Time to Stop Playing: No Game Studies on a Dead Planet

"Time to Stop Playing: No Game Studies on a Dead Planet," published in Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture in 2023, argues that the games industry cannot be understood apart from the material and ecological crises of contemporary capitalism. The authors frame the industry as embedded in 21st-century imperialism, with hardware and labor outsourced from the Global South while profits concentrate in a small number of large corporations based in the United States, Japan, and increasingly China. Their central thesis is that industry patterns, including the reproduction of racist, orientalist, and militarist narratives and the environmental costs of ever-newer hardware and cloud infrastructure, are symptoms of capitalist contradictions that also drive war, inequality, and climate change.

The paper's argument rests largely on theoretical and interpretive framing rather than new quantitative data. Its evidence base includes the industry's collaborations with the US military, the commercial success of military shooters such as Call of Duty, harassment campaigns associated with far-right "gamers," and greenwashing by major console manufacturers. From these premises, the authors forecast continued consolidation under a few mega-corporations, layoffs and restructuring, deeper worker exploitation and automation, and the defunding and privatization of academic game studies, which they describe as itself shaped by precarious labor.

Scope is global in its industrial and political reference points, spanning hardware supply chains, labor markets in multiple countries, and the geopolitics of semiconductors and US-China technology competition. The paper is contemporary in focus and anchored in critical political economy, Marxist theory, and ecological and postcolonial scholarship.

As its primary remedy, the authors propose collective worker power and cross-border labor organizing, pointing to unionization efforts in Korea, France, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. They also call for materialist analysis of games and for alternative forms of play. The paper's forecasts are speculative and grounded in theory, but its emphasis on organizing and grounded solidarity defines its proposed path toward progressive change.