“Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work,” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer declared in 1944. The mechanization of labor, the Frankfurt theorists thought, had so enmeshed itself with human “leisure and happiness” and so “profoundly” determined the “manufacture of amusement goods” that entertaining diversions were “inevitably after-images of the work process itself.” Following this lead, game theorist Steven Poole observed in 2008 that modern video games “seem to aspire to a mimesis of the mechanized work process.” We learn—or are disciplined by—the game’s rules and receive positive feedback for following them efficiently. “You didn’t play the game,” Poole writes, much less “beat” it. Rather, “you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour.”

Single-player games with plenty of weapons to upgrade, skills to gain, and currencies to spend are perhaps the archetypal iteration of this phenomenon, but almost all contemporary games contain some mimetic elements of work and market exchange. They don’t offer fantasies of escape, of imaginative play for its own sake; they offer a fantasy of rules—a rationality otherwise missing from the contemporary wage labor process. Vicky Osterweil has called this type of game a “utopian work simulator”; it doles out rewards at predictable intervals in exchange for our disciplined effort. These rewards can make the game easier, allow us to purchase in-game adornments, signal our achievements to others, and progress in a logical and satisfying trajectory toward an achievable goal. Games remain a form of diversion, but what they divert us from is not our labor, but our disappointment with its volatility, its arbitrariness, its cruelty and unfairness.

In its most acute form, journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio writes, workers use “video games to perform the ghosts of [their] daily labors.” A long-haul trucker spends his week off grinding in American Truck Simulator; chefs leave their kitchens at midnight to play Cook, Serve, Delicious! before bed. In the game world, unlike our own, D’Anastasio writes, “productivity is quantifiable and discernible.” Games compensate for an absence of control, reliable feedback, clear goals, and fair rewards in our working lives. In this way, games remain a kind of wish fulfillment, one in which the ideological fictions of capitalism are realized. It’s a paltry dream, reconciling us to falsehoods we must otherwise accept.

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Mobilizing various moods and affects, among them fantasies of patriarchal dominance and competition, violent games manage to “structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that one must master and tolerate to live under current economic conditions,” Osterweil writes. In turn, workplaces like Amazon incorporate gamified elements—public leaderboards; notional rewards for expeditious work; even arcade-style mini-games unlocked by completing warehouse tasks—to habituate employees to hours upon hours of monotonous physical and mental labor. As the FPS player’s prowess is expressed by her “kill/death” ratio, the Amazon worker’s value is expressed by her “pick rate,” homologous measures of cognitive and kinetic efficiency.