GAME ON?

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 259 /08 February 2016 11:16

I wouldn't ever describe myself as a gamer, but that's not to say that I've never played any computer games. On the contrary, I was once so hooked on Microsoft's "FreeCell" version of solitaire that I would download lists of solutions and complexity analyses by maths nerds. I was almost relieved when those miserable sods at Redmond removed it from Windows 7, and have resisted buying any other version. Long, long before that I played text adventures like Zork (under CP/M), Wizardry (crude graphics, on Apple II but nevertheless highly addictive), and graphic shooters like Doom. I even finished the hilariously grisly Duke Nukem. I still play a single game - the gorgeous French "stretchy" platform game Contre Jour - on my Android tablet.

So, with this rap-sheet, how can I claim not to be gamer? Because I lost all interest in shoot-'em-ups after Duke Nukem, never got into the modern generation of super-realistic shooters like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, and have never purchased a computer for its game-play performance. I do realise that this cuts me off from a major strand of popular culture among today's youth, and *the* major source of current entertainment industry revenues, but I had no idea just how far I'd cut myself off until I read an article in the Guardian last week.

Called "Why my dream of becoming a pro gamer ended in utter failure" (http://gu.com/p/4fzjt/sbl), this fascinating article by tech reporter Alex Hern came as a revelation to me. First of all, I had only the vaguest idea that computer games were being played for money, but secondly I was utterly clueless as to exactly  *how* these games are being monetised. The games Hern played aren't GTA-style shooters but up-to-date versions of that mean old Wizardry I used to play, in which play proceeds by casting spells, chosen from a range of zillions. The strategy of these games, played online against human opponents, lies in carefully choosing the deck of spell cards you'll deploy, and in how and when to deploy each one. In game-theoretic terms this is fairly close to Poker, revolving around forming a mental map of your opponents' minds and strategies. And like Poker, these games (for example Hearthstone, which Hern tried) are played in championship series with huge cash prizes of £100,000, but as he soon realized, only one person gets that pay-off and the rest get nothing for a huge expenditure of playing effort. Instead the way most pro gamers get a regular, but more modest, pay-off is by setting up a channel on social-network Twitch, on which people watch you play while being shown paid-for ads.

I'll say that again in case it hasn't sunk in. You're playing a computer simulation of imaginary spell casting, against invisible opponents via a comms link, and people are paying to watch. This intrigues me because it fits so beautifully into a new analysis of modern economies - one might call it the "Uberisation Of Everything" - that I'm, along with many others, trying to explore. Everyone has recently been getting all whooped up about robots stealing our jobs, but for many young people the miserable jobs on offer are no longer worth protecting, and they dream instead of getting rich quickly by exploiting what talents they were born with: a pretty face, a fine voice, a strong imagination, in football, in hip-hop, or... in streaming Hearthstone.

IT lies at the very heart of this phenomenon. Long before robots get smart enough to do all human jobs, computers are assisting humans to do jobs that once required enormous, sometimes lifelong, effort to learn. Uber lets you be a taxi-driver without doing "The Knowledge"; a synthesiser makes you into an instant keyboard player and auto-tune a viable singer; an iPhone can make you a movie director; and Twitch can make you a Poker, or Hearthstone, or Magic pro. The casino aspect of all this, that your luck might make you instantly rich so you don't have to work, merely mirrors the official morality of the finance sector, where young dealers can make billion dollar plays and end up driving Ferraris (and very rarely in jail, LIBOR-fiddling notwithstanding). This is the economics, not of the Wild West itself, but of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Over recent decades the media have so thoroughly exposed us all to the lifestyles of billionaires that now everyone aspires to be a star at something, work is regarded as the curse that Oscar Wilde always told us it was, and money (lots of it) is seen as the primary means to purchase pleasure and self-esteem. The Protestant Work Ethic that motivated our parents or grandparents is being flushed spiralling down the pan...