Hard Work: Videogames, Responsibility & Capitalism in Space

Mouthwashing, the second game from Stockholm indie studio Wrong Organ, is twilit. As the lives of its beached sailors dim, it reflects a deadlocked, capitalist world, and gaming's fraught industry on the cusp of change.

Mouthwashing opens by asking you, the player and captain, to "TAKE RESPONSIBILITY" for your crew. A meteor barrels toward the Tulpar, your ship, but – rest assured – course-correcting 1.4° left will steer you safe. When you grab the controls, however, your only option is to turn right. "WARNING". The ship goes into autopilot. Your only option is to turn the autopilot off. "CRASH IMMINENT". Try interacting with anything else in the cockpit, and the game tells you, simply – accurately – "There's nothing else to be done." Within the first five minutes, the crew's fate is sealed.

After the crash, you take on the role of Jimmy, the first mate. Trapped at work with dwindling resources and a captain incapacitated (bar for a single, watchful eye), time malfunctions too. In space, we retreat twice into the downwards slant and once forwards to stay afloat: it is impossible to touch a star. The twenty-foot monitor in the lobby they call "the windowscreen" is stuck on loop; blood leaks from the ocean's socket - impossible to discern whether it is a sunrise or a sunset - as you hear the orange galley capsize. Without portholes and awning through the ick of space, whilst spiralling between the events leading up to and following your attempted mass suicide, the windowscreen's static horizon summons a squinted tropic of vague lights: Am I alive? What is the mission? Who is in charge? What is the point? All your front pockets have holes in. In your back right you have twenty pence and a euro. There are no countries left in which to spend them.

Perhaps the closer that art gets to its medium, the more effective it is. If film sculpts time and a book speaks, then videogames' primordial putty is that of player agency. And ever since writers have tried to inject more nuance into their work than "save-the-princess-from-the-castle-don't-ask-why-you're-an-Italian-plumber", they have opened a chasm between interaction and narrative, story and fun. Subsequent attempts to bridge its coasts, such as in Spec Ops: The Line, or Neil Druckmann's spectacular hate-fuck of The Last of Us 2, have brewed some of the most engaged and passionate cultural conversation in art history. For gaming, today is the middle of the storm, its central question remains unanswered.

Once (and still, in the reeds of Steam forums) a genre synonymous with low-effort game design, Wrong Organ's "Walking Sim" is deeply immersive when stripped to its fundamental haptics, weaving the genre's narrow agency (walk to X, speak to Y, interact with Z) into the narrative itself. After feeding the captain his medication, for example, you have the unprompted choice whether to leave open the mouth of the man who tried to kill you or provide him comfort, then whether to leave him alone in the Medbay with the door closed or let his straggled breath stalk the halls. This isn't a choice that will affect the outcome of the game, or even signposted as a choice – after all, the ship has crashed, and there is no rescue team – but one that beats in its sustained grammar of aftermath: guilt, repentance, forgiveness.

Elsewhere, developers have tried to squash ludonarrative dissonance by rewiring the definition of "fun". The Soulslike genre constructs a reward system closer to that of weightlifting, where repetitive strain and frustration eventually evens out into mastery, only if the player is willing to withstand an ultimately punishing and convoluted time-sink. Death Stranding is the Walking Sim to end all Walking Sims, whose strange treasures are rewarded solely via the amount of hours dedicated to its task; in another name: "work". Fun and work – especially employment – are an uneasy affair. Whilst dedication and improvement is often a reward unto itself, the myth of meritocracy coupled with process streamlining blur the routes to its attainment. Engaging with co-workers, resting, and mining the brief social or aesthetic experiences of employment is frequently accompanied by guilt reinforced by management. "If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean." Work socials are awkward contradictions of rhetoric that feel like a trap, as meticulous masks are asked to be taken off, or otherwise a kind of debauched brouhaha that eerily celebrates material accrual.

The work put into fun, also, is steeped in irony. Videogames are a lucrative, but still relatively acned industry, pockmarked with labour disputes, IP theft, an impassioned audience of sometimes infantile vitriol, and haunted by a folkloric evil, 'The Crunch'. Its fluctuating progress coeval with tech-giants is something of a wild west, as prone as cinema was in the '70s to inanity as it was to formal innovation and the birth of the auteur: wide swings, home runs. Wrong Organ, too, recently found themselves in an online controversy typical of its era. Developers are frequently caught like Jimmy, Mouthwashing's protagonist, living the waking terror of middle management, beholden to the demands of both employees and employer.

We're left by capitalism in a temporal and psychological hangover, our howling histories muffled, our futures without scaffold. All of us just wanna have fun. Disco Elysium's "gameplay" is an expression of narrative dissonance, and of a gridlocked world zeroing out into lag. You have amnesia; The world of 'Revachol' is a debris heap; 'Martinaise', your surrounding city, is a traffic jam; a labour strike drunkenly awaits recuperation; and the easiest tasks are seemingly impossible to overcome. Instead, the game fervently asks you to go mad. Its skill system loads psychological traits to their extreme. Take the stat 'Encyclopaedia', a riff on the boundless reams of glossary text found in the darkwoods of Western RPG menus. Without it, you'll stumble blindly around a fin-de-l'histoire hellscape of relativity, where nobody knows anything that isn't singed by personal bias or trauma. Load all your skillpoints into it, however, and you'll gain a maddening, preternatural objectivity that inundates you with endless pages on the 'Antecentennial Revolution', 'Kraz Mazov', 'King Fillipe III', blah-blah-blah, and the alloying of in-game currency. All of which is useless to the bullet-ridden sidewalks and homophobic kids you are attempting vainly to save. Disco Elysium, which pretends to be about a murder but is actually about a world ravaged by work, is not "fun". It is the mechanics of frustration, and a scarily close reflection of our days spent labouring escape from haystack rubbles of doubt.

With a similar taunting impotence, Mouthwashing deploys a litany of fourth-wall breaches, repeatedly demanding the player to "TAKE RESPONSIBILITY". In a game that challenges player agency, set during company time, the words take on an impish and multi-layered evil. In the first sense, work itself is a responsibility. It must be tended to, maintained. Daily fires, weekly meetings, monthly goals. The more responsible one proves themselves to their employers, the more responsibility they are given. In practice, however (and to borrow another of gaming's anathemas), work is the paywall to responsibility. Put simply, it costs to live and costs increasingly more to live well. If you want to go to school, drive a car, buy a house, raise a family, then you must take on more responsibility at work. 'Polle' is the terrifying brand mascot of 'Pony Express', the company that owns the Tulpar and pays your wage, that eventually metastasises into something cosmic and abiding. In an end-stage capitalism where companies have taken over countries, then planets, then miles of void, where there are no shores on which to levy tax, and automated convenience comes at the cost of any living space outside of employment, responsibility also becomes prerequisite for survival. You should lock in and work harder. You don't get to work less hard because you are raising a child, a thousand years from now, driving an Amazon truck from Mars to a distant oasis in Andromeda; quite the opposite. Responsibility's ceaseless progressive overload is the nightmare at the heart of the game.

During a flashback, Jimmy and Captain Curly discuss their desire for work that not only pays the bills but is fulfilling, maybe even fun. Curly asks, "Is this enough? Should I just stay here because I’m successful at it?" Throughout the conversation, of course, the player is abandoned to sit and watch, with nothing to do but click and proceed into a pre-written horizon.