Games and Empire - Special Edition

Games and Culture

2020, Vol. 0(0) 1–13
© The Author(s) 2020
White Masculinity, Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Creative Desires, and DOI: 10.1177/1555412020939873
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Production Ideology in
Video Game
Development

Ergin Bulut1

Abstract
Game workers have a problem. They code values and ideologies into games, but they
are either not aware of it or deny it. Through a constructive and critical engagement
with Games of Empire, I propose the concept of “ludic religiosity” to reveal how white
masculinity informs game workers’ professional discourses, technological practices,
ludic desires, and imaginations. Drawing on three-year-long ethnographic research
and in conversation with cultural studies, philosophy of technology, and postcolonial
game studies, I revisit desiring machine and ideology, two major concepts from Games
of Empire. My goal is to demonstrate the racialized and gendered discourses and
practices behind game developers’ desire to produce cognitive capitalism’s “escapist”
commodities and rethink ideology within white masculine production cultures.
Foregrounding how racialized and gendered practices and imaginations inform the
desire behind the global game industry is crucial, especially in the aftermath of
Gamergate and the rise of authoritarianism.

Keywords
video games, ideology, desiring machine, Games of Empire, ludic religiosity, white
masculinity, creativity, technology, race, gender, production, ethnography

1
Media and Visual Arts, Koç University College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Istanbul, Turkey

Corresponding Author:
Ergin Bulut, Media and Visual Arts, Koç University College of Social Sciences and Humanities,
Rumelifeneri Yolu Koç Universitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Fakultesi, Istanbul 34450, Turkey.
Email: ebulut@ku.edu.tr
2 Games and Culture 0(0)

Introduction
Imagine a group of video game developers, predominantly white and male. They
work in a medium-sized triple-A studio in the United States. I anonymously call this
studio Desire, a laid-back workplace, where developers play video games at work and
drink beer during meetings.
In Desire’s major franchise, players entertain themselves in urban America with
exotic experiences. Its genre and narrative have created some public and scholarly
criticism (Gray, 2014; Mukherjee & Hammar, 2018; Murray, 2018). So, I discussed
this with Desire’s developers during my ethnographic research.1 Why were their
games desirable? What did they think about the criticisms of objectionable repre-
sentation of certain demographic groups in their games?
I directed these questions to two programmers as we discussed their work ex-
perience. Artificial intelligence programmer Chris (White, late 30s) responded with
pauses:

It’s an interesting question… Uhhh… A lot of it is letting out your inner child… The
general freedom to do what you want to do is a pretty big deal for a lot of people.

Following from his use of the word “freedom,” I asked Chris if he would agree that
video games enabled “identity tourism” (Nakamura, 1995) for a predominantly white
audience.

Chris: I think there’s a lot of that … I grew in a suburban house. I didn’t know any of
that stuff. But you see it in a couple of movies … Everything from The
Godfather to Goodfellas to even more urban … I can’t think of a movie off the
top of my head.
Me: Boyz n the Hood, maybe?
Chris: Fantastic, something like that.

At this point, Matthew, a programmer of color, called their game a “fantasy.”2

Then, Chris acknowledged how the urban reality in the United States was different
from their games. He said: “That reality hasn’t hit me out in suburbia, riding BMX.”
So, I asked: Would they agree that their franchise commodifies tough urban life for
white male audiences’ pleasures?

Matthew: We’re definitely playing off of stereotypes of that culture regardless of

whether those stereotypes are actually true or not. It’s a romanticized vision
of what that culture is. And the truth is that culture includes a lot of nasty
stuff.

Ultimately, both programmers agreed that their game was a venue for “escapism.”
Bulut 3

Although these two programmers felt comfortable with claims of escapism, Ri-
cardo (White, mid 30s), an artist involved in constructing the game’s urban territory,
expressed discomfort with the game’s aesthetic conventions. As we discussed
questionable racial choices for some character skins, Ricardo was somewhat
ashamed. Without me probing, he said: “I’ve always kind of felt that was a little racist.
So, I’m not sure where that came from.”
Revisiting Games of Empire (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009), I problematize
Chris and Matthew’s all-to-easy dismissal of games as forms of escapism and push
further Ricardo’s question about how such production decisions are made in triple-A
games. Games of Empire weaves together political economy with a Deleuzian twist to
explore video games based on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire. In Empire, Hardt and
Negri argued that contemporary capitalism was all-encompassing. For them, the
nation state’s power was replaced by multinational corporations, international or-
ganizations (IMF and WTO), and networks. In the context of Empire, media and
information were central to how work and citizenship were configured through what
Foucault called “biopower,” a form of boundaryless power that not only disciplined
bodies but also fostered their capacities toward an endless capital accumulation.
To illustrate how this capital accumulation operates, Games of Empire introduces
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conceptual framework (machine and desire) to
explain how players, their subjectivities, and desires become part of the Empire in
general and the game industry, in particular. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is the
libidinal infrastructure that fuels capitalist social relations. There is nothing unreal or
irrational about desire.
In what follows, I first explain Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual framework.
Then, I will show that the desire that runs the game industry is racialized and
gendered. One cannot simply assume a universal desire because the dominant
subjectivity in the game industry springs from cultures and practices of white
masculinity.3 White masculinity shapes how game workers desire, informs how they
imagine escapism, and ideologically structures how they relate to technological work.
I then address “desiring machine” and “ideology,” and complement them with in-
sights from my ethnographic work, postcolonial approaches to gaming (Mukherjee,
2017; Mukherjee & Hammar, 2018), and cultural studies (Slack & Wise, 2015). Ten
years after Games of Empire was published, foregrounding the racialized and gen-
dered nature of desire and ideology is vital, given how Gamergate has unleashed
a resentful and networked white masculinity feeding into authoritarianism (Taylor &
Voorhees, 2018).

White Masculinity and the Game Industry’s

Desiring Machines
To explain how the industry profitably bridges game producers’ creativity with
players’ gaming capacities, Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter draw from Deleuze and
4 Games and Culture 0(0)

Guattari to deploy the concept of “machine” as they analyze the Microsoft Xbox
console. For them, game consoles are contested machines that produce data-based
profits and anti-corporate struggles.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, machines are central to how societies function:
“Everywhere it is machines … machines driving other machines, machines being
driven by other machines, with all the necessary coupling and connections” (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1983, p. 1). On the one hand, there are “technical machines” such as
consoles. On the other hand, these technical machines are part of a “social machine,”
namely, the networked sum of gaming technologies, as well as those who make and
play them. So, a console would be a technical machine within a larger social machine,
comprising game corporations, developers, players, and hardware workers.
Deleuze and Guattari’s next step is to expand the meaning of machines by defining
human beings as “desiring machines.” Therefore, my subjectivity as a gamer is an
endless process connected with biology, society, and technology. As a desiring
machine, when I interact with consoles and gamers, I am in “an incessant process of
‘becoming’ that produces new alignments of bodies, cognition, and feeling” (Dyer-
Witheford & De Peuter, 2009, p. 70). Then, my gamer subjectivity is cultivated within
digital networks and social practices of play, a total constellation of historical forces,
visual regimes, and engineering choices that interact with consumer desire and
developer demographics (Mejia & LeSavoy, 2018).
What is desire then? There is nothing unreal about desire; for Deleuze, “desire
produces, its product is real” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 26). Especially under
consumer capitalism, desire is immanent to all social relations. In fact, along with
a particular mode of production and pursuit of rational interests, desire runs capi-
talism. For Deleuze, capitalism works not only because there are rational mechanisms
but also because of “libidinal-unconscious flows that constitute the delirium of this
society” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 263). We pursue things that are not always rational. So,
playing games we do not like only to collect trophies on PS4 would be an example to
this (Wilson, 2018).
Desire is so central to social relations that for Deleuze, history is “the history of
desire,” (2004, p. 263) meaning that different social classes desire differently in
different epochs. Then, he adds: “When people in a society desire repression, for
others and for themselves, when there are people who like to harass others, and who
have the opportunity to do so, the ‘right’ to do so, this exhibits the problem of a deep
connection between libidinal desire and the social field” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 263).
I am concerned with Deleuze’s failure to adequately racialize and gender desire,
and link desire to colonial histories and legacies (McClintock, 1995; Stoler, 1995).
Obviously, neither Games of Empire nor the project of Deleuze and Guattari was
postcolonial.4 They do not have to be. In fact, Games of Empire critically examines
hardware’s unequal production materiality in Asia.
Yet, it misses how the desire that fuels the game industry’s creative workforce itself
is racialized and gendered. While Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter underline “crea-
tivity, cooperation, and cool” (2009, p. 55) as the affective forces behind game
Bulut 5

developers as desiring machines, they cast less than necessary attention to the ra-
cialized and gendered histories and longings of these desiring machines and their
capacities. The creative workers might surely desire liberation from work and
demonstrate this through placing Easter eggs in video games. Yet, what about their
desire to consume the Other within creative production cultures (Hooks 1992)? As
such, the Deleuzio–Guattarian framework behind Games of Empire fails to illuminate
how racialized and gendered histories inform game developers’ practices of creating
racialized and gendered fantasies.
The computer screen is never blank prior to game production (Mejia & LeSavoy,
2018). The phrases I encountered during my fieldwork (“escapism,” “letting out your
inner child,” and “the general freedom to do what you want”) are “a continuation of
the Western historic project of securing pleasure through the other” (Leonard, 2003,
p. 5). Such seemingly innocent practices of escapism are rooted in colonialism to the
extent that “19th century adventurers in Central Asia, exploring and marking out
potential territory for their English or Russian masters, called their enterprise of
espionage, surveillance, and mapping the ‘Great Game’ or the ‘tournament of
shadows’” (Mukherjee, 2016, p. 506).
Then, white masculine fantasies condition game developers’ creative desires to
unleash escapism on computer screens.5 If games are “playable representations”
(Murray, 2018), then how their creators make claims about the world and how gamers
play with these representational claims must be grasped through the subjectivity of
those who desire (Bogost, 2006). In sum, how the game industry thrives as a machine
is directly linked with the white masculine subject position of those desiring machines
employed in the racialized and gendered playgrounds of the game industry.

White Masculinity, Ideology, and Technological Practice in

Game Production
In this section, I flesh out the dominance of white masculinity behind game de-
velopers’ productive desires through another concept that Games of Empire analyzes
only at the representational level—ideology. Although the book dissects the cynical
ideology shaping Grand Theft Auto IV, it fails to clarify cynicism’s relationship with
white masculinity. Remaining at the representational level and not addressing the
relationship between white masculinity and technological practice, the book misses
how white masculinity informs game developers’ imagination regarding what they
can achieve with technology.
According to Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, GTA IV both constructs essentialized
identities of people of color and provides a “comedic expose of US politics” and
a “scathing parody of neoliberal sensibilities” (2009, p. 179). Yet, GTA’s criticism fails
because it does not suggest a way out of the urban decay and corruption. GTA’s
ideology is cynical because both its producers and players believe that the game is too
absurd to take seriously (2009, p. 181).6
6 Games and Culture 0(0)

Indeed, defending GTA IV, Rockstar’s Sam Houser argued that their games were
“unilaterally offensive” (Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter, 2009, p. 181). This is where
Games of Empire fails to illuminate the relationship between the desire of equally
offending everybody and white masculinity. GTA’s developers claim the authorita-
tive space of unilateral offense and entertain themselves at work through white
masculinity.
Let me illustrate how this cynical ideology works through an encounter from my
fieldwork. In my interview with Stuart (White early 30s), who was responsible for
supporting player communities, I asked his thoughts about their game’s subversive
narrative.

Stuart: We offend everybody. We go after men. We go after women. We go after fat.

We go after skinny. We go after white, black, Asian, Latino. It doesn’t matter to
us. I think that’s what allows us to get away with it. It’s the fact that we go after
everybody equally. We don’t just do jokes that demean women. We do jokes
that demean men.

While evoking cynicism as suggested in Games of Empire, this statement reveals

a discursive strategy of whiteness, which exists by systematically denying its actuality
(Nakayama & Krizek, 1995). Going after everyone equally erases white masculinity’s
political responsibility precisely because whiteness powerfully remains unnoticed as
a world of habit (Ahmed, 2007). Denying its centrality to power relations, white
masculinity becomes the gatekeeper for boundary-making. Through the discourse of
equally offending everyone, it establishes an unquestionable coherence around who
the proper subjects and objects of offense are (Ortiz, 2019). So, on the one hand,
Games of Empire misses the racialized and gendered roots of cynical ideology in
game production.
On the other hand, there is a technological dimension to this production ideology.
White masculinity is rooted also in how game developers unleash their desires to push
the boundaries of what they can achieve with new technologies. This is where I
conceptually expand ideology7 beyond game representation to encompass how game
developers’ desire—rooted in white masculinity—functions in relation to techno-
logical work. I ask: What is it about technology and white masculinity that enables
game developers to forcefully invest their desires in creative work, claim mastery over
technology, and a neutral position regarding ideological meaning?
In my book, I introduce the concept of ludic religiosity 8 to unpack how game
developers not only dismiss the ideological content of their work but also passionately
believe that video games are machines to explore the limits of innovation. Embedded
in cultures of white masculinity, ludic religiosity is a strong belief system that
measures everything against the commensurability of ludic and technical pleasure in
a supposedly neutral technological system. This ludic function is related to game
content but even more deeply connected to the capacities of technological machines,
which game workers push for pleasure.
Bulut 7

If technology, as Carey (2009, p. 87) suggests, holds a “secular religiosity” within

the Euro-American imagination, then the theology of game developers is ludic and
technological experimentation. Game developers enjoy pushing both discursive
(“offending everyone”) and technical (“letting your inner child” or “blowing things
out”) boundaries. Yet, technical experimentations and breakthroughs usually rest on
unequal power relations (Benjamin, 2019; Eubanks, 2017; Noble, 2018). Similarly,
while games are data, affect, and action (Anable, 2018), some of them signify
masculine mastery over technology. As Chun and Lison (2014) discuss in relation to
the unequal gendered politics of programming, computational systems’ promises are
linked with power and sovereignty. With their racialized and gendered technological
desires and imaginations, game developers are the sovereigns that act on and
transform the world (Chun & Wilson, 2014, p. 180).
The racialized and gendered desire for technological mastery through sacrificial
work came up in my ethnography. Many of my interlocutors would make a claim for
good command of computer skills, display a masculine libertarian work attitude, and
endorse a gendered attitude regarding passionate work. Drawing on Johnson (2018), I
define such discourses and practices as “technomasculinity.” My interview of Karl
(White early 40s), a programmer who had worked at Desire for many years, illustrated
this. During our discussion of the contributing factors behind Desire’s success, Karl
said:

It was just a personal sacrifice from a number of people and ridiculous hours that we
pulled it off. I am not sure where we would be today; probably nowhere if we hadn’t
managed to pull that pedal off.

“Pulling that pedal off” was possible during those days because most of the
developers during Desire’s early days were “either single or pretty close to it, no kids,”
he added.9
Karl and I also discussed the cultural shifts and organizational frictions at Desire
when a major publisher acquired it in 2000s. He described a “not-invented here
syndrome.” The developers during Desire’s early start-up days had a “self-
centeredness about them that they sort of know better than the next guy,” Karl
said. So, when Desire was acquired, the developers were skeptical of the incoming
project managers.
For Dinerstein (2006, pp. 570–571), technology and its potentials function as “a
white mythology” that constructs a “techno-cultural matrix” of “progress, religion,
whiteness, modernity, masculinity, and the future.” Being such a “techno-cultural
matrix,” game production emerges as the utopic landscape of a “new frontier”
(Gunkel, 2015). Territorial expansion occurs through code and game design, as game
developers with their hegemonic subjectivities seek to maximize their technological
pleasure.
Embedded in white masculinity, ludic religiosity accomplishes a few things. While
it reinforces whiteness as the universal arbiter of what counts as escapism, it
8 Games and Culture 0(0)

simultaneously erases whiteness in shaping production cultures in the gaming in-

dustry (Dyer, 1997). When Stuart from my fieldwork uses a discourse of offending
everyone equally, he renders invisible the power dynamics of who can exploit the
affordances of technological machines and at whose expense. Such color and gender
blind rhetoric of “equal opportunity offense” promises an abstract form of in-
dividualism and liberalism in the context of post-racialism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014),
rendering “radical resistance to and revisioning of racial logics unlikely if not im-
possible” (Young, 2016, p. 359). Since technological mastery and pleasure stand at
the heart of ludic religiosity, the possibility of an institutional critique of the game
industry’s racialized and gendered production logics is diminished.

Games of Empire: Ten Years Later

Cultures, habits, and practices of white masculinity lie beneath the “desiring ma-
chines” in the game industry. Therefore, a conceptualization of “desiring machines”
and “ideology” can be more complete with a thorough consideration of race, gender,
and colonialism. This constitutes the core of my reflections on Games of Empire,
a highly influential work on my research and game studies. Where do we go from
here?
First, I emphasized how whiteness becomes invisible by denying its existence.
Today, we are facing a resentful white masculinity that wants to be painfully visible
and celebrated. Therefore, the extent to which the much-celebrated multitude in
Empire and Games of Empire can in fact be reactionary as demonstrated during
Gamergate needs further theorization (Lees, 2016).
Second, we need sustained inquiry into nationalism and video games. Recently,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published a reflection piece on Empire in the age
of Trump (Hardt & Negri, 2019). They still argue that the nation state is losing its
salience. However, nation states are racing to provide tax breaks for game companies
(De Peuter, 2012). Moreover, video games teach gamers to become loyal subjects of
the nation and conquer new territories in the name of imperial progress, rewriting
historical memory in playful ways (Hammar, 2019; Harrer, 2018). Consider the
uncertainty that Brexit caused for game workers in Britain, as well as how various
groups produced different propaganda games for both political options (Didžgalvytė,
2018). Therefore, a dedicated research agenda on nation, nationalism, authoritarian
populism, and video games is essential.
Third, Games of Empire suggests how global capital is particularly good at ac-
quiring successful indie developers. An issue that requires further analysis is how
indie developers are offloaded the task to resolve racial inequalities in the broader
gaming ecosystem. The framing of the independent game sector as a remedy to racist
game content only increases the emotional labor undertaken by indie game developers
(Ruberg, 2019; Srauy, 2019). At the same time, indie games’ progressive potentials
create new multicultural markets that are ready to capture indie developers’ labor
Bulut 9

power. In that regard, Games of Empire’s formidable political economic perspective

remains relevant for illuminating how the industry commodifies progressive causes.
Finally, with their focus on the resisting capacities of game developers, Games of
Empire foresaw the organizing capacities of the multitude reflected in the global
movement “Game Workers Unite” (Weststar & Legault, 2019; Woodcock, 2020).
Although one might critique Games of Empire’s overemphasis on flows of desire, its
stress on struggle and labor autonomy is valuable, given the promising transnational
struggle of Game Workers Unite. Yet again, intersectional and anti-colonial ap-
proaches to resist and overthrow institutional racism, sexism, and exploitative labor
practices will have to be central to a 21st century game workers’ union, as well as
critical video game studies.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

ORCID iD
Ergin Bulut  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7972-3919

Notes
1. For almost three years, I explored what it means to love making video games at this studio. I
observed team meetings, studio-wide meetings, and in-house training sessions. I interviewed
developers, testers, and their partners. Centering materiality, social reproduction, and in-
equality as a lens, I investigated who can play and who has to work in the game industry. The
findings of this research, along with questions of unionization, universal basic income, and
post-work imagination, are in my book (Bulut, 2020).
2. Fantasies and practices of identity tourism vary. Well-intentioned developers address racism
by “playing race” through avatars—for example, Everyday Racism—but still reproduce
racialization as a domain of white knowledge, unconsciously obstructing institutional
critiques of racism in and outside the industry (Fordyce, Neale, & Apperley, 2018).
3. In understanding how race and gender operate, I am inspired by Sara Ahmed’s concep-
tualization of whiteness as a world of habit, where whiteness orients bodies’ acting, moving,
and thinking. For Ahmed, whiteness becomes a bodily and spatial point of “inheritance,”
shaping individuals and institutions. Ahmed argues that whiteness derives its power partly
from “lagging behind.” Therefore, despite remaining unnoticed, whiteness still holds im-
mense power over social relations (Ahmed, 2007, p. 159). That invisibility applies also to
masculinity as a world of habit, which significantly shapes production cultures in the game
industry (Johnson, 2018).
10 Games and Culture 0(0)

4. For a starting guide on this, see Bignall and Patton (2010). They engage with the debates
regarding Deleuze’s link with the postcolonial theory. Some critique Deleuze for his “silence
on colonialism” along with his “Eurocentric self-interest, a neo-imperial motivation or
a hidden or unacknowledged desire to deflect attention away from the political concerns of
the postcolony” (Bignall & Patton, 2010, p. 1). In fact, his interest in nomad practices was
targeted due to an indifference to colonized people’s experience (Kaplan, 1996). Similarly,
his failure, along with Foucault, to devise alternative ways of listening to the subaltern
subjects produced scholarly discontent (Spivak, 1988). Others, however, see a potential
conversation between Deleuze and the postcolonial condition. For an example on the
materiality of geography of the postcolonial condition in Palestine, see Svisrky (2010).
5. Whiteness is not geographically limited to the West. Games like Resident Evil through
particular aesthetic forms (i.e., Japan and mukokuseki in our case) rearticulate whiteness as
an organizational logic in the context of epidemic, while globally circulating race in the
aftermath of the War on Terror (Brock, 2011; Mejia & Komaki, 2013). Harrer and Pichlmair
(2015) also considered how RE5 reproduces racialized and gendered neo-colonialism
through stark visual and narrative dichotomies.
6. Examples about the problematic mobilization of humor in gaming cultures are abundant.
Electronic Arts’s promotion of Battlefield 1 with “humorous” tweets led to criticism re-
garding insensitivity (Hern, 2016). Penny Arcade’s dismissal of criticism against “rape
jokes” and the recent Gamergate attests to the toxic articulation of “humor” within gaming
cultures (Braithwaite, 2016; Salter & Blodgett, 2012).
7. I define ideology as the cultivation and negotiation of certain beliefs through social relations
and concrete practices. Game developers do not suffer from false consciousness. Rather, I
am referring to the relationship between the ideas we practice in the world and the formation
of subjectivity. Subjectivity is constitutive of ideology, meaning that historical formations
and cultural practices—in our case whiteness and masculinity—shape how game developers
imagine work and circulate their professional discourses. I am aware that we, as academics,
are not beyond the operations of ideology. We have to be reflexive of how gamers or game
developers can be our own objects of desire. I do not aim to single out game developers but
point to institutional production cultures that breed problematic game content. Game de-
velopers’ identities are not fixed but open to negotiation and change. This change, however,
depends on whether game developers, just like academics, take responsibility to ac-
knowledge how knowledge production is implicated in politics.
8. This concept draws from ludic sublime, a term we previously used to address the cyber-
utopian and market-oriented approaches to serious games of philanthropy positioned to
solve major social inequalities (Bulut, Mejia, & McCarthy, 2014).
9. I discuss elsewhere how developers’ partners experience technomasculinity at home and
reproduce an entire workforce through their invisible reproductive labor, as well as classed
femininities (Bulut, 2020).

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Author Biography
Ergin Bulut is currently an associate professor at Koç University’s Media and Visual Arts
Department. He researches in the areas of political economy of media and cultural production,
video game studies, media and politics, and critical theory. In the 2019–2020 academic year,
Bulut was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and faculty fellow
at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at UPenn. His book A Pre-
carious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry was published from
Cornell University Press in 2020. His work has also appeared in Media, Culture and Society,
Triple C, International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication,
Television and New Media, and Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies.