Hodge’s Sociable Media highlights the nature of our interactions with social media and the physiological significance of our urge to be “connected.” When we scroll through twitter, swipe through tinder, or even check our email, we engage in a form of phatic communication. According to George Simmel, this sociability distills “the pure essence of association” out of the realities of social life. It extracts the associative process as “a value and a satisfaction.”
The rise of “phatic culture” in the 21st century has changed the landscape of our social culture. Contented with the satisfaction from clicking, texting, swiping up, and liking, our definitions of connection in the modern age have taken a turn toward the impersonal. If we take Simmel’s definition of sociability as “the play-form of association,” we might see how games and play affect our modern notions of association.
While Cookie Clicker evolves into a commentary on the dangers of capitalism and clicker games in general, Hodge’s essay allows us to draw out additional social commentary from clicker games. Although there can be many different features and aspects of control to clicker games, the main (if not sole) mechanic of such games is clicking; the player achieves all desired goals through the simple act of clicking. Thus, these games are less about the complexity of play and are instead designed to capture and keep your attention through the ever-present possibility of “leveling up”. Often with complex or even simple economic systems, the pleasure derived from advancing in these games comes from climbing up hierarchies of economy and of power. By associating achievement and satisfaction with minimal effort, these games can be reduced to the status of games without play, games that are closer to simulations of work. They mimic real world systems of exploitation, often without reference to the real-world implications.
Effectively training the player base to be productive members of capitalist society, clicker games have the added effect of reducing our capacity for meaningful social engagement. Reinforcing the “always on” mentality while simultaneously allowing people to be distanced from selfhood, clicker games produce the perfect capitalist subjects. These ways of being have leaked into our ways of relating to one another, making it so that we desire and are satisfied by only minimal amounts of social interaction. Often too tired to fully engage with others, that phatic, low-stakes engagement so easily mediated through our screens satisfies that social hunger. Thus, we might consider phatic sociability more rewarding than substantial connection because the former generates a higher reward for less effort. This is the gamification of our social life and, while clicker games are by no means entirely to blame, they exemplify the use of the game as a tool for indoctrination.
works cited:
Golumbia, David. “Games without Play.” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (2009): 179–204. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20533140.
Hodge, James J. “Sociable Media: Phatic Connection in Digital Art.” Postmodern Culture 26, no. 1 (2015) doi:10.1353/pmc.2015.0021.
