Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Governance through Philitainment: Playing the Benevolent Subject

2014; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14791420.2014.951948

1479-4233

Ergin Bulut, Robert Mejia, Cameron McCarthy,

AbstractThis article analyzes Free Rice within the context of "the rise of the ludic sublime," where video games are hailed as the solution to highly sophisticated political problems. As part of what we call practices of "philitainment," Free Rice, we argue, functions within the political domain of what Jodi Dean has termed "communicative capitalism" and therefore both captures resistance and actually solidifies global capitalism. Ultimately, this case study of Free Rice reveals ways in which practices of philitainment signal the proliferation of a convergence between the technological sublime and neoliberal politics through which the disinvestment of the state from social problems is legitimized and reproduced through a reconfiguration of citizenship in terms of techno-consumerism.Keywords: Digital GamesCritical TheoryGovernmentalityPhilitainmentDevelopment Notes[1] James W. Carey and John J. Quirk, "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution," in Communication as Culture, ed. James W. Carey and G. Stuart Adam (New York: Routledge, 2009).[2] James W. Carey and John J. Quirk, "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution," in Communication as Culture, ed. James W. Carey and G. Stuart Adam (New York: Routledge, 2009), 93.[3] James W. Carey, "Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph," in Communication as Culture, ed. James W. Carey and G. Stuart Adam (New York: Routledge, 2009).[4] Susan Douglas, "Amateur Operators and American Broadcasting," in Imagining Tomorrow: History Technology and the American Future, ed. Joseph J. Corn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 40.[5] Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).[6] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 2005); Diane Tucker, Gaming Our Way to a Better Future (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2012).[7] Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010).[8] Kurt Squire and Henry Jenkins, "Harnessing the Power of Games in Education," Insight 3 (2003): 5–33.[9] Melissa Nasiruddin et al., "Zombies—A Pop Culture Resource for Public Health Awareness," Emerging Infectious Diseases 19, no. 5 (2013): 809–13.[10] Matt Warman, "Call of Duty: Black Ops II Sales Hit $500 Million in First 24 Hours," The Telegraph, November 16, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9683341/Call-of-duty-Black-Ops-II-sales-hit-500-million-in-first-24-hours.html.[11] Tucker, Gaming, 1.[12] Postman, Amusing Ourselves, 18.[13] Tucker, Gaming; James Paul Gee, "Good Video Games and Good Learning," Phi Kappa Phi Forum 85, no. 2 (2005): 33–37; Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).[14] Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 116.[15] Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (New York: Plenum Trade, 1997), 98.[16] Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Penguin, 1999), 142.[17] McGonigal, Reality is Broken.[18] Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 2.[19] Toby Miller, "For Fun, For Profit, For Empire: The University and Electronic Games," in Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor, ed. Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 230.[20] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 3. Participatory culture is often misinterpreted as liberating media audiences from hierarchical power structures; Jenkins, however, notes that:Not all participants are created equal. Corporations—and even individuals within corporate media—still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers. And some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others.This analysis operates in the spirit of this often overlooked footnote to the study of participatory culture.[21] Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 2003), 146.[22] Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 2003), 146.[23] Dmitri Williams, "The Video Game Lightning Rod: Constructions of a New Media Technology," Information, Communication & Society 6, no. 4 (2003), 523–50.[24] Tom Curtis, "New Game to Teach Students About Slavery, The American Civil War," Gamasutra, January 24, 2012, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/129232/New_game_to_teach_students_about_slavery_the_American_Civil_War.php.[25] Sean Coughlan, "Eye-controlled games for disabled children," BBC News, February 12, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17179405.[26] Tom Curtis, "What's NASA doing making video games?" Gamasutra, February 13, 2012, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/129635/Whats_NASA_doing_making_video_games.php.[27] Neal Ungerleider, "Army Tweaks Recruitment Video Game to Train Soldiers for Real Hurt Locker Situations," Fast Company, August 3, 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1771044/army-tweaks-recruitment-video-game-train-soldiers-real-hurt-locker-situations.[28] David Rejeski & Donald Kettl, "Escaping the Cliff: In Search of Real Budget Heroes," Huffington Post, February 26, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rejeski/budget-hero_b_2372230.html.[29] Shaker Consulting Group, "Client List," (2014), http://www.shakercg.com/clients-and-case-studies/client-list.[30] Stephen Jacobs, "Serious Play Conference 2011: Microsoft's Productivity Games," Gamasutra, August 29, 2011, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36824/Serious_Play_Conference_2011_Microsofts_Productivity_Games.php.[31] While the term "serious games" designates a movement intent on consciously engaging the politics of play, the label is misleading in its suggestion that games designed purely for fun are not serious. Although an analytical distinction between serious games and fun games might be useful, it obscures the fact that all games are serious in that they are experiences of learning and subjectivity.[32] Major institutional centers of the serious games movement including the following: University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, the Woodrow Wilson Center's Serious Games Initiative, and the Games for Change organization.[33] Clark Abt, Serious Games (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 3.[34] Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).[35] Clark Abt, Serious Games; Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006).[36] Entertainment Software Association, Industry Facts, (2014), http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp.[37] Damien Djaouti et al., "Origins of Serious Games," in Serious Games and Edutainment Applications, ed. Minhua Ma, Andreas Oikonomou, and Lakhmi C. Jain (Berlin: Springer, 2011).[38] Damien Djaouti et al., "Origins of Serious Games," in Serious Games and Edutainment Applications, ed. Minhua Ma, Andreas Oikonomou, and Lakhmi C. Jain (Berlin: Springer, 2011).[39] Squire and Jenkins, "Harnessing"; Tucker, Gaming.[40] Gordon Rayner, "Prince Harry returns from Afghanistan as he reveals he killed Taliban insurgents," The Telegraph, January 21, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/9815438/Prince-Harry-confirms-he-killed-Taliban-as-he-returns-from-Afghanistan-saying-Take-a-life-to-save-a-life.html; Ronald Reagan, "Remarks During a Visit to Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center Near Orlando, Florida," March 8, 1983, http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/30883a.htm.[41] Michael Anderson, "USC Film Students Practice Artistic Craft Through Games," Wired, December 30, 2011, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/usc-film-students-practice-artistic-craft-through-games; Gee, "Good Video Games"; Squire and Jenkins, "Harnessing."[42] Center for Disease Control, "Zombie Preparedness," August 18, 2014, http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombies.htm; Nasiruddin et al., "Zombies." Though influenced by an array of sources, the CDC's treatment of the zombie as a metaphor for disaster and disease is heavily indebted to ludic influences.[43] Jodi Dean, Democracy; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (London: Routledge, 2010); Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1999).[44] David Harvey, A Brief History, 31.[45] Wendy Brown, "American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization," Political Theory 34, no. 6 (2006): 693.[46] Nikolas Rose, "Governing Cities, Governing Ctiziens," in Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, ed. Engin F. Isin (London: Routledge, 2000), 108.[47] Guinevere Nell, Paul Winfree, and James Sherk, "Free-Market Philanthropy: The Social Aspect of Entrepreneurship," The Heritage Foundation (2008), http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/09/freemarket-philanthropy-the-social-aspect-of-entrepreneurship; Ron Paul, "In Praise of Private Charity" (2012), http://www.ronpaul.com/2012-04-09/ron-paul-in-praise-of-private-charity/.[48] Samantha King, Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).[49] In line with our prior conception of the ludic sublime as a technique that extends beyond the confines of digital play, we would classify walk-a-thons, mud runs, and charity balls as examples of philitainment writ large. That some of these older forms of philitainment preceded digital play by decades, if not centuries, ought to reinforce our overall argument that we ought not to mistake technique with technology. Rather, our focus on digital play is because we believe that this instantiation of the ludic sublime reconfigured the public imaginary surrounding the possibility of play as something more than leisure—something that now could be productive or destructive.[50] For an extensive list of the praise and recognition that FreeRice has received see the "press" section of the website: http://freerice.com/about/press.[51] The FreeRice website offers 400 grams of rice as the equivalent of two meals, with 48 grains of rice constituting one gram. Current totals for the amount of grains donated were taken from the "Totals" section of the website: http://freerice.com/frmisc/totals.[52] This screenshot was taken from a personal computer located in the United States. That said, there were no substantial differences between accessing this website outside of the United States (in Turkey); likewise, there were no substantial differences between accessing the FreeRice website on other devices, such as Android or iOS platforms.[53] At the time of this writing, the Syrian Civil War was approaching three years.[54] Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 8.[55] W.W. Rostow, "The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto," in The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Social Change, ed. J. T. Roberts and A. B. Hite (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). This point is perhaps made most vivid through the existence of a Korean version of the FreeRice website. Though the instructions are in Korean, the games offered replicate the conflation between modernization and Westernization made on Western versions of FreeRice. Korea Bizwire, NCsoft Foundation to Distribute "Mobile Free Rice" Game on World Food Day: http://koreabizwire.com/ncsoft-foundation-to-distribute-mobile-free-rice-game-on-world-food-day/.[56] Extended play in this subject (Famous Paintings) does not evidence deviation from this Western bias. Indeed, the only deviation evidenced was that there seemed to be little rationale regarding the difficulty levels, with paintings shown at the lowest levels also appearing at higher levels.[57] It is important to note that though this figure illustrates that FreeRice's philanthropic information has been pushed farther out into the extra-diegetic periphery, the screenshot is slightly misleading. That is, to illustrate the increase in physical distance between the diegetic and extra-diegetic philanthropic columns, we initiated Firefox's full screen mode, which removed the browser's toolbar and navigation bar (amongst other items) from view, thereby expanding the visual real estate of the webpage. Operating conventionally (with the browser's toolbar and other items in view), as we imagine most users do, the extra-diegetic philanthropic columns operate outside of the browser's visual real estate—in contrast to the corporate banner advertisement that remains thoroughly visible. Though it is possible for the user to scroll down the page and explore further the philanthropic information offered through these exterior columns, our point remains that once the game begins this information is quickly pushed to the periphery. This observation regarding screen real estate was made using a laptop of average size (fourteen inches) at a resolution of 1366 by 768.[58] At any given time the player can change the level of difficult on a scale from one to sixty. Rice is only rewarded, however, for each correct answer—and the amount of rice rewarded for each correct answer remains constant regardless of the level of difficulty.[59] Lisa Keränen, "Technologies of the Self at the End of Life: Pastoral Power and the Rhetoric of Advance Care Planning," in After the Genome: A Language for Our Biotechnological Future, ed. Michael J. Hyde and James A. Herrick (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013), 218.[60] Frederic Mousseau, "Toward a Future without Want," World Policy Journal 26, no. 2 (2009): 74.[61] Frederic Mousseau, "Toward a Future without Want," World Policy Journal 26, no. 2 (2009): 74. Alex Perry and Addis Kassahun, "Pain amid Plenty," Time 172, no. 7 (2008): 32–35.[62] Perry and Kassahun, "Pain."[63] USAID, "Food Assistance Fact Sheet—Ethiopia," http://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do/agriculture-and-food-security/food-assistance/programs/emergency-programs.[64] Feed the Future, "Ethiopia Fact Sheet," In The US Government's Global Hunger & Food Security Initiative (2014).[65] To be clear, FreeRice does not offer In-Kind Food Aid, as the website has "a policy of purchasing rice from the same country to which the rice is allocated." See the FAQ section of the FreeRice website: http://freerice.com/about/faq. Nevertheless, as part of a larger ensemble of practical reason governing our understanding of the cause, consequence, and solution of world hunger, the FreeRice platform presents a depoliticized logic of global hunger as something that merely exists. That is, global hunger is framed as a problem of production when it is often a problem of distribution; in other words, hunger is often the end result of governments and regimes using food as a political and economic weapon. For this point, we appreciate the contributions of the anonymous reviewers for pushing us further on this line of thinking.[66] Joshua S. Hanan, "Home is Where the Capital Is: The Culture of Real Estate in an Era of Control Societies," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 193.[67] This is all according to the FreeRice website's "privacy" section: http://freerice.com/about/privacy.[68] Mark Andrejevic, "Exploitation in the Data Mine," in Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media, ed. Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval (New York: Routledge, 2012), 74.[69] Mark Andrejevic, "Exploitation in the Data Mine," in Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media, ed. Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval (New York: Routledge, 2012), 74.[70] This information is taken from the "partner with us" portion of the FreeRice website: http://freerice.com/advertisers-partners.[71] This information is taken from the "FAQ" portion of the FreeRice website: http://freerice.com/about/faq.[72] The value of each correct answer was calculated by taking the August 2012 100 percent B grade white rice cost per tonne benchmark (which was reported at US$580) and multiplying that number by 48 (which is the amount of grains in one gram). We then divided $580 dollars by 4,800,000 (which is the amount of answers needed to provide one tonne of rice) to determine that each correct answer constituted the equivalent of US$ 0.00012. For the 2012 rice benchmark values, please see: Phoonphongphiphat, Apornrath, "Factbox—World's Top 10 Rice Exporters and Importers (2012), http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/08/thailand-rice-factbox-idINL4E8IJ0LI20120808.[73] In 2008, FreeRice was able to purchase twenty grains of rice for each correct answer provided; this number was decreased to ten grains of rice per correct answer in 2009. For the 2008 rice benchmark values, please see: Phoonphongphiphat, Apornrath, "Factbox."[74] To determine the cost per two meals, we applied FreeRice's claim that 400 grams of rice constituted the equivalent of two meals. 400 grams of rice amounts to 0.0004 tonnes. We then multiplied 0.0004 to the total cost per tonne of rice (according to the rice benchmark values of that year) to determine the wholesale value of 400 grams of rice. We then divided this value by the amount of economic activity generated per person fed (e.g., US$0.432 ÷ US$0.96) to determine the amount of philanthropic entropy that was occurring through the website.[75] http://freerice.com/about/press.[76] World Food Programme, "What causes hunger?" (2014), http://www.wfp.org/hunger/causes; Jenny Gustavsson, Christel Cederberg, Ulf Sonesson, Robert van Otterdijk, and Alexandre Meybeck, "Global Food Losses and Food Waste" (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2011).[77] These totals were taken from the "totals" portion of the FreeRice Website: http://freerice.com/frmisc/totals.[78] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).[79] Gee, "Good Video Games"; Squire and Jenkins, "Harnessing"; Tucker, Gaming.[80] Sara Ahmed, "Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35, no. 3 (2010): 590.[81] Sara Ahmed, "Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35, no. 3 (2010): 593.