My first touchpoint for thinking of gaming as an area of study happened in 2016 when a group of creatives, artists and designers approached me to discuss some ideas. They were motivated by the desire to form a collective focused on collaborative endeavours. In an early ideation exercise, they created an organisational chart in the graphical style of an adversarial example¹ diagram — as part of a series of promotional materials. At the centre of their diagram was the PlayStation logo, chosen as the adversarial image infiltrating their learning network.²

The gaming console’s logo was reused as the collective’s logo due only to the shared acronym — the collective called themselves the Office of Patrick Sylvestre. I saw great potential in the association. We continued to explore possibilities of adapting gaming mechanics into their art and design practices and that encounter with the group sowed the seeds for my own curiosity about “gaming” in the broadest sense of the word. I wondered if gaming, as a platform, could serve as a Trojan Horse³ much like how the collective had inadvertently imagined the PlayStation as a disruptive adversarial example.

A year later, the oracle pinged from a Malaysian airport, a four-hour drive north. News broke that Kim Jong-Nam, the paternal half-brother to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, had been allegedly assassinated in broad daylight in Kuala Lumpur’ low-cost carrier terminal. What was peculiar was the manner in which the assassination had been carried out. Two unsuspecting members of the public had unknowingly murdered Kim Jong-Nam by smearing on his face what they had thought was baby oil, but which was in reality a chemical weapon called Venomous Agent X. They had done this under the instruction of a group of North Korean operatives pretending to be TV show producers, who tricked Indonesian woman Siti Aisyah and Vietnamese woman Doan Thi Huong into being part of their highly elaborate set-up. The CCTV image of Doan⁴ — circulated as part of initial search efforts — nonchalantly sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with “LOL” was eerie in itself, but the fact that the assassination had been executed under the guise of a fake TV game show was especially baffling.⁵ The almost otherworldly event cemented my suspicion that gaming was not merely an avenue for entertainment and play, but that it possessed the potential to shape our lived realities in significant ways, even to be deadly. What other agencies then — beyond existing as a proxy for geopolitics — reside in gaming?

(Un)Final Fantasy: Beta Environments

Gaming platforms are not only perceived as sites of unproductivity, but also serve as unintentional beta environments for testing innovative forms of thinking, production and organising: from decentralised finance (DeFi) to epidemic management, and even decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). Before the establishment of esports and the proliferation of live game streaming, video games were often viewed rather negatively. In Singapore, the authorities went so far as to impose a nation-wide ban on video game arcades in response to the growing concerns of parents who feared the negative impact gaming could have on young children and teenagers.⁶ Today, however, as gaming platforms transform into battlegrounds for “the people,” Big Tech and Wall Street, it has become urgent to reassess such outdated perspectives.

Two decades into the new millennium, the notion that games could corrupt young minds has evolved into a self-fulfilling prophecy with the Corrupted Blood incident. The event — named after a spell that was the root cause of the accident — marked a significant moment in gaming history, where an erroneous bug spread rapidly in World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), causing the “death” of thousands of players and necessitating a hard reset of the game servers. Epidemiologists and scientists took interest in the anomalous conditions surrounding the outbreak and the reactions of the players to the plague. Consequently, the incident became an influential model in the study of epidemic responses, including SARS and COVID-19. Game worlds emerged as potential avenues for overcoming the limitations of studies in the real world, given their ability to replicate real world environments and conditions without the associated constraints. Intentionally releasing a strain of a virus in the real world as part of an experiment in understanding human behaviour during an outbreak would be impossible, whereas game worlds allow for such experimentation without causing real harm and danger

Games continue to showcase anomalies and deviations along similar lines. RuneScape, the fantasy-style browser-based role-playing game (RPG) popular in the 2000s, saw some players veering from the original game mechanics to organically establish an alternative player-to-player in-game market. Such minor circumvention of game mechanics likely existed in various forms, within numerous massively multiplayer online (MMO) game universes as well. I recall visiting the neighbourhood barber-cum-LAN-shop⁷ to play the game as a child. Somehow, I knew, without any transference of knowledge (as with all urban legends of that time), where to locate these player-to-player secondary markets in the game world. To sell all the fishes and pies I’d cooked and prepared to level up my cooking experience, I would head to the entrance of the free-for-all combat zone known as “the wilderness.” For better deals on special weapons and armour, I would visit the secret gathering spot on the grass patch behind the bank on the west end of Varrock.⁸

The scene of players “shouting” in text over each other, defying the valuation of their wares by the game’s central banks, may have foreshadowed what we are witnessing today: the rapid emergence of blockchain and decentralised ledgers challenging the legacies of financial institutions and moving towards a more peer-to-peer financial system. It would be worth nothing here that beyond players inflating the value of items outside of the pre-set game economics⁹ and creating self-determined zones where they could capitalise on free market logic, the intervention also facilitated gifting between older players and newly joined players, or amongst players of self-organised clans and guilds.

Clans, Guilds and Communality

In video games, clans and guilds are groups of players that band together and play regularly. These range from small groups of friends aimlessly hanging out on gaming platforms together, to massively organised groups working together towards a common goal. Guilds grew over time into complex systems of organising¹⁰ across different game mechanics and universes, but at the heart of it, they embodied a unified sense of camaraderie and communality amongst gamers.

The communal agency provided by gaming platforms was never more pronounced than during the peak of the recent COVID-19 outbreak.¹¹ Forced to stay indoors as part of a global effort to control the spread of the virus, we turned to digital spaces such as game worlds to maintain a sense of connection with each other. My close friends and I resorted to meeting online using Tabletop Simulator, an online game that allows players to create and play tabletop board games together. There we attempted in vain to play various board games available, but for the most part we just hung out and chatted. The game gave us some semblance of being together at the same table while appeasing our desire for the normalcy of a past where we could be conversing and sipping coffee face to face. Reminded of the power in gathering online on gaming platforms, some raved, some hustled and “united to profit” together, some protested, while others created safe community spaces. Amongst these offshoots, artists and creatives also explored other gaming-derived platforms, from messaging boards like Discord to game-streaming services such as Twitch, in search of new ways of building knowledge together

New Level Unlocked: Communal Knowledge Building

During the pandemic, I had the opportunity to experience first-hand one such experiment, *plotting*, conducted by a group of conspirators from the Berlin-based research collective Trust. The group had previously held video programmes — mostly lectures and lecture performances — but the new Twitch livestream series they embarked on was distinct due to the involvement and use of a self-invented game board with a unique set of game rules and mechanics, complete with dies and counters. The series manifested as a radical variation on the familiar reading group format, where both organisers and participants traditionally shared and discussed reference materials tied to a central theme. Here however, the addition of game mechanics — including diagram boards, turn systems and wormholes that disrupt gameplay, amongst other interventions — offered new ways of experimentation.

In one particular schematic, when two different reference materials (presented as cards in the style of trading card games) were found to have been placed on lots on the board with the same variation of hidden wormholes, a timed minigame was triggered. In this game within the game, the turn player had a limited window of time to decide which position or proposition (for example accelerated efficiency vs anti-automation) represented by the cards would “win,” through a process of rationalising their contexts and mapping a similarity or difference in their contextual underpinnings as raised by the other player and owners of the card. Introducing gaming mechanics in these instances not only transformed knowledge sharing from a passive exercise to a more active one, but at the same time added an element of chaos that opened up opportunities for new forms of relationality to emerge.

Chaos Good, Good Chaos?

In an introduction for audiences entering a stream, the conspirators of the collective would refer to the playing board as a compass, bringing to mind a lineage and association to the moral compass introduced by the iconic board game, Dungeons and Dragons(D&D).¹² Published in 1977, an updated third version of the game’s handbook introduced a moral alignment chart as a new game mechanic to guide players by defining the trajectories and actions taken by their characters. The alignment chart, denoted on an X-Y axis ranging from lawful to chaotic and good to evil, served as a means of mapping and understanding characters’ worldviews. Over the next few decades, the moral alignment chart gained popularity beyond the gaming community and was used by the mainstream public for various situations. Today, a quick Google search of “moral alignment chart” yields results ranging from the chart being re-contextualised in popular TV shows, types of breads, types of chairs and even email sign-offs.

In an article published in The Atlantic that detailed the viral growth of the moral alignment chart from its D&D roots to its current meme status, the graphic illustration accompanying the article embedded the chart within the pupil of an eye, alluding to the symbolism of the chart as a new way of perceiving and judging. One could argue that the moral alignment chart, and to some extent gaming platforms, have indeed provided new ways of looking at the world — offering perspectives that reject simplistic binaries and embrace nuanced spectrums. The chart continues to inspire new ways of seeing as artists and thinkers continue to be informed by it, whether by adapting it into their game-as-art practices¹³ or using it to understand political synthesis.¹⁴

Endgame. End Game?

The title of this text — and also my momentary foray into studying gaming beyond this outlet — borrows from a cautionary proverb, which has ancient Roman etymological origins. However, what is often conspicuously omitted is the second half of the proverb: “It’s all fun and games, until someone loses an eye.” Although gaming as a phenomenon offers some agencies for the betterment of society, it is at the same time a domain in which the ills of the world can be replicated. This has already become a reality, with the perpetuation of undeterred gendered, classist and racist violence on digital game platforms, ungoverned virtual sweatshops with extremely overworked and underpaid game miners, and even the gamification of the military-industrial complex.

It is evident that gaming presents a double-edged sword with conflicting potentials. Games are platforms for communality, learning and experimenting with new ways to live and operate as a society; but they can also be avenues for intensifying inequalities and desensitisation towards violence. This duality may obscure the potential of games, but what is clear is that their potency cannot be ignored. Not unlike being in a game itself, perhaps we should be urged to constantly examine the technology, save our progress, sporadically evaluate our tools and anticipate what we are able to do with them, so that we can be ready for whatever comes next. Recalling the moral alignment chart’s prompt to resist thinking in binaries, I would like to refrain from arriving at an endgame resolution of what gaming can or cannot do, but rather, in the spirit of climbing game levels, I would simply save my progress.

This essay was originally published in So-Far’s Issue 4: Platforms, and builds upon research developed by Rafi Abdullah during a Hotdesk residency at Hothouse, Singapore. The research was also summarised in an interactive livestream, available to watch online.