A World to Build: World-building and Capitalism in Games

This paper argues that videogame world-building is deeply embedded in capitalist social relations and should be understood as a form of political-economic production rather than purely creative labour. Drawing on Marxist political economy, the author contends that game worlds function as fixed capital, comparable to land, that media companies use to develop and extend intellectual property. Through analysis of Fallout 4 and Disco Elysium, the paper positions the player's relationship to these worlds as closer to that of a rentier than a consumer, and treats game worlds as stores of value that can be repeatedly returned to and licensed as brands.

The central aesthetic claim is that this economic logic produces worlds marked by stasis: persistent, always-on environments that resist meaningful change because altering them would waste the value embedded in them. The paper reads this tendency as an expression of the political unconscious of what Anna Kornbluh calls "too-late" capitalism, a condition in which history seems to have ended and the future appears foreclosed. Drawing on Mark Fisher's notion of capitalist realism, the author suggests that such worlds make alternatives harder to imagine, while also acknowledging that failures of imagination carry a radical potential, as Ruth Levitas's utopian method suggests.

As a counterpoint, the paper examines Disco Elysium as a work that resists this stasis by embedding historicity into its game world, presenting its narrative moment as one phase within a larger totality of historical change. The author argues this supports a process-based model of world-building attentive to past, present, and future. The analysis then concludes, however, that even this work was ultimately subsumed by capitalist logics, as shown through the legal and financial dispute over the Elysium intellectual property.

The study is primarily a theoretical and textual analysis, grounded in close readings of two titles and situated within media theory, games studies, and Marxist scholarship. It draws on no original survey or quantitative data. Its stated contribution is to outline the economic and ideological dynamics of late capitalist games production and to propose reclaiming world-building as a utopian and pleasurable practice.