm Gladwell’s mastery in far fewer than 10,000 hours, you are working at something.”
“Discipline, learning, and productivity melt together into an ecstatic experience of achievement, achievement whose pleasures are individual and internal.”
“This “flow” is stripped of social meaning and decontextualized from networks of power.”
“It makes any repetitious activity—and by extension, any kind of work—capable of appearing as individual progression, creative production, skill learning, and strength building.”
“The ease with which work, exercise, and other disciplinary tasks have been “gamified” indicates how much games are already about discipline to begin with.”
“Of course, there is a whole world of games that do not fit the above description, that approach games from a more surreal or liberatory or creative or philosophical angle. Games built around communal storytelling—for example the Powered-by-the-Apocalypse series of tabletop role-playing games, or the avant-garde work being done on Twine and other open-source game-development platforms—depend much less on a player’s technical or tactical mastery of gameplay constraints. Such games, by their very nature, do not structure or give way to compulsive, repetitive, addictive relationships.”
“MOBAs achieve the opposite. Not destructive enough to really destroy most players’ lives, nor featuring real play—the actually anarchic play that challenges your perception of the world and the way it functions—MOBAs instead funnel energy, attention, time, and money toward the quest for more perfectly epic and entertaining wizard battles: a quest whose material result is a more perfectly disciplined capitalist subject. Is it any wonder Gamer Gate drew its recruits partly from these communities?”
“Playing video games for 40 compulsive, depressing, and exhausting hours a week is addiction, but going to work for 40 compulsive, depressing, and exhausting hours a week is having a job.”
“Addiction is not defined by the way you feel; it is not about levels of compulsion or willpower. It is defined by what those feelings and compulsions do to your productivity.”
“Addiction is when the pleasures to which one becomes addicted no longer smooth out capitalist relations and social reproduction but disrupt the ability to work.”
“It is not to deny the real suffering and considerable damage that addicts and addiction can wreak to see in addiction a social demand. Is addiction a potential beginning of resistance, rather than merely individual pathology?”
“Perhaps. But the ways in which video-game play reproduces neoliberal subjectivity and productivity make this political transmutation of addiction almost impossible to achieve through video games.”
“The sensation of progress, achievement, and learning in games is both genuinely pleasurable and just effortful enough to satisfy that neoliberal itch toward constant productivity, at least as long as the game is booted up and the endorphins are still pinging: Afterward, guilt sends us back to work, chastised and full of self-reproach.”
“We have entered a historical period where work in the Global North feels as meaningless as it ever has.”
“Our work isn’t making the world any better—in fact, the world is dying of our productivity. The likely political horizons, as the nation-state loses its last shreds of sovereign power in the face of global capital, are merely different cultural organizations of the police state: Do you like your fascism theocratic or liberal-humanist?”
“Video games reflect back and mimic our work’s pointlessness.”
“If leisure is as pointless as work, then maybe work isn’t so pointless after all. And so I just keep playing. There’s rent to be paid, after all.”
“My daily affect has come to rely on my ability to wield a computerized wizard.”
“A gaming addiction is perfect for the lazy workaholic, too resentful of authority to actually work hard for a boss. Trapped within myself, in this insufficient individual subjectivity, a fully engaging method of wasting time is the easiest way I can quiet the insistent internal reminders that productivity is the only virtue, which has been the main cop in my head for most of my adult life. What a trap: The things that best quiet the cop make him stronger.”
“The coordination, strategy, and reflexes that Dota demands would be challenging enough on its own. But you have to play with nine other people—for the most part, random people, strangers, of whom most, on U.S. servers, will be white boys and probably well-off ones, considering the hardware required.”