A new type of capital and power operation is quietly emerging in our time, and it seems to be most abundantly and crazily embodied in the mainstream commercial games of the moment.
A new type of capital and power operation is emerging in our time, which seems to be the most abundant and crazy in the mainstream business game nowadays.
Recently, the 91st Youth Literature and Art Forum "Digital Capitalism and the Governance of Pleasure", organized by the Institute of Marxist Literature and Art Theory of the China Academy of Art, was held online. Dr. Fu Shanchao of the Chinese Department of Peking University gave the lecture. Dr. Fu Shanchao is a young scholar who has focused on game research in the humanities in the Mainland. Using his research on electronic games as a case study, the forum discussed the "governance of pleasure" in the context of digital capitalism through cross-border dialogues with scholars of critical theory, public ****governance, new media research, and practitioners of vertical media. Convened by Mr. Qin Lanjun, Associate Researcher of the Institute of Marxist Literary Theory, China Academy of Art, the forum invited Mr. Jiang Yuhui, Professor of the Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University; Mr. Dong Shubao, Professor of the Department of Chinese Language and Culture, Beifang University of Technology; Mr. Liu Jinhe, Assistant Researcher of the School of Public *** Governance, Tsinghua University; Mr. Zhu Jiayin, Co-Founder of TouchLeisure; Mr. Ye Zitao, Tencent's NExT Studios to participate in the dialogue. Deng Jian, a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University.
Why discuss the "governance of pleasure"? Fu Shanchao suggests that in the context of the larger vision of digital capitalism, data is juxtaposed with capital as a factor of production, and at the same time, data as an intermediary of algorithms or rules is also a factor of power. Data contains assumptions about pleasure, and the platform side shapes and induces patterns of pleasure in users by assuming what they like. Herein lies a model of a triadic relationship between the platform, the laborer and the user, where the platform holds more power as a monopolistic intermediary, where the platform is less likely to directly regulate the laborer, but instead mediates its own will and volition with rules and algorithms, and where the laborer is directly confronted with rules and algorithms set by the platform side, as well as with judgments from the user. This means that the mode of power in digital capitalism differs considerably from the disciplinary techniques of disciplinary institutions in that it employs less negative power, such as enacting bans or disciplining, and instead uses affirmative power as much as possible; that it is not mediated by gaze, but by pleasure; and that it exhibits not a centered power, but a decentered power, i.e., the "the governing art of pleasure".
What is the "governance of pleasure"? According to Fu Shanchao, as the content of stylized survival aesthetics, pleasure itself can have various contents and different ways of enjoyment; but in the governance technique, it becomes the assumption of collective behavioral patterns. In the context of platform capitalism, the so-called "governance of pleasure" can be understood as the platform shaping and inducing the pleasure patterns of users and laborers to make most of them conform to such pleasure patterns, so as to weaken the uncertainty of the users and laborers and gain profit; if it can keep repeating such induction and shaping, the users and laborers will be able to enjoy it for generations to come. shaping so that generations of users keep repeating this pleasure pattern, then it partially realizes the self-reproduction of the business model and thus completes the governance.
How is the "governance of pleasure" applied to games? Fu Shanchao analyzes this with the example of "character development type of gold handicraft". Why are players willing to pay for these "developable" characters? The pleasure comes from the charm of the character itself, but the emotional connection between the player and the character needs to be constantly reawakened in new performances. That is to say, after the player has purchased the character and gained the right to use it, he can't get all the pleasure, but he has to "raise" the character, and in the process of raising the character, he needs to continue to pay money and labor, and "raising" is only the threshold for getting the pleasure. The next step is the performance of the character, i.e., letting the character go on stage to show its ability and charisma, and the pleasure gained in the process of performance is the most important pleasure in the character development class of the gold handball game. From the perspective of political economy, this kind of game players in the draw to the role, but does not possess all the means of production required for the production of pleasure, there is a part of the means of production is required to players with labor to exchange, that is, the player's pleasure always have a part is to be entrusted to the future, in this case the player's power is weakened. And this kind of labor of the player in exchange for the materials needed to raise the character is often repetitive and boring, this kind of labor is a means rather than an end, and its purpose is to obtain the character as well as to let the character perform in the level, so this kind of labor is a kind of alienated labor. Taken together, the players of such handheld games are much like the proletarians of wage labor, albeit with full possession of the final pleasure product.
The above "governance of pleasure" implies that in this case the players' role is the power to produce pleasure in the future, and their alienated labor is an ever-increasing sunk cost. On this basis, they are dependent on the game's producer/operator, who will hopefully add new characters and levels that will better enable them to realize their rights. As a result, different thrills constitute a competitive/adversarial relationship. In the end, the parallel and unrelated pleasures in the Tohoki model, the pleasures that are "born equal", contradict each other because of the "lack of objectivity" in the character-raising game, forming a kind of "politics of life" in a simple sense. "
These are the first time I've ever seen a person with an eye for a good story, but I've never seen a person with an eye for a good story.
In response to Fu Shanchao's speech, research scholars from various fields and practitioners in vertical fields actively participated in the dialogue. Dr. Liu Jinhe from Tsinghua University complemented Fu Shanchao's speech. In response to the "life politics" of pleasure mentioned by Dr. Fu at the end, Liu Jinhe provided new thoughts from the perspective of "meta-universe" based on the current situation. He asks: if the game is directly replaced by the "meta-universe", then is its life politics all-encompassing? From this point of view, can Foucault's theories be integrated with our present immense reality? Is there a possibility of producing a new theory that goes beyond Foucault's discursive concepts and theories? These questions are thought-provoking.
Prof. Dong Shubao from the College of Arts and Law, North Polytechnic University, mentioned that in the era of digital economy, the concept of "body" may have changed a lot. People's physical bodies can be absent and replaced by data. When each of us becomes a user and registers for an account, the body and the subject are separated, and the real body disappears and is replaced by a "virtual body", i.e., a virtual body. The "virtual body" is more convenient for data statistics, especially for big data statistics and cloud computing, and it is also more convenient to be mastered and manipulated by the platform. At this point there is a thorny issue: in whose hands is the data? Nietzsche said that God is dead, Foucault said that the capitalized man is dead, Prof. Dong Shubao believes that in the era of digital capitalism, the "virtual body" as a human being is also dead, because the human being has been firmly grasped in the hands of the platform, based on this, he asked: as a virtual body of human beings there is no further enlightenment and liberation possibilities? Today's electronic games try to give players more editing rights, empowerment and empowerment at the same time also "empowerment", that is to say, to provide players with the possibility of making their own happiness, which may not only be a kind of reproduction of power, in a sense, may also be able to provide players with the possibility of creating their own self like a work of art.
Prof. Jiang Yuhui of the Philosophy Department at East China Normal University argues that games are indeed a force for guiding young people, but that this guiding force can in turn be a force for young people to guide themselves. The game is persuasive, and its persuasive power is not only reflected in the persuasion of the players, so that the players continue to play, but also reflected in the game on the ability of the players to inspire and enlightenment, which allows the players to return to their own, to guide and reflect on their own, and can even really go to awaken the players as a kind of subject of the status and power. Prof. Jiang Yuhui suggested that we may be able to combine the power of reflection with pleasure, try to transcend from the machine of pleasure, not to use pleasure as a trap, but to use pleasure as a kind of motivation, the future of the game to promote the pleasure may be able to serve as a guide to think and inspire the power of thinking, not just the temptation of kryptonite gold and explosive liver.
Well-known game media person Zhu Jiayin provided his own observations on games from the perspective of thrill governance. He mentioned that five or seven years ago, online games would usually regulate players by means of providing negative feelings, encouraging players to top up their games or invest energy in them, as if only paying players could get a sense of the game's experience; but in the last few years, some games have evolved into a model in which free players are also able to play with pleasure, and paying players will play with even more pleasure. In this model, free players don't just exist as a user experience for paid players, they also have their own game experience. It's clear that game designers have now created a better path.
Zitao Ye, game designer at Tencent NExT Studios and lead producer of Media Lab's Between the Suns, further talked about the difference between immersion and addiction, based on Professor Jiang Yuhui's "game addiction". He argued that in gaming experience, there exists both addictive simple stimulation and immersive mind-flow experience, just as the state of a professional player when playing a game is different from that of an ordinary player when playing a game for leisure, and that a professional player needs the intervention of higher-order cognitive ability when he enters into the immersive state of mind-flow. In addition, Mr. Ye Zitao raised several thought-provoking questions: Is there a kind of self-technical electronic game? Is it possible for game developers to be concerned with the humanities when making games? How should we go about making such self-technical electronic games?
Finally, Deng Jian, the moderator of the forum, added that in the context of digital capitalism, there should be two sets of orders operating in the same way in e-games***. One is the symbolic order, which is what Higashi Hori calls the consumption of databases and moe elements, which is itself a consumption of mimicry, and the other is the algorithmic order, which is built on top of the data or the numerical values. The two orders are intertwined and ****ing operate together. Fu Shanchao responds to this by arguing that the algorithmic order can be seen as an economic order. As for the combination of symbols and data, Dr. Fu pointed out that the main significance of the existence of avatars in games is to unite the symbolic order with the algorithmic order.
Proofread by Liangliang Zhang