This article investigates some of the key debates that have emerged within the nascent union organising project Game Workers Unite, with a specific focus on its UK branch (GWU UK). The analysis is based on a period of participatory observation and a series of interviews with board members of GWU UK. This article evaluates Game Workers Unite (GWU) in relation to other recent attempts at unionising the game industry. It concludes that the strategies adopted to counter the hyper-visibility and individualisation of the game worker are key contributions of GWU in contemporary video game labour. This article draws on the work of Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) Games of empire: Global capitalism and video games to evaluate the historical specificity of GWU and the importance of the organisation for the contemporary video game industry.

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Towards the end of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), the main character Arthur Morgan contracts tuberculosis. The videogame is set in the United States in 1899, a time when many died from the respiratory infection. The videogame does not provide a cure for the disease, nor does it show when the contagion happens. It is presented as the consequence of an invisible action. Combining auto-ethnographic analysis with (para-)textual readings, in this article, I articulate my engagement with the game and with YouTube videos in which players claim to have identified a strategy to save Arthur. I argue that these paratextual practices address, without fully resolving, an effective response that originates from an unresolved reading of the videogame ( Consalvo, 2016 ; Genette, 1987 ). The videos on Arthur’s sickness remediate (in the double sense of restoring upon and healing) players’ agency ( Bolter and Grusin, 1999 ). I argue that this imagination of a restoration of the player’s agency insists on two levels: a narrative level, interpreted as a navigable database of events, and on the environment, seen as a ‘gamespace’ of resources and non-player characters to exploit or keep at distance ( Jennings, 2019 ; Stang, 2019 ; Anikina, 2020 ; Wark 2007 ). The duration of the auto-ethnography overlaps with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article concludes by exploring some recent mediations of the virus, observing how they restore a view of human agency that runs parallel to that which players of Red Dead Redemption 2 have articulated in a much more marginal context. The case studies, although diverse in nature, gravity and scale, shed light on the variety of contexts in which agency is negotiated, on the affective potential of these negotiations, and on the pervasiveness of white and able-bodied normativity in contemporary digital culture.

In this paper I offer an alternative way to look at games that require no form of play. The player of these games is only supposed to keep them always up-to-date and running, but no specific action is required. NikeFuel is a significant example of this kind of game. NikeFuel, a technology for the quantification of body movement developed by the sports company Nike, is applied in a series of gadgets. The most popular, Nike+, is a wristband that quantifies the movements of the user and converts them into a NikeFuel score, which can later be visualised on a laptop or mobile phone. The act of moving throughout the day is transformed into a game-like experience, according to the principles of gamification. Gamification and quantified-self technologies have been noted for their performative potential and their capacity to control and inform our bodies (Whitson 2015). From a Foucauldian perspective, quantified-self technologies are attempts to rationalise the practices and movements of living organisms, as forms of biopolitical control (Foucault 2005, Schrape 2014). However, these are also spaces of transformation of the conditions under which the self becomes possible. Through NikeFuel, and other examples that I explore in this paper (Farmville, Cookie Clicker, CarnageHug), the player has to come to terms with games that act as parasites on their own lives. Thus, I argue that Nike+ can also be seen to complicate our thoughts about the contemporary digital technologies that surround us on an everyday basis. In this paper I will argue, possibly counter-intuitively, that gamification and quantified-self technologies are not necessarily tools that we use for a specific purpose; these are technologies we carry around with us and live with. As such, we are transformed by them as much as we transform them. Thus, the problem raised in this paper is about how we can cohabit and be hospitable with these 'parasites' (Serres, 1982).

The article investigates how players of the incremental game AdVenture Capitalist write about the end of the game and the end of capitalism with it. The game visually and mechanically represents the economic imaginary of frictionless capitalism, characterized by endless and self-sufficient growth. AdVenture Capitalist has no end and does not require the player’s interaction. The analysis shows that players’ responses to their marginalization from an endless simulation are pataphysical: They privilege the particular over the general, the imaginary over the real, the exceptional over the ordinary, and the contradictory over the axiomatic. In so doing, players occasionally raise imaginary solutions to the end of capitalism. Examining the written traces of players’ disengagement from the simulation, the article intervenes in broader debates regarding the effects of games. It concludes that exceptional cases of overinterpretation reveal a complex transformative approach toward video games and the political and economic ideology represented therein.