[WS:] Or perhaps neo-con feudalism. Under the feudal system, peasants worked the lord's land in exchange for the small fraction of the crops they produced. They were often paid in booze for the foodstuff they produced, and which the lord appropriated. This form of payment was also used by some South African farmers under the apartheid system.
So since the peasants or the Black farm hands would spend their money on booze anyway, there was nothing wrong with this form of payment, right? Or perhaps it is wrong only when it applies to "uncool" material stuff, but it is OK when it applies to the "cool" virtual stuff?
Looking at it form a different angle, the problem is not whether the form of payment is "real" or "virtual", as paper money is no more "real" (or "virtual') than "points" that can be exchanged for some goods or services. The problem is the system of exchange in which one party claims the lion share of the goods or services produced in that system based solely on his legal claim of ownership, whereas the actual producers of these goods or services are paid a small fraction of what they produce. This is the essence of exploitation, as defined by Marx's theory of value.
Gaming is the ultimate form of exploitation. The gamers do the entire work, whereas the owners of the gaming site (be it brick and mortar , like a casino, or virtual) contribute nothing to the game but the ownership, which entitles them them to the "tribute" from the gamers. In principle, this is not much different from any capitalist production process. What makes it more obnoxious, however, is that ordinary capitalists produce something of use value in the process of producing for exchange value. The casino capitalism, by contrast, is all about exchange value, and very little use value is produced by the exchange system.
In other words, owners of the "satanic mills" produced cloth, which had high use value. They organized the production process in such a way that they could produce more cloth more efficiently, which allowed them to keep the lion's share of their product exchange value, but there was also general benefit to society as more cloth was available for a greater number of people at a relatively lower price.
With casino capitalism, no such general benefit to society obtains. The fact that more "monopoly money" is available for future games produces nothing of value to society. Moreover, the process of making this monopoly money is a net drain on society, as it absorbs productive energies of individuals that could have been used on producing use value (even under capitalist relations of production) and applies them to unproductive ends (more gaming to produce more exchange value.)
In sum, the practice of paying workers in virtual money (or in booze) - while in principle similar to other forms of exchange under capitalist system of production - is more obnoxious than other forms of the capitalist wage system, because it is the purest form of capitalism that maximizes exchange value obtained by ownership of the means of production without producing any use value in the process.
Wojtek
On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 4:40 PM, <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> On Sun, June 20, 2010 11:15 am, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
>
> > Jesse Schell (a gaming CEO and CMU prof) gave an interesting talk
> > about a future where life is a game -- schools, corporations and
> > governments structure everything as a point system.
> >
> http://fury.com/2010/02/jesse-shells-mindblowing-talk-on-the-future-of-ga
> > mes-dice-2010/
>
> Ah, yes, I remember running across that talk a couple months ago. What he
> describes in such glowing terms, though, is really a dire vision of
> unrelieved neoliberal hell.
>
> It's funny how the more Wall Street neoliberalism tries to imagine the
> future, the more it ends up recoiling into neocon barbarism. The
> point-counting system he describes at the end is the prison-house at the
> end of the US Empire. The suburban dream house, that Ur-fantasy of the
> 35-year credit bubble, is transformed into a panopticon which tracks your
> every muscle-twitch for the sake of profit -- every subprime mortgage
> becomes its very own Guantanamo Bay.
>
> But there's good news: advertisers and oligopolies are losing control of
> the gaming culture, thanks to increasingly assertive and powerful digital
> networks of artists and fans.
>
> -- DRR
>
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