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All Work and No Play - Dissent Magazine

dissentmagazine.org · 3,680 words · saved by 1 readers

Video games, like any creative product, reflect and refract the conditions of their production. Today, what they most resemble is twenty-first-century work.

When I was seven, my best friend Matt and I set out to create a video game. We drew elaborate levels, otherworldly scenes full of alien fauna and complex jumping puzzles; we cut handsome avatars out of construction paper to navigate them. For weeks, we met and planned the game, imagining treacherous scenarios, superhuman powers, challenges to unlock and master. We wrote down numbers and symbols, logging foggy statistics and win conditions. It was thrilling. The game world and our powers within it felt nearly limitless, confined only by our imaginations, our childish penmanship, and the ink in

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