Summary:
Ten years after addressing power stuggles on the Internet in Cyber-Marx, Dyer-Witherford brought his approach to autonomist Marxist theory to video games. These games, Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter argue, allow individuals to experience a variety of different perspective, from the humble plumber Mario, to the roll of a god controlling worlds. The variety of these experiences influence the thinking of the gamers, making them more aware. Companies and corporations recognized such opportunities to influence the gamer audience, and the Marxist power struggle continues to cycle into the imaginary universes created in video games. In their unabashedly anti-capitalism approach, they redefine Empire and other terms (such as Immaterial Labor, pp. 4-6; Playbor Force, pp. 23-26; Cognitive Captialism, chapter 2; Biopower, chapter 6; etc.) to suit their needs and beliefs, exploring the concepts in the field of electronic gaming. They also explore: the machine's influence and participation in these cycles of struggle, the impact of virtual reality on reality, the effect of war, the ability for games to merge different cultural groups (such as rap culture and gamer culture), imprisonment through and in gaming, and political and cultural simulation through video games.
Well-written and grounded in examples, this work will appeal to those already of a similar ideological mindset of the authors, while those in opposition will find the same concerns and problems that have been stated elsewhere in hundreds of debates on the subject. The authors defend their position, but their lack of a balanced approach (indeed other ideologies are merely insulted instead of addressed through the work) leaves room for improvement in the work.
Citation-worthy:
"Games once suspect as delinquent time wasters are increasingly perceived by corporate managers and state administrators as formal and informal means of training populations in the practices of digital work and governability" (Dyer-Witherford & de Peuter, 2009, p. xix).
"Empire [is] encapsulated [in] a wider experimental fusion of Marxist militancy and poststructuralist theory. It circulates novel concept--biopower, immaterial labor, multitude, exodus--among students of globalization" (Dyer-Witherford & de Peuter, 2009, p.xxi).
"We work with a revised and modulated version of Empire. By Empire, we mean the global capitalist ascendancy of the early twenty-first century, a system administered and policed by a consortium of completitively collaborative neoliberal states ... to an increasingly dubious preeminence" (Dyer-Witherford & de Peuter, 2009, p.xxiii).
