Workers Out of Office (2023)
Digital Games and Allegorithmic Work:
The Politics of Exchange, Alienation and Performative Ideology
The Politics of Exchange, Alienation and Performative Ideology
Author: MgA. Filip Hauer | Supervisor: doc. MgA. Tomáš Svoboda Ph.D. | Consultant: Mgr. Vjera Borozan Ph.D. | Year of defence: 2025 | Akademie výtvarných umění v Praze
This dissertation undertakes two primary tasks. Firstly, it examines market, ideological, and extractivist stereotypes in exchange of player labour for game progress, and employs them as analytical lenses to formulate a conceptual framework for critical game design and art. Secondly, based upon an analysis of capitalist allegories in selected games, it provides a definition of problematic capitalist, authoritarian, colonial, and extractive tendencies in both mainstream games and games with critical aspirations. This framework has normative ambitions and investigates methods for designing speculative and critical games. To this end, it formulates a three-level analytic heuristic framework oriented toward game exchange, alienation, and performative player agency. The dissertation argues that games are artistic media capable of articulating a narrative and a procedural critique of economic and social systems in a dynamic dialogue with players. However, to achieve this, a critical analysis should first be conducted on both narrative and procedural levels within the exchange, alienation, and player agency frameworks. In this regard, it is necessary to consider the forms of meaningful player agency within any given game design to be restrictive game affordances – game options to act within game market institutions, game rules, and narrative allegories – that will result in either a lack of speculative game mechanics or abundance of ideological fantasies. The question of the mode of player agency is largely connected to game economies, allegories of alienation in player labour, as well as to the degree of power players wield in each game, whether their agency is hegemonic in the game world, or whether there is a degree of agency shared with other actors.
The first chapter discusses forms of exchange in strategy games and draws a framework for the analysis of game ideologies based on their economies. The second chapter discusses the framework of game allegories of alienation in capitalism, strategies working with alienation in arts as well as in critical games and draws out the possibilities for critical design strategies based on them. The third chapter discusses forms of shared agency, performativity, and troubled utopia, as the possibilities of an alternative to game ideological stereotypes. The fourth chapter proposes a three-level heuristic framework and critical design principles for alienated game exchange. This dissertation was conducted in the context of artistic research and game studies. The game art projects that accompanied theoretical research with artist research affordances are discussed in the concluding sections.
Games, game exchange, alienation, performativity, ideology, inner game markets, game work & labour, capitalism, game economies, speculative mechanics, critical games, game art, critical design, allegorithms, ecogames, game studies, artistic research
Workers Out of Office: London DLC (2024)
Dreaming About Work, Workers Out of Office, and Lithium reel
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Dreaming About Work: For Loop Contingency (2021) opening scene