Digital Capitalism’s War on Leisure

> If you had more quarters to spare in Pac-Man,

Definitely. And just to dilute simplistic points of view, there were also books published designed to teach the secrets to beating these games in part to spend less money on them. [1] One was even published by Consumer Reports..

[1] http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/12/golden-age...

But the author has already bought into the frame that playing the game according to implicit rules and achieving progress is the dominant form of the game. This overlooks many other social aspects of the game, such as roles like watching, reviewing, finding secret levels, using games as a social space to meet others, etc.

In short, the author is caught by surprise by the fact that humans will project their social relations into the video game world which they have imagined to be hyper-egalitarian.

In fact, the mere invention of the games was an extension of our social relations into the digital field, so as soon as they appeared it was too late to sustain the author's idealistic viewpoint.

Perhaps the author would have made a stronger point arguing for the emergence of a hypercapitalist congeries of video games which are actually a precession of Baudrillardian simulacra. In the first stage, the dynamics of human experience are projected digitally into a virtual, lithographic field, e.g. instead of battles in space, we use electronic computers to simulate game play

In the second stage, e.g. games on disks and CDs from the 80s-2000, capital was used to design a product which must be recovered through sales of the game software.

In the third stage, it is the simulacra of a game which is sold. It must be so technically dazzling that the capital required to produce it can not be recovered from the sales of the game itself. The game must be reconfigured so that it is not merely a game any more, but an addictive object whose main purpose is no longer leisure, but to recover the hypercapital outlay to reproduce it through gacha.

Even most of those seem to subsist more on pulling in a small percentage of "whales" (who spend thousands and likely have gambling addictions) and people who buy the occasional hat.

Even then on an entertainment/hour basis video games are a remarkably cheap form of entertainment.

> Has anyone run the numbers of how UBI would be financed?

There are different ways to do the accounting here. The opponents like to just add up the sum of everyone's UBI and call that the cost. But if someone pays $12,000 to fund the UBI and then receives a $10,000 UBI, the net cost to them is obviously $2000 rather than $12,000.

Calculating the overall net cost is also not very useful, because it's effectively zero outside of some minimal administrative costs -- payments in equal payments out.

Probably the sensible way to do it is to calculate the net loss to people who pay more than they receive, e.g. $2000 to someone who pays $12,000 and receives $10,000 but $0 (rather than -$2000) for someone who pays $8000 and receives $10,000.

Using those numbers you end up somewhere in the ballpark of 25% of the cost calculated using the first method, because you take the total cost and subtract out the UBI the top half of the population is paying themselves, and then half the remainder for the bottom half, because people in the bottom half would be net recipients but would still on average be paying half as much as they receive.

Whether this is exactly 25% depends on the income distribution within the population. It gets higher the more inequality there is. If everyone had exactly the same income it would be 0%. If there is great inequality it would be higher, i.e. more dollars transferred from richer to poorer. But that's kind of what you want.

The most important factor in the cost is obviously the amount of the UBI. It can be made arbitrarily more or less expensive by changing that.

> I would be more in favor of a jobs guarantee since I think people find working meaningful

There are reasons to think that would be a bad idea, e.g.:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-...

Moreover, half the point of a UBI is that it doesn't impose costs on working, unlike means-tested programs where earning money from working causes the loss of benefits.

It's one of the things that allow it to operate productively even at below-subsistence payment levels. The highest paying job you're qualified to do may not pay enough to subsist on but becomes enough when combined with a modest UBI.

And for someone who genuinely can't find full-time work, they're more likely to find meaning -- or a lead on gainful employment -- by volunteering somewhere of their choosing rather than being forced to dig holes and fill them back in with insufficient free time to improve themselves and get out of that situation.

NES era developers knew that many of their customers could only afford a few games a year but also didn't have enough memory on the carts for extremely large games. The only way to prevent kids from blowing through the content in a weekend was to crank the difficulty up or figure out some way to offer endless replayability (ala Tetris).

It's really incredible when you see printed out maps of old NES games just how small the levels were. You could put an entire game in a 4 or 5 page spread in Nintendo Power if you wanted.

This article unravels at this line- " In industrial and post-industrial societies, work tends to be necessarily hierarchical. But leisure has always held out the promise of equality. "

I don't think this has ever really been true.