‘They have to help themselves’: Saw and the horrors of neo-liberalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-277
Author(s):  
Logan Brown
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Game Logic ◽  
Technology Ethics ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Liberal Ideology

Critical examinations of the Saw films have generally focused on their post-9/11 production context and the link between the War on Terror and images of spectacular violence. This article argues that Saw and its sequels can instead fruitfully be understood as products of new neo-liberal regimes of subjecthood. As neo-liberal ideology and policy push market logics further into everyday lives, new forms of immaterial labour force the worker to act both as disciplining manager and as disciplined worker. By tracing neo-liberal subjectivity’s emphasis on individualized agency and responsibility through Jigsaw’s ideology, this piece shows that Saw dramatizes the parody of freedom offered by late capitalism. Jigsaw, like neo-liberalism itself, operates through a complex assemblage of technology, ethics and guilt, which forces the neo-liberal subject to enact its own punishment. Saw’s trademark traps are explored through the series’ use of video game logic and language in order to position Jigsaw’s victims within the more subtle mechanisms of control necessitated by contemporary capitalism.

scholarly journals Winning Back the Intellectuals: Inside Canada’s “First War on Terror,” 1968-1970

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gauvreau
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
English Canada ◽  
Security Services ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Liberal Ideology ◽  
New Type ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Radical Ideas

Abstract Historical treatments of the October Crisis have tended to focus on a simple dichotomy between the aims of the Canadian government and the Front de Libération du Québec, have suggested the tensions in the relationship between federal and provincial levels of government during the crisis, or have sought to situate the FLQ within the emergence of a new strain of radical ideas in Québec during the 1960s. This paper takes as its starting-point the irony of the reluctance of the Trudeau government to brand the FLQ as “terrorists,” and examines the federal government’s response within a larger strategy to force the intellectual communities in both English Canada and Québec away from a sympathy for student radicalism and international decolonization struggles. It situates the Trudeau government’s “war on terror” as less an episodic response to the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte, but within a growing strand of conservatism in the encounter of the authorities with elements of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. It poses the question of whether the nature of the federal government’s response may have been due to the desire, among members of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s inner circle, to promote a new type of liberal ideology that sought to dispense with older versions that legitimated civic participation through non-elected, “representative” bodies by defining the latter as conscious or unwitting accomplices of terrorist violence. The paper is based on a range of newly-declassified documents from both the federal cabinet and the security services deposited in Pierre Trudeau’s prime ministerial archive, as well as a new reading of newspaper and media sources in Québec.

scholarly journals NOSTALGIA AND THE BACKLOG: /R/PATIENTGAMERS AND THE TRANSACTIONAL NATURE OF LEISURE

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainforest Scully-Blaker
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Game Play ◽  
Video Game Play ◽  
Game Players ◽  
Efficiency And Productivity ◽  
Do So

This paper uses the findings of an investigation into the /r/patientgamers subreddit to account for the ways that our leisure time and our play have been assimilated by the logics of neoliberal, late capitalism. I do this by tracing classed experiences of slowness as experienced by video game players. The figure of the patientgamer was selected not just because of their protracted approach to video game consumption, but because the grows out of a frustration with the financial and temporal costs to access leisure. Through Foucauldian discourse analysis, two major themes were detected across a number of posts which traced how many players tried, and often failed, to slow down their lives in restful ways through their play and the conversations that emerged from the impulse to treat their leisure time as work. Specifically, users’ nostalgia for their childhoods and their anxieties around possessing a video game backlog are both emblematic of the way that video game play has been made legible to capitalist logics such that any distinction between labour and leisure becomes moot and attempt to lift from the patientgamer ethos some potential ways that the work of play may be reframed to undercut logics of efficiency and productivity. The case study of /r/patientgamers holds relevance not just for the study of games and/as culture, but of how technocapitalism instrumentalizes all leisure and the consequences felt by those who try to slow their rhythms of consumption but do so without proper attention to issues of class and power.

Working on and at Play

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Rainforest Scully-Blaker
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Serious Games ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Media Objects ◽  
Player Game ◽  
Work Done

Abstract As media objects, video games are imbued with values held by their makers. This is done intentionally by serious games practitioners but also occurs independently of design goals. One of the more problematic manifestations of ‘values at play’ is playbour, a putting-to-work of play that recalls Agamben’s mourning the loss of ‘menuchah’, an inoperativity that is more than a means to prepare one for more work. But is there a way to rescue leisure from its subservience to labour? Or, if not, is there a way to make the work done through play operate against the logics of late capitalism? To make sense of the conversations around player, game, power, and labour, I articulate two concepts: visibility, or the degree to which a system can account for the actions of those operating within it, and perception, a measure of an actor’s understanding of the methods through which a system understands their movements. Through several gameplay examples, I use these concepts to lay the foundation for suggesting that play is a force for critique, for laying bare a game’s operational logics so that they may be subject to our scrutiny. To conclude, the concepts of glitch and queer failure are introduced to argue for a working on and at play that interrogates not only video game machines, but the larger machines of ideology that drive them.

scholarly journals Punctuated temporalities: Temporal borders in student-migrants’ everyday lives

2020 ◽  
pp. 001139212093631
Author(s):  
Olivia Maury
Keyword(s):  
Labour Force ◽  
Labour Markets ◽  
Skilled Migration ◽  
Time Limits ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
Temporary Migrants ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Lived Time

The punctuation of time through visas and residence permits intimately affects temporary migrants’ everyday lives. The temporal forms of control engendered through the global border and visa regime and their impact on fragmenting lived time have received little attention in comparison to the extensively studied spatial aspects of migration, particularly in the research context of mobility conceptualised as skilled migration. By drawing on in-depth interviews with migrants holding a temporary student status in Finland, the article examines the ways in which temporal borders bring about punctuated temporalities among non-EU/EEA student-migrants. Moreover, it demonstrates how the time limits of the student permit offer fruitful ground for the production of a low-paid labour force and how temporal borders assist in hierarchising this labour force in terms of mobility and rights. The article contributes to the sociological literature on migration and precarious labour markets by emphasising the analytical relevance of examining temporal borders as engendering a hierarchising function of the border regime and the role of temporal borders in facilitating the production of precarious migrant labour.

scholarly journals "Too Human" versus the enthusiast press: Video game journalists as mediators of commodity value

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Video Game Industry ◽  
Immaterial Labor ◽  
Game Industry ◽  
The Way

This article examines the role of mediators in the production of commodity value, arguing that there is a rise in a kind of immaterial labor, shaped by contemporary conditions of late capitalism, that functions explicitly as a mediating force. In this example, video game journalists are understood as actively engaged in producing and negotiating the value and meaning of video games for both producers and consumers. By specifically examining a moment of value contestation, a podcast debate between a journalist and a game developer, this article traces the mediating practices of the enthusiast gaming press and examines the way their history with and relationship to the video game industry continue to structure their ability to filter knowledge and shape desires.

Predictors of Problematic Video Game Usage in Childhood and Adolescence

2013 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 153-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Mößle ◽  
Florian Rehbein
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
School Children ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Video Gaming ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Childhood And Adolescence ◽  
Longitudinal Control ◽  
Peer Problems ◽  
Media Usage ◽  
Usage Patterns

Aim: The aim of this article is to work out the differential significance of risk factors of media usage, personality and social environment in order to explain problematic video game usage in childhood and adolescence. Method: Data are drawn from the Berlin Longitudinal Study Media, a four-year longitudinal control group study with 1 207 school children. Data from 739 school children who participated at 5th and 6th grade were available for analysis. Result: To explain the development of problematic video game usage, all three areas, i. e. specific media usage patterns, certain aspects of personality and certain factors pertaining to social environment, must be taken into consideration. Video game genre, video gaming in reaction to failure in the real world (media usage), the children’s/adolescents’ academic self-concept (personality), peer problems and parental care (social environment) are of particular significance. Conclusion: The results of the study emphasize that in future – and above all also longitudinal – studies different factors regarding social environment must also be taken into account with the recorded variables of media usage and personality in order to be able to explain the construct of problematic video game usage. Furthermore, this will open up possibilities for prevention.

Frustration and Violence in Mobile Video Games

2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-70
Author(s):  
Petr Květon ◽  
Martin Jelínek
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Implicit Association Test ◽  
Self Determination Theory ◽  
Psychological Needs ◽  
Basic Psychological Needs ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Mobile Video ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
Before And After

Abstract. This study tests two competing hypotheses, one based on the general aggression model (GAM), the other on the self-determination theory (SDT). GAM suggests that the crucial factor in video games leading to increased aggressiveness is their violent content; SDT contends that gaming is associated with aggression because of the frustration of basic psychological needs. We used a 2×2 between-subject experimental design with a sample of 128 undergraduates. We assigned each participant randomly to one experimental condition defined by a particular video game, using four mobile video games differing in the degree of violence and in the level of their frustration-invoking gameplay. Aggressiveness was measured using the implicit association test (IAT), administered before and after the playing of a video game. We found no evidence of an association between implicit aggressiveness and violent content or frustrating gameplay.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document