Vol2 of Capital is most directly relevant to the time question. Timed etc games mean the consumer will consume the game faster. This means they will buy another game faster, enabling more rapid turnover of the capitalists investment in games. As with historical games/sports, as they become a spectacle and a source of profit, capital takes it over and subsumes it, reorganising its production and rationalising its consumption. In search of relative surplus value, it must be turned into a more appealing spectacle than any of its competitors. One of the easiest ways to do this is simply aim to break records, leading to the drives you point out, towards (extremely fierce, violent, unsafe, unfriendly) competition and efficiency (the latter of which is capitalism’s favourite word; its positive connotation hides the fact that it almost always means “efficiency for the production and realisation of surplus value” rather than “efficiency for the realisation of living needs”).
Regarding the competition and focus on soley athletics and efficiency, yeah we (overdeveloped capitalist nations) are a weird society in terms of the constant competition. Rybczynski’s Waiting for the Weekend gives a very good example of this (as well as a more in depth analysis): in the 1920s, it was common for regular folks to go ski-ing by simply tying long flat objects, or even round ones, to their work boots. The wealthy scoffed at this and attempted to be ‘professional hobbyists’ as opposed to these mere ‘amateurs’ (sidenote; the word ‘amateur’ used to be positive, meaning one did something for fun, but has turned into a negative word implying lack of skill and purpose because we demand constant production of surplus value), and bought ‘professional quality’ skis, pants, jackets, etc, etc, etc. In the imperialism-fueled postww2 economic boom, this tendency was expanded to the growing ‘middle class’.
Unrelated to any of your main points of inquiry, but a neat book that looks at the economics of video games through an explicitly marxist lense is Marx at the Arcade by Jamie Woodcock
Vol2 of Capital is most directly relevant to the time question. Timed etc games mean the consumer will consume the game faster. This means they will buy another game faster, enabling more rapid turnover of the capitalists investment in games. As with historical games/sports, as they become a spectacle and a source of profit, capital takes it over and subsumes it, reorganising its production and rationalising its consumption. In search of relative surplus value, it must be turned into a more appealing spectacle than any of its competitors. One of the easiest ways to do this is simply aim to break records, leading to the drives you point out, towards (extremely fierce, violent, unsafe, unfriendly) competition and efficiency (the latter of which is capitalism’s favourite word; its positive connotation hides the fact that it almost always means “efficiency for the production and realisation of surplus value” rather than “efficiency for the realisation of living needs”).
Regarding the competition and focus on soley athletics and efficiency, yeah we (overdeveloped capitalist nations) are a weird society in terms of the constant competition. Rybczynski’s Waiting for the Weekend gives a very good example of this (as well as a more in depth analysis): in the 1920s, it was common for regular folks to go ski-ing by simply tying long flat objects, or even round ones, to their work boots. The wealthy scoffed at this and attempted to be ‘professional hobbyists’ as opposed to these mere ‘amateurs’ (sidenote; the word ‘amateur’ used to be positive, meaning one did something for fun, but has turned into a negative word implying lack of skill and purpose because we demand constant production of surplus value), and bought ‘professional quality’ skis, pants, jackets, etc, etc, etc. In the imperialism-fueled postww2 economic boom, this tendency was expanded to the growing ‘middle class’.
Unrelated to any of your main points of inquiry, but a neat book that looks at the economics of video games through an explicitly marxist lense is Marx at the Arcade by Jamie Woodcock