‘Choose, collect, manage, win!’: Neoliberalism, enterprising culture and risk society in video game covers

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the relationship between video games and neoliberal values. To fulfil this aim, it analyzes the covers of the 20 top-selling video games in the US each year from 2010 2 to 2014 (a total of 80 different games). Video game covers are a type of paratext, i.e., texts that accompany another text to promote it and to guide its reading. Thus, video game covers choose and highlight some of the games' features over others, and by doing that they construct a discourse. In this article, it is argued that regardless of genre, the covers analyzed convey and promote neoliberal values, such as freedom and choice, entrepreneurship, consumption and accumulation of goods, customization, novelty, individualism and meritocracy. This promotion of neoliberal values is combined with an appeal to the concerns of 'risk society'. Thus, the covers of the top-selling video games play on fears linked to the new context created by the economic crisis while at the same time legitimizing the neoliberal ideal of the 'enterprising self' as a model for dealing with it.

Self-enterprising eSports: Meritocracy, precarity, and disposability of eSports players in China

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“…Furthermore, from the ‘reform and opening-up’ period (1978−present), China has employed a neoliberal development strategy and has become one of the most representative neoliberal countries in the world (Harvey, 2007; Rofel, 2007; Yan, 2009). This has created a specific neoliberal context and a nuanced theoretical perspective of the ‘enterprising self’ (Oliva et al, 2018: 607) that can be used to explore the culture of eSports and its relationship to the broader neoliberal context.…”

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“…(Darius, male, 28 years, game designer and developer)This, then, casts players as powerful subjects, who are able to control the outcome of their actions in ways they could only imagine in their daily lives. As Oliva, Pérez-Latorre, and Reinald (2016, p. 12) argue, paratexts around video game culture (in their case video game covers) urge the player “to ‘choose,’ ‘collect,’ ‘manage’ and ‘win,’ defining what we should expect of a good game or a good player experience,” which directly links this experience to neoliberal rationalities. Video games create then an environment (rhetorical but also material) where players’ agency is inflated and promotes a sense of achievement and empowerment.…”

Beyond Cultural Identity. A Critique of Horizon Zero Dawn as an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Simulator

“…Paradoxically, in order to collect all the pieces of information that comprise this staunch critique of capitalism, like in most AAA action games (Oliva, 2018), the player must obey the very capitalist principles that the game overtly rejects. Success in role-playing games hinges on the player's ability to attain the necessary upgrades for defeating higher-level opponents.…”