Social ecstasy may be an obscure and esoteric subject, but as a phenomenon it does exist, and for the time being we can try to trace its contours in video game production.
What does ecstasy in production look like? It might be a little difficult to talk about what is actually happening in the subjective experience of the producers, but one can find markers of its existence upon apprehending the actual work of art. Something feels great in the work, or something is being expressed that suggests that the artist expressing it was clearly experiencing some sort of ecstasy or cosmic vision.
But what I'm interested in at the moment is how this ecstasy becomes possible, and then how is it to ebb and flow given the modalities it arises with?
Something happens over time in the video game industry, which is related to the structure and modality of reproduction of the society that the industry exists in. Large corporate economic structures form around various intellectual and technological properties, and there is a pattern in which original and vital franchises form at a slower rate, and repetitious sequels and spinoffs churn forth in increasingly degraded states. The culture itself calcifies, with a conservative fan base rallying around the hyper-masculine and violent franchises they've been consistently fed all their lives.
Yes, there must be a raw material that fuels the ecstatic vision. For the most part, the mainstream strains of our video game culture has chosen war.
There are common technologies and ideas that are shared socially, which form the soil from which these creative visions spring forth. However over time increasingly idiosyncratic and proprietary developments are fenced off by the conservative and acquisitive corporations, which take less chances as the production process becomes more expensive and intensive, choosing instead to milk the cash cow, the successful franchise that worked.
Where do these successful franchises come from? Maybe someone spots a rare talent, or some team of talents comes together organically before the company's social structures have completely hardened. Maybe there is a trusted talent who has an existing team, and a new idea is developed then? I can't claim to know the interiors of the companies, but there is enough information present to make inferences. From the outside, it helps to reiterate that all these things suffer from diminishing returns, and I given company, the truly inspired pieces become fewer and far between. Restructuring, mergers, various reinvigorations, and the like may complicate things further, but I digress.
A useful contrast lies in the existence of The Valve Corporation, which has put out consistently excellent quality franchises and games - at a reduced frequency - in part because of its free associative organizational structure. Teams are allowed to organically combine and disband depending on what employees are interested in working on. Still there are limits to this as well.
To go further, if one is really looking for something special, in which the writing and the art direction is truly inspired and even ecstatic, one must go to the indie realm, where projects are greatly scaled down and the production process is less intensive. The process may be accessible enough so that a single person with vital ideas and talents may be able to make the entire game, or else a few compatible team members can come together organically.
In the mainstream portion of the industry, to find an instance in which the ideas, the writing, the art, and whatever else are all working together to form a consistently excellent whole is much more rare. Even more rare is to find a game which bucks the most basic conventions of the industry, or even of the greater culture.
The technology itself - the product of the engineer's ecstasy - persists for some time, and can be successfully reproduced if there aren't systemic issues with the organs of production - this is another issue altogether - and so graphics, physics, framerates and all the like are quite consistently spectacular, while the writing and the subject matter is comparatively dull and lifeless. And there are even increasingly glaring problems with the technology itself as time wears on, such as strange or even fatal bugs and flaws, which can probably be traced back to the social structures of production, and even to the surrounding technological infrastructure itself.
This is all getting ahead of another set of questions. Where does the ecstasy go? Who gets to enjoy it? Who gets to do work that they enjoy, and who gets to get respected for that work? Are we huddled breathlessly around the work of janitors who maintain the buildings of production, and the technicians who maintain the computers and other machines of production? No, in this case, the full blooming, and the full social witnessing of the blooming occurs at the levels of cultural work and high technology.
And given the historic concentration of capital and even worker resources, this ecstasy blossoms in limited circles, delineated by class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, etc. Yes, in the cultural realm things are changing, sometimes rapidly in some quarters, but there remains a political struggle for participation in a wide swathe of cultural production, a participation which necessarily requires a certain amount of resources and standard of living, all political struggles in their own right.
And further, everyone is still working under the constraints of capital, even the indie workers, who toil under constrained resources.
Now one major question to go back to is this: why is it that when something reaches a certain point of development in this society, its creative spark, or its soul is lost?
One explanation we can point to lies in the structure of the modern corporation itself. It was once built to be formed and then collapsed to administrate large economic projects, but now it is erected and persists for as long as it has the means to accumulate money and capital for its owners, which happen to be a minority resting at the top of the structure.
The ecstasy then is consistently reserved for the businessman, who is permitted by his society to latch on to some cultural phenomenon of interest, establish an economic structure around it, and then exploit it for his ecstasy, his delight in accumulation. This necessarily must order all of the cultural activity underneath it towards this aim, breaking up the connections which are formed in various ecstatic directions, and then reordered to perpetuate and intensify accumulation.
The economic landscape of video game production becomes a sort of great game, in which the executives controlling the economic apparatus hijack the entire field of activity in order to accumulate and consolidate their operations and capital. And well, by now this is an old story to seasoned ears.
