Essay

In the field of games we do a lot of arguing for videogames to be considered as cultural works on a par with other fields: film, television, theatre, art. One way of doing that is to explore games critically on their own terms, but this article is my attempt at Taking Games Seriously from another perspective: putting a videogame in dialogue with other pieces of culture and not arguing that it belongs there. Just… assuming it does. 

In magazines like the London Review of Books or The New Yorker you’ll often get several works about a topic used together to approach it from several directions – putting them in dialogue. And that’s what this is. A kind of ‘comparative study’ which (for the first time? Has someone done this before?) includes a videogame. The topic I’m exploring is the digital worker in an age of AI and digital surveillance. The game is Zachtronics’ Eliza, written and directed by Matthew Seiji-Burns – a 2019 visual novel that explores a burnt-out Seattle AI tech worker’s experience of re-entering the world, and figuring out who she wants to be in it. 

The work of fiction is Calvin Kasulke’s Several People are Typing, a modern take on the epistolary novel, which is entirely made up of the exchanges between people on the channels and DMs of a PR firm’s Slack. At the beginning of Several People Are Typing, the central character wakes to find his consciousness has somehow left his body and become trapped in the work Slack. 

And the work of non-fiction is Jathan Sadowski’s accessible and punchy The Mechanic and the Luddite. Subtitled ‘a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism’ Sadowski’s book explores how contemporary digital technoculture presents new and increasingly inextricable challenges when resisting capital’s exploitation of every part of our lives.

Together we can use the three works to come at the question: as technology is so intertwined with our lives and work, how do we unpick ourselves from the machine?