“Warm and Stuffy” - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 163

The second, boosterish group concerns us most here. Its investment
in high art and high technology brokers high neoliberalism via ludology
(ignoring the work of professional associations such as the Association for
the Study of Play and the North American Society for the Sociology of
Sport) and narratology, via the non-materialist, non-medium-specifi c work
of literary studies (ignoring the International Association for Media and
Communication Research and the Union for Democratic Communication).
Drawing on the possessive individualism of neoclassical economics, reac-
tionary game analysts study virtual environments to understand “whole
societies under controlled conditions” (Castronova 2006, 63), neglecting or
caricaturing history, ethnography and media studies as they do so.
Game Studies is therefore fractured between hostile outsiders who do
not play games and supportive insiders who do. But a logocentric interde-
pendence binds the governing binary of Game Studies together in a surpris-
ing way, blinding it to a powerful reality. This binding/blinding derives
from shared obsessions with consciousness and productivity.
Research into everyday life and electronic gadgetry also makes no men-
tion of these topics (see, for example, van den Boomen et al. 2009). The
same lacuna exists in applied rather than purely scholarly work. The Enter-
tainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association's (2004) celebration
of women and video games ignores their painful part in making and dis-
posing of games. Britain's vaunted Byron report on harm to children from
games neglects the children whose forced labour makes and deconstructs
them (Department for Children, Schools and Families and Department
for Culture, Media and Sport 2008). A report entitled Working in Austra-
lia's Digital Games Industry leaves out making games, mining rare earth
metals, and handling e-waste—all of which should fall under “working in
Australia's digital games industry” (Australian Research Council Centre
of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland Univer-
sity of Technology and Games Developers' Association of Australia 2011).
Such studies focus on the consciousness of players and the productivity of
corporations. Materiality is forgotten, excluded as if it were not part of
feelings, thoughts, experiences, careers—or money, oddly. This is a shock-
ing contrast with the British trade union Unite's path-breaking How Green
is My Workplace? A Guide for Unite Members and Representatives in the
Electrical Engineering, Electronics and IT Sector (2008).
Foucault argued that the central problem of modernity was a tendency to
valorize the present (2001, 1388). In Game Studies, a “cult of the present”
is dazzled by the spread of play and players (Mattelart and Constantinou
2008, 22). Game Studies' mythology of innovation and adoption mixes the
sublime—the awesome, the inef able, the uncontrollable, the powerful—
with the beautiful—the approachable, the attractive, the pliant, the sooth-
ing. In philosophical aesthetics, the sublime and the beautiful are generally
regarded as opposites. The unique quality of electronic technology has been
to combine them. This technological sublime relates to what Marx called