The End of Capitalism: Disengaging From the Economic Imaginary of Incremental Games

Abstract

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.

Special Issue Introduction: Politicizing agency in digital play after humanism

“…Sonia Fizek argues that the pleasure of playing often derives from interpassivity rather than interactivity: the pleasure of engaging with a text that provides the means of its own reception (Fizek, 2018). Incremental and idle games (such as the popular Cookie Clicker and AdVenture Capitalist ), that require minimal player interaction and keep playing themselves in the absence of an active human agent are now popular on smartphones and as a form of casual gaming (Ruffino, 2019). Even if videogames are played through assemblages of humans and nonhumans, the two sides are not always equally involved.…”

Play, History and Politics: Conceiving Futures Beyond Empire

“…McClancy’s (2018) analysis of the Fallout franchise also exposes the concern around possible futures, specifically noting that the narrative of the Fallout series is what stakes a claim about how desirable any such future might be. Ruffino (2019) has identified a strand of procedural games that mimic Franklin’s (1979) analysis of capitalist futures, specifically noting that incremental games in particular offer a logic of infinite expansion and that players respond by withdrawing from the prospect of an ‘end’. Conversely, there is also scholarship that attempts to address the nature of what survival itself might look like, post-capitalism, such as van Ryn’s (2020) account of survival without an economy of exchange in Don’t Starve (2013).…”

Games of Empire Ten Years On

“…Its code is modifiable, and save games circulate within the player community. The idea that videogames might foster a capacity to think beyond the present economic system is an established idea (see, for instance, Ruffino, 2019), and is located in the same search for cultural or imaginary models for thinking on the problem of contemporary imperialism.…”