UC Irvine

The neoliberal, capitalist logics that underpin our globalized world are failing. To wake up each day is to be reacquainted with the sense that we are on the verge of social, political, economic, and ecological collapse. It is so clear to so many who are impacted by this exhausting status quo that something must be done, but even collective desires to steer away from unfettered profit and growth are stymied by the fatigue of everyday life. We want change, but we are tired… This dissertation is concerned with the pursuit of meaningful, systemic change and it approaches the problem through an investigation of the intersectional politics of leisure and exhaustion in both video games and culture at large. From my investigations into the designs and discourses surrounding play, slowness, and rest, I argue that, far from offering a break from the fatigue of our daily work, video games are often designed in ways that uphold neoliberal values of productivity and self-management. Through a combination of critical theory, discourse analysis, and game analysis, I examine how our individualistic, “grind culture” perpetuates the exhaustion of bodies (both the extraction of people-as-resource for productive ends and the cultivation of fatigue to hamper dissent) even when we are supposedly “at rest.” I draw parallels between the rule-based systems of games and the real-world crises of labour and wealth disparity and ask whether there is a way to work both on and at leisure so that it operates against exhaustion and against the logics of neoliberal, late capitalism. To answer this, I analyze case studies of video games and play practices which I see as potentially operating against exhaustion. I conclude by arguing that a willful slowing of our relation to play and media consumption can produce a generative (and regenerative) suspension of neoliberal, capitalist logics that carves out time and space for imagining and indeed enacting more socially just alternatives to the status quo.