First section would be about how existing as a tool for corporate profit harms the medium. It'd talk about things like concentration of the industry under a handful of companies, predatory microtransactions, the rise of subscription-based platforms where players never really own the games they play, how series like Call of Duty serve as propaganda for the American military industrial complex.

Second section would discuss how video gaming might be different under socialism, based and my own experiences with other nonprofit hobbyist developers - artistic expression over spectacle, an end to predatory monetization models, making the hobby accessible to people who can't afford expensive consoles or gaming PCs, etc.

  • ChaosMaterialist [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    There are two books you might be interested in:

    Marx at the Arcade - It likely covers what you've done, but its short so you can easily dive into any particular category the book brings up.

    The PlayStation Dreamworld - A zizek experimental analysis of video games using Freudian Dream Analysis. Video games are a special class of art because they are uniquely interactive. You are immersed, you forget that you are playing a game. This immersion, this Process of Forgetting ("They don't know, but they do it anyway"), is the player's process of absorbing the game's ideology. At the same time, it shows just how weak Ideology really is when that immersion is broken and we become aware again that we are playing a game. This book is also short, so you can dig much deeper on this analysis if you want.