There was a time when people talked of video games as an art form. They had sophisticated modular narratives, critics would say, as well as parallax scrolling and anamorphic perspective. Halo? Its killzones had a radiant beauty. BioShock? Love those eerie 1940s stylings.
But the games that are booming today are different. They’re what used to be called “resource management” games, and a lot of them can be found on Facebook. They are games, if we’re honest, that people play sneakily on their computers while at work.
Something odd’s at play here. Work is becoming less like work, what with teleworking, flexitime, automation and entire industries such as PR, marketing and (unfortunately) journalism spreading on to social networking sites.
Meanwhile, entertainment is becoming more like work. The most popular television programs now are about people doing jobs, or trying to get them: cooking, singing, dancing. And video games are becoming even more like work, too.
I’ve been playing FarmVille on Facebook. You click on the icon and a cartoon yokel in dungarees appears on a grid of green squares. That’s you. Hello!
Your yokel has a pocket full of gold coins. You click on any square to plough it, click to buy seed, click to plant it. Then you wait, anything between two hours and three days, depending on your crop. Then you log on and — look! Your crop has grown.
Click to harvest it. Click, click, click, click, click, anything up to 148 times. Then you get more coins. Plough, sow, wait, click, click, click.
And that’s it. You don’t conquer anything, you don’t run any risks, there’s nobody to fight and nothing to do. As you advance, all that happens is you get more coins and can grow, say, yams instead of carrots. If you’re bored with watching your own imaginary plants grow, you can visit a neighbor’s farm and watch his imaginary plants grow.
“I’ve been to your farm,” a friend told me recently. “You’re growing a lot of pineapples, aren’t you? An awful lot.”
I felt violated. FarmVille pineapples are to real pineapples what a Jeff Koons balloon dog is to my cousin’s dachshund: empty, blandly pretty, infinitely reproducible — and inedible, obviously. Yet there you are at your computer, clicking endlessly to grow imaginary objects for imaginary profit.
When I see the FarmVille icon, I get the same sick feeling I used to get when I knew there was a deadline I was neglecting: a mixture of guilt and a reluctance to do anything about it, made worse in this case because every minute I spend working on my farm is a minute I am not spending working on my work. I have taken to seeking out the crops that take longest to grow so I don’t have to log in to the wretched game more than once every couple of days. But still, there are cows to milk and apples to harvest. And those chickens won’t collect their own eggs. Awful!
This means people are taking time out from unfulfilling, white-collar, desk-bound jobs in order to “play” an unfulfilling, white-collar, desk-bound simulation of manual labor. Which, given the number of clicks involved, is actually the closest to manual labor they’ll get. OK, you’re not about to lose a thumb to a combine harvester, but you are more likely to contract RSI.
It’s not just farming you can get into. There’s a game where you pretend to be a short-order chef, and another where you bake cookies. Even Mafia Wars — where you’d expect a bit of excitement — is essentially a bleak round of collecting money from your property empire and reinvesting it in yet more property. These games are basically identical: take gold, spend gold, rinse, repeat.
So video games, having flirted with the status of art, are now retreating from it. There’s no narrative, and the sounds and images are looped and repetitive, designed to look as designless and generic as possible. Instead of standing aside from the production-line tedium of commerce, they imitate it. Yet millions plough this exhausting virtual furrow.
How will we escape? Well, look what has happened with multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft, calibrated to reward players who spend the most time in-game. Can’t be bothered to invest hundreds of hours slaying boars and digging for gold? For a few bucks on your credit card, workers at a virtual Chinese gold farm will do the work for you, showering your character with unearned gold coins and magic swords.
My prediction is that FarmVille’s crew of dungareed cartoon yokels will end up doing the same — which is, amusingly, what farmers do in the real world: contract out the dreary tasks of reaping and sowing to scandalously underpaid migrant labor. Eventually, we will pay virtual Chinese farmers real money to grow our imaginary pineapples. And what will we do with all the time that this frees up?
I know it sounds silly, but we could always try working.
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