“Warm and Stuffy” - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 164

“the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they
are in the hands of consumers, who lust after them as if they were “inde-
pendent beings” (1987, 77).
Because prophets of both game gloom and game glory focus on such
questions, they miss a simultaneously underlying and supervening mate-
rial reality. Before there can be a story to analyse, a message to decode,
a mind to psychologize, a designer to train, a military contract to sign, a
company to hatch or a social pattern to identify in the collective and indi-
vidual use of games, there has to be a physical medium, a technical means
of communication.
In everyday life, the sublime experience of games conceals the physical
work and material resources that go into them, whereas the technological
sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, aromatic, axiomatic,
even sexy. Such symbolic power underlies what Juliet Schor calls “the mate-
riality paradox”: the greater the frenzy to buy goods and services for their
transcendent or non-material cultural meaning, the greater the use of mate-
rial resources (2010, 40-41) even when they are seemingly immaterial, as
per online games. Conversely, mentioning the political-economic arrange-
ments that make games possible, or the environmental consequences of
their appearance and disappearance, is unwelcome. It's no way to describe
“cool stuf .”
Fortunately, we have a corrective to the sublime that originates from
inside this very beguiling discourse. Testifying before the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission in the 1950s, the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer,
who led the group that developed the atomic bomb, talked about the instru-
mental rationality that animated his team. Once his colleagues saw what
was feasible, the device's impact lost intellectual and emotional signifi cance
for them, due to its “technically sweet” quality (U.S. Atomic Energy Com-
mission 1954, 81). Just such technical saccharine is the lifeblood of the
technological sublime.
Bruno Latour's (1993) actor-network analysis of contemporary life as
the sum of equal and overlapping infl uence among natural phenomena,
social forces and cultural production provides an alternative. Latour notes,
“Every type of politics has been defi ned by its relation to nature, whose
every feature, property, and function depends on the polemical will to
limit, reform, establish, short-circuit, or enlighten public life” (2004, 1,
33). Put another way: “we have only ever managed to philosophise with the
help of things: the turning stars, apples which fall, turtles and hares, rivers
and gods . . . cameras and computers” (Muecke 2008, 95). Just as objects
of scientifi c knowledge come to us in hybrid forms that are coevally af ected
by society and culture, so the latter two domains are themselves af ected
by the natural world.
Picking up on that insight, we need to reconsider games in the light of
their ecological context, rewiring the historiography of innovation to indi-
cate how they have deepened the world's environmental burden in the same