I had a literal shower thought today about how many games, whether sport or video game or board game or puzzle, are time-based, and I wondered if that has always been the case or if time-based games have proliferated under capitalism.
The reason I think about this is I enjoy doing the NYT crossword, but I don’t understand why there needs to be a prominent timer. Why does a puzzle need to be timed? It only adds stress to something meant to be fun, and makes leisure feel like work.
There are more connections as I think about it. Role-playing games are an obvious one. Players begin their journey as isolated individuals, true Robinsonades who must forge a life on their own, standing apart from the NPC society created by the developers. The NPCs and world resources serve only as a means for player advancement. And of course, online highscores bring efficiency to the fore. It is not sufficient to advance. You must advance faster than everyone else, or be left behind. RPGs frequently involve player-to-player market economies for another layer of competition.
Were games historically this focused on time, efficiency, and competition? If so, was it to a similar degree as today?
I am not a historian but I remember reading that the ancient Olympic Games, while still being competitive, were also religious and artistic in nature, not purely athletic. The competitive aspect was because of the rise of neighboring Greek city-states which had to compete for resources, and the Olympics served as a peaceful way to blow off resultant steam. So while this is a different kind of competition from capitalist competition in the market, it’s clear that political-economic situation impacts games and how people view their leisure.
I’ll do some research on it this weekend. It’s just been in the back of my head and thought I’d share.
Vol2 of Capital is most directly relevant to the time question. Timed etc games mean the consumer will consume the game faster. This means they will buy another game faster, enabling more rapid turnover of the capitalists investment in games. As with historical games/sports, as they become a spectacle and a source of profit, capital takes it over and subsumes it, reorganising its production and rationalising its consumption. In search of relative surplus value, it must be turned into a more appealing spectacle than any of its competitors. One of the easiest ways to do this is simply aim to break records, leading to the drives you point out, towards (extremely fierce, violent, unsafe, unfriendly) competition and efficiency (the latter of which is capitalism's favourite word; its positive connotation hides the fact that it almost always means "efficiency for the production and realisation of surplus value" rather than "efficiency for the realisation of living needs").
Regarding the competition and focus on soley athletics and efficiency, yeah we (overdeveloped capitalist nations) are a weird society in terms of the constant competition. Rybczynski's Waiting for the Weekend gives a very good example of this (as well as a more in depth analysis): in the 1920s, it was common for regular folks to go ski-ing by simply tying long flat objects, or even round ones, to their work boots. The wealthy scoffed at this and attempted to be 'professional hobbyists' as opposed to these mere 'amateurs' (sidenote; the word 'amateur' used to be positive, meaning one did something for fun, but has turned into a negative word implying lack of skill and purpose because we demand constant production of surplus value), and bought 'professional quality' skis, pants, jackets, etc, etc, etc. In the imperialism-fueled postww2 economic boom, this tendency was expanded to the growing 'middle class'.
Unrelated to any of your main points of inquiry, but a neat book that looks at the economics of video games through an explicitly marxist lense is Marx at the Arcade by Jamie Woodcock