Art and Labour, Part 3: Video Games

A pink bear plods along a beachfront just after dawn. She is singing a little song to herself. She has no memory of the life she had before she arrived on the island and neither do her fellow animal co-habitants. There is plenty to do and there is plenty of leisure. Occasionally, perhaps once a day, the islander who named the island approaches her and gives her a little present. This island neighbour is human and they tend to vanish into their home before returning to run about the island, shaking trees, thwacking rocks for ore and fishing for sharks. In many ways the human seems to have a lot of power over the island but it often involves them agreeing to some kind of financial arrangement with a local tanouki who is also a very powerful corporate tycoon. The pink bear doesn't know that the humans are visitors from another world, where a plague has sequestered them to their homes and some have not made physical contact with another human being for months. Some barely had friends at all but are now pressed up hard against the hardest edge of their friendlessness. But here at least, they are able to entertain an idea of what friendship might be. Here, they can watch a cartoon sun make contact with the sea's edge and pursue work that is rewarding and meaningful.

Come the next century, if libraries still exist, there will be an entire shelf in each one dedicated to texts about Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the pandemic. While the game would have undoubtedly been a big seller –⁠ the pandemic, and lockdowns in particular, were the factors that made it one of the cultural cornerstones of a global crisis.

We could only spend one hour a day outside our homes but we could spend hour after hour on an island with our little NPC friends and the visiting avatars of our distant family members and friends. We could hand them little gifts that didn't need to be sprayed with disinfectant and speak right into their fuzzy, big-eyed faces.

The difference between video games and more traditional art forms hinges mainly on interactions with environments and behaviourally conscious entities. They are still fictions in their own ways but the membrane between the work and the audience is more porous. Sometimes it seems to disappear completely.

I often wonder if an out-of-body experience is similar to a third-person video game, where your character is running about in your field of visual consciousness but you still feel like it is you. My proper night time dreams always occur in first person but I can often see my own face and body in daydreams. So, in this sense, Animal Crossing offered an extended daydream of a simple, communal life on a placid, bucolic island while we were all locked up in our homes with the catastrophic effects of our experiments with sourdough.

Another thing that Animal Crossing offered was work. Not just for those of us who were on furlough and for whom the novelty of having actual time to do stuff had waned, but for those of us that were stuck in the purgatory of Zoom or MS Teams. Work on the little island involved manageable tasks –⁠ a spot of fishing, fruit picking, carpentry or cooking that might earn a few bells, the currency of the Animal Crossing games. What if your axe or fishing rod aren't up to the task for the job you want to do? No problem, the island harbours all the materials you need (albeit a certain amount per day) for you to upgrade your equipment.

The work of Animal Crossing isn't just rewarding, it enables progression to better things. When you first set up on the island you're given a little tent to live in, much like the participants of the Fyre Festival. But, unlike the Fyre Festival, there’s the opportunity for upgrading. A little bit of elbow grease here and there and you'll soon be living in a little house of your own. Not only that, if you keep on putting in the work, you can add new room after new room that would normally make you the envy of your animal buddies if they weren't completely immune to such negative feelings.

How exactly do you get these upgrades to your house? Well, you get a loan from the Nook Bank of course, the fiscal institution run by the island’s corporate benefactor and CEO of Nook Inc, Tom Nook.

Tom Nook appears to be a raccoon but he is actually a Tanouki, a "racoon dog" that is endemic to East Asia. You soon realise that nothing on this island can be done without the benediction of Nook Inc. In many ways the island is the property of Nook Inc and you are simply a tenant who also has to upgrade your housing through making money from Nook Inc's infrastructure and then paying those same bells back to them.

I knew some people that were caught completely by surprise by the pandemic, in the sense that they weren't already in possession of a Nintendo Switch. I remember scanning my social media feeds during lockdown and seeing the FOMO of those that weren't able to nurture their little island. My suggestion to them was the same one that I offer to other people who can only play games on a phone, tablet or low spec computer: Stardew Valley.

I've spoken about Stardew Valley and its sole developer Eric Barone in another blog about artists and introversion. It's quite possibly one of the best games I've ever played. Its plot and gameplay loop are heavily inspired by the Harvest Moon games of the 90s onwards. Here, you play a character that has inherited a farm from a recently deceased grandparent. You begin the game with a patch of dirt, a bag of seeds and a little box to dump your produce with the town's mayor giving a payout each night for their value. From those humble beginnings you can build up your farm, foster friendships and even romance the fellow citizens of Pelican Town. 

There are a number of storylines within the game, one of which concerns a conflict between the town's dilapidated community centre and the JoJa corporation who have just opened a local JoJa Mart nearby. The player can either work at restoring the community centre or can sell out and accelerate the corporation's takeover of the town. From an ethical standpoint, the corpo route is portrayed as the wrong choice, albeit one that doesn't end in catastrophe for the player. 

I love Stardew Valley because it's the perfect execution of a certain genre –⁠ the cozy farming life sim. The chilled soundtrack and pixel art sprites are beautifully rendered. The character of the seasons, the changes of landscape and ambience are so well realised that, when I notice a sudden shift in the season in the real world, I am just as prone to think of Stardew Valley as I am to ponder the work of Keats. 

However, despite emphasising the values of community and friendship against the corporate takeover of all aspects of modern life, its mechanics are inherently in thrall to the meritocratic capitalist myth. You start off with a patch of dirt and a bag of seeds. You farm, fish, cook and mine ores and dump your produce in a box that the town's mayor pays you for every night.

Within a few in-game years, not only had I turned my inherited hovel into a cosy family home, but I also possessed a winery as well as a hut full of replicators that churned out diamonds. My sprawling farm was fully automated as far as watering and picking was concerned. I was probably rich enough to enact a hostile takeover of the Joja Corp itself. The biggest fantasy the game offers is the idea that anybody can build an empire from nothing by putting a few hours of graft in every day. 

This leads me on to what is perhaps the biggest genre of work-based game: the Dad game. The Dad game is a game that involves some kind of repeated, skilled task. Mowing a lawn, power-washing a vehicle or driving across a continent in a truck. And yes, these games tend to have a lot of Dads in their player base. Though, at the same time, I can imagine that a lot of these Dads might work in offices for pretty good money. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that most truck drivers don’t play Euro Truck Simulator 2 unless they’re making a viral reddit/instagram post of them playing it while sat in the cab of their rig.

I sometimes wonder if the titular Dads that play these games see an appealing freedom in the life of the long-distance trucker –⁠ just you and the long stretch of the autobahn without a supervisor or manager breathing down your throat. This is, of course, not the typical life of an HGV driver, who has to tackle unsociable hours, isolation and very narrow margins with regard to delivery times. 

That said, there is one game I can think of that succeeds as a Dad game while at the same time confronting the alienation and exploitation that accompanies labour. That game is Hardspace Shipbreaker.

The gameplay loop ticks all those Dad game boxes. The player is based in an orbital scrapyard, where they carefully disassemble spaceships within a given time limit. The player has a series of laser cutting tools and grapple hooks for hacking up the spacecraft and depositing the parts in an incinerator or recycler, while buzzing about with a jetpack. The job is replete with hazards –⁠ things can go seriously wrong when dealing with fuel lines and coolant feeds. Not properly depressurising a room can lead to you being flung against a wall or smashed through a cockpit’s glass. On top of that, some ships are powered by nuclear reactors that need to be carefully disconnected and then deposited before they explode and wipe out the entire facility.

Despite the danger, the gameplay is incredibly satisfying, it really gets to the heart of that flow and immersion one can find with repetitive labour. However, this core gameplay loop is framed within a dystopian narrative where the player begins work in crippling debt to the corporation that employs them. The Lynx corporation controls many elements of the player’s life in space. The player uploads their consciousness every day so that, if one of the hazards has fatal consequences, they can be reconstituted in a new body and sent back out. The cost of this resurrection is, of course, added to the player’s debt that they are working off.

The player receives messages from other shipbreakers and soon there are whispers about worker’s rights and organisation. The job continues, with the player paying off their debt and upgrading their equipment so they can take on bigger, more challenging ships. During the player’s downtime, they hatch a plan with their comrades about how they can best strike back at the corporation to empower themselves and their fellow workers, strewn throughout the galaxy. The game nails the isolation and satisfaction of the work while at the same time dealing with the issues that face industrial workers today.

It should finally be noted that the video games industry itself is currently a grim example of exploitation and alienation within work. 10,000 people working in the video games industry lost their jobs in 2023 and 8000 more jobs have been cut in the first quarter of 2024. Many of the big corporations behind these cuts, such as Microsoft and Sony, are not in any immediate danger of going bankrupt and their executives and shareholders are far from being destitute. Add to this the many scandals concerning sexual harassment and crunch-culture. While there are some studios that are able to make great games while looking after their workers (Larian studios are currently hiring many laid off workers to work on their next game), it should never be far from our minds that the great pleasure we get from video games is connected to hard-working devs who are often alienated from the fruits of their labour.

Thanks for reading this

So, after publishing on a Sunday instead of a Friday last week, I've decided to make it a regular thing from now on. Fridays are really hectic for me and it’s been a bit of a mad rush getting these posts out on time. I like to post on a regular schedule because I find it rewarding and it keeps my writer-brain ticking over. For me, tying my creative work to a schedule brings a certain kind of meaning to each week. As you get older, those weeks tend to fly by a lot quicker but consolation can be found in looking back at that half-forgotten blur and seeing that I made stuff.

Similarly, I’m pushing my videos into midweek. I film the talks on Saturday mornings when I get the flat to myself and I have recently realised that giving myself a 24hr turnover for editing isn’t a definitive act of self-compassion. Having a few more days to nip and tuck them feels like a sensible option if I want to keep posting them.

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Cheers

Niall