Video games are an economic and cultural force par excellence. Since 2018 the video game industry has produced greater profits than the film and music industries combined. Around 35 percent of the global population regularly plays video games. Grand Theft Auto V has made over $eight billion in revenue since its release, making it one of the most profitable media products ever.
All this success and widespread adoption, however, has done little to elevate video games beyond bland and reactionary conversations in much of the mainstream media. Video game industry critic Marijam Did (née Didžgalvytė) in Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World describes it best: “Videogames occupy an odd space; they are the most influential and profitable entertainment… but at the same time they are exempt from any serious cultural criticism.”
Confidently written, Everything to Play For is structured to mirror how we experience games. Each chapter is presented as a level, successively increasing in difficulty as we are tasked with exercising our imagination. Nevertheless, the book is still immensely readable and easy to pick up. Did strings together complex concepts and technical details into comprehensive sentences, drawing throughout from direct connections between technology and video games, art criticism, global financing, labor, environmental concerns, and even the war industry. Concepts like gamification are demystified, and its adoption in a variety of products is explained.
Everything to Play For as a political book brims with lofty ambition. Did wears her politics on her sleeve. She wants how we look at games and how we built them to change. Through user modification, Did argues, video games “have the potential to add greatly to visual inventiveness, something that is essentially impossible to achieve in other media.” This visual inventiveness, however, comes at a high cost. The video game industry exploits its workers and is stuck in an extractivist mindset that constantly looks to create more powerful hardware. This narrow-mindedness unsurprisingly bleeds into the games and further fuels anthropogenic climate change.
Everything to Play For is meant to win hearts and minds. The subject matter and the challenges discussed are equally as informative as they are harrowing. You’re left to think, how can we change these seemingly intractable problems? By the end of the book, you will learn a few things, and if receptive enough, you might even eagerly want to advance Did’s call to action.
Everything to Play For‘s first two chapters, “Introduction: Main Menu” and “Tutorial: History”, though at first glance appear self-evident, are instead radical retellings of the video game industry’s history and its global impact. Throughout, Did takes time to highlight important games and why they are significant. For example, DOOM, the 1993 game that birthed the first-person shooter, was a popular scapegoat in America’s culture wars. “Alienation, economic and social insecurity, and mental health crises were all dismissed in the popular media in order to denounce the perceived true culprit – videogames,” writes Did ironically in defense of DOOM.
Subsequent chapters are more steeped in political theory. In “Level IV: Modes of Production”, for example, Did is most concerned with how games are made. As she sees it, the video game industry is preoccupied with profit-making at the expense of working conditions and environmental impact.
Play creates value. It is more than just an abstract activity. It can engender and teach what Did calls “methods and structures for compliance and resistance.” Thus, play is a power that can be used for good or ill. Did expands, “Play is essential to the general mechanics of existence and, crucially, to resistance.” Thus, video games become a battleground “brimming with politics”.
Indeed, what propelled Everything to Play For into existence is a rallying cry: “We can either allow this vast cultural space to be eternally entangled in the awkward nets of conservatism and financialisation that will suffocate and deform both it and the players who touch it, or we can fight to rescue it.” As I read this, I asked myself, can the video game industry be rescued? Should we even try? Everything to Play For answers back with a resounding Yes!
Our modern routines are morphing play into, first and foremost, a form of labor. Gamers are increasingly becoming a source of what philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato terms immaterial labor where “labor… produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.” The streamers, influencers, and players creating shareable content also generate profits for video game companies. Did speaks to this phenomenon by adding that “unpaid labour adds value to the game and may indirectly benefit game developers and publishers by maintaining the game’s relevance.” Consider the streamer making content on Animal Crossing: New Horizons. They are purposely or inadvertently marketing the game for Nintendo. As were politicians who campaigned in the game in 2020.
Furthermore, video games under capitalism reinforce what theorist Theodor Adorno describes in entertainment products as “a ritual in which the subjugated celebrate their subjection.” Adorno would go even further by arguing that free time is a space ripe for the expansion of productivity. The streamer plays games not as a pastime but as work. Did not only agrees with this but goes to great lengths in highlighting how many of the most popular modern video games, Stardew Valley, The Sims, and Animal Crossing, for example, “… are simulations of our laborious work life repackaged in an idealized form.”
Not all players so willingly subjugate themselves to capital. Others engage in bootlegging, hacking, and modifying existing games to expand their gaming options. The results can be meaningful and enhance the significance of the original games tampered with. Take, for example, the recent DOOM: The Gallery Experience, a video game whose creators, Filippo Meozzi and Liam Stone, describe as “an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.” The three-decades-old DOOM is refashioned into a new game to make salient political statements. On top of this, it is distributed for free on the website itch.io. How’s that for radical?
Video games as an industry are the children of “ideas and iterations”, writes Did, who are historically made possible by “funneling publicly acquired knowledge into privatized industries.” In the 1950s, early video games were mainly funded by US taxpayer money, even though these digital inventions were not intended for a general audience or, for that matter, for fun.
It took nearly two decades for the first commercial video game to be released in 1971 with the coin-operated game, Computer Space. Atari’s Pong followed in 1972, and coin-operated games exploded in popularity. Social panic soon followed. By the late 1970s, coin-operated games were so popular that the Japanese video game developer Taito could believably propagate the myth that Japan was running out of 100 yen coins due to the popularity of their hit Space Invaders. At the time, Space Invaders was one of the most successful media products ever made, with billions of dollars in profits, according to Dustin Hansen in his 2019 book Game On!. This shows that video games have had a significant societal impact for decades.
Everything to Play For also provides a detailed account of the sexist evolution of the video game industry. The Tech industry’s long-standing diversity problems are passed on to video games. Bias testing, high computer cost, and the culture of the earliest video game companies like Atari, played a major role in making it the white male-dominated industry it still is. According to Did, in the 1950s, around 40 percent of computer programmers in the US were women. Compare this to today, where only eight percent of programmers are women. It didn’t have to develop this way.
Another inflection point in cultural history is the great video game crash of 1983, which shifted “the geographical center of the videogames industry, with Japan… taking the lead.” The crash led to further outsourcing of manufacturing to East Asia. Workers in the US suffered as a result. Did acknowledges this as “probably the most significant shift in the global videogames industry – a cost-cutting, profit-raising, environmentally disastrous decision. As a result, videogames became completely dependent on the manufacturing lines in the Global South.”
As video games’ appeal widened and their popularity exploded in the late 2000s, in part due to Nintendo’s DS and Wii consoles and the advent of mobile games like Candy Crush, the video game industry began to diversify. This catalyzed pernicious social backlash from a vocal part of the fan base. Gamergate as a movement was born, according to Did, from fans failing “…to see the expansion of narratives in game, and the diversification of the people making them, as a pie growing larger.” Gamergate would radicalize many fans into becoming online harassers and stalkers. Many of the seeds of our current political moment begin with that movement.
For those unaware of the video game industry’s problems, much of the book might appear to be doom and gloom, but Everything to Play For is a measured attempt that also spotlights video games as cultural artifacts that can be used for good. “In practice, we are witnessing an increase… of progressive activism in the industry.” Everything to Play For highlights the importance of the online world in forming communities and molding beliefs and ideologies. Did sees games like massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) as “rich spaces for self-expression, civic or otherwise”. This is a lesson learned from Did’s experience with MMORPGs and the terror she experienced with Gamergate.
Despite its relatively short 277-page length (a big chunk of which is citations and the index), Everything to Play For covers a lot of ground. Even the hot-button topic of artificial intelligence is addressed. Did sees AI as “likely to define much of arts and production in the next century” and that it is “…seeping into the game development process with unstoppable speed.” She says that currently, “AI is killing the game experience.”
Though Did has a lot of knowledge of Western game development, trends, and canon, there is not much on the Japanese or majority world video game industries. The book does a lot with its focus, but emphasizing these industries would have made Did’s argument more resounding and strengthened its global perspective.
A central question in Everything to Play For is, “Can anti-colonial videogames even exist, given the current modes of production?” Considering this question, Did critiques games like Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please because they “never quite push the boundaries beyond the comfort zone.” However, Did has difficulty providing examples of explicitly political games, pushing boundaries, and utilizing different means of production. Instead, plenty of examples of fine art are given.
The few examples Did offers within the medium are the work of Mollenindustria, real name Paolo Pedercini, who makes radical, easy-to-play games that educate and highlight the most pernicious elements of our capitalist society. I interviewed Pedercini in 2024 about his game The New York Times Simulator and got the sense that game design is a form of praxis for him. So, I was not surprised to see his work discussed in Everything to Play For.
Did’s comparisons between the fine arts and video games are informed by Claire Bishop’s influential 2012 book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Art curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s work also becomes a critical point of inquiry. Take Bourriaud’s thoughts quoted by Did on the relationship between art and its production, “Art has to start changing the world through questioning its own conditions of production and diffusion.”
Luckily, the hypocrisy of art and artists is not spared within the pages of Everything to Play For. However, throughout the book, Did can seem self-righteous. Little consideration or discussion is spent on the material hardships of game developers who only make art games with a political bent. The personal cost of taking on massive multinational corporations and the current system of capitalist production comes at enormous personal costs.
Paolo Perdercini, for example, can bankroll his political games because of his job as a university professor. Two other notable positive examples in the industry are game studios Matajuegos, an Argentine cooperative, and the Danish Die Gute Fabrik, creator of the excellent Saltsea Chronicles, and also published a climate impact report on the making of the game. Sadly, both Matajuegoes and Die Gute Fabrik ceased operations in 2024, which hints at the challenges of going against the status quo.
Regardless of my quibbles, Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World, like Ben Abraham’s Digital Games After Climate Change (2022) is a vital new work, as is the works of critic Lewis Gordon. These writers “agitate for change” and like Did advocate for “more direct action, protests and substantial grassroots pressure to turn things around” within the video game industry. In her work, Did deploys protean prose to impassion, praise, and scathe the absurdity in the industry. I laughed when she described the stages of presenters of e-sports events as having “…an added layer of pubescent imitation of a man-cave, adorned with plastic and neon lights.”
For those with even a flicker of interest in video games, this is among the best books on the subject. In Did’s words, “videogames are an arena of constant political expression and a battleground for the popularity of ideas, where gamers have the ability to actively create, enact, organize and manipulate situations or even entire contingents of people.” Everything to Play For takes its subject and the perilous time we live in seriously. It is a wake-up call for those ignorant of the titanic importance gaming has in the modern world. Yet it does not discourage but instead galvanizes. Ignore Did’s words at your peril.