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  • Much like our first lives
  • Terry Harpold (bio)
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter , Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. 333 pp. £15.00 (pbk).

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter position Games of Empire within what they describe as an emerging third wave of video game studies, in which earlier critics' condemnations of games' intellectual poverty, on the one hand, or celebrations of players' supposed empowerment via virtual play, on the other, are tempered with a critical political analysis of the medium (xxvi). Games extends many of the arguments of Digital Play, the authors' 2003 collaboration with Stephen Kline, which focused on the gaming industry's mythologies of agency and interactivity, positing that games represent an 'ideal commodity' - the term is Martyn Lee's - of post-Fordist capitalism: 'an artifact within which converge a series of the most important production techniques, marketing strategies, and cultural practices of an era' (Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 24). This book takes as axiomatic the exemplarity of games in this regard, and shifts the analysis to a conceptual framework oriented by a more problematic - if finally also generative - master signifier, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire. In their 2000 book, Hardt and Negri proposed that late modern capitalism has entered a new phase of development (the big-E 'Empire' of the book's title), characterised by the diminishing importance of nation states as political agents, the growing dominance of multinational corporate interests and the consequent totalisation of social formations in relation to corporate power and conflict. Hardt and Negri termed 'immaterial labour' the distinctive and hegemonic form of work in this new globalised social order, distinguished from earlier forms of wage labour by its emphasis on the social and symbolic dimensions of commodities - those forms of neo-managerial, high-tech, affective work concerned less, as Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter put it, 'about the production of things and . . . more about the way the production of subjectivity and things are in contemporary capitalism deeply intertwined' (4). [End Page 271]

Hardt and Negri's analysis of imperial sovereignty (extended in 2004' s Multitude and 2009's Commonwealth) has been sharply criticised by leftists for its neglect of the staying power of national self-interests (pugnaciously supported by military force), the intractable materiality of actual labour conditions for the vast majority of workers and Hardt and Negri's simplistic treatment of resistant collective social formations generated from within Empire. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter acknowledge these significant problems of the imperial paradigm, but counter that relations of Empire and 'virtual gaming' - their umbrella term for digital gaming machines and game practices - uniquely illustrate the reach of Empire into all facets of consumption and production, work and play, in the networked world. Virtual games, they propose, are 'exemplary media of Empire. They crystallize in a paradigmatic way its constitution and its conflicts' (xxix) in how they generate new opportunities for Empire's control and new lines of flight from its influences. Games is a signal accomplishment, a theoretically sophisticated, convincing and evocative analysis of game culture and its relation to contemporary mutations of labour and capital.

Early chapters of the book address the history of the gaming industry and its roots in US military R and D and 1970s hacker culture. These include extended discussions of the golden age of 1980s video gaming, Atari's boom and bust, the rise and troubles of game publishing powerhouse Electronic Arts (EA), the 1990s and 2000s console wars of Nintendo, Sega, Sony and Microsoft and the seismic shift in game design and marketing effected by the 2006 release of Nintendo's Wii console, just beginning to be felt at the time of publication. Much of this history was covered in Digital Play; in Games, the history is the background for the book's description of an aggregate machinic logic of gaming culture (Deleuze and Guattari are the source of this idiom) made up of the technical machines of chips and circuits, the corporate machinery of manufacture and marketing, the mobilization of passionate players as machinic subjects of new imperial domains and the war machines of nomadic hacking and...

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