CHAPTER 11 . . . CHRISTIAN P. HAINES

“JUST A GAME”

BIOPOLITICS, VIDEO GAMES, AND FINANCE IN WILLIAM GIBSON’S THE PERIPHERAL

In January 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) added the diagnosis of “gaming disorder” to its eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases. WHO defines the disorder as “a pattern of gaming behavior (digital-gaming or video-gaming) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.” ¹ Instead of the moral panic linking video games to violence, this diagnosis emphasizes the disruption of daily routines because of an inability to properly manage one’s time. However, gaming disorder isn’t pure disruption, for, as the WHO suggests, it has its own pattern. The problem is that gaming threatens to go viral, subsuming the rest of life and colonizing the pleasures and obligations of the everyday with the yearning to escape into digital fantasies. That the threat gaming presents is not only psychological but also economic can be seen in think pieces that worry over gaming’s contribution to rising rates of unemployment, especially among young men. ² The specter of young men opting out of the labor force in favor of digital play indexes a more general fear of economic stagnation and political disaffection, an anxiety that so much time might go to waste and that this waste might return to haunt the social body of capitalism. To his credit, Ryan Avent, an editor for The Economist , recognizes that this social pathology is less cause than symptom of an economy in which long-term careers have been replaced with contingent employment and consumer credit: “A life spent buried in video games, scraping by on meagre pay from irregular work or dependent on others, might seem empty and sad. Whether it is emptier and sadder than one spent buried in finance, accumulating points during long hours at the office while neglecting other aspects of life, is a matter of perspective.” ³

Gaming disorder is a symptom of financialized capitalism. It is less a suspension of capitalist temporality than an element of the more general transition toward an economy in which temping (temporary labor) has become the norm. ⁴ Financialization is, at least, a twofold phenomenon. First, it is, in Greta Krippner’s words, “a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than trade and commodity production.” ⁵ This aspect of financialization pertains not only to the restructuring of corporations so that they are more responsive to the interests of shareholders but also to how companies not traditionally associated with finance increasingly rely on financial revenue streams. Since the 1970s, corporations and nation-states have relied more and more on financial speculation to compensate for declining profit rates. Second, financialization also names the spread of financial techniques into everyday life. Randy Martin writes: “Financialization integrates markets that were separate, like banking for business and consumers, or markets for insurance and real estate. It asks people from all walks of life to accept risk into their homes that were hitherto the province of professionals. Without significant capital, people are being asked to think like capitalists.” ⁶ Financialization generalizes the ethos of speculation so that it encompasses all kinds of social conducts, from parenting to leisure activities. It replaces the ascetic worker-subject described by Max Weber with an opportunistic freelancer always seeking to transform a situation into another revenue stream. Opportunism is the mood of financialization; it’s the background hum of subjects compelled to speculate on contingent possibilities to survive in conditions of economic stagnation.

Gaming disorder is financialization’s fallout: the disaffected young men about whom capitalist intellectuals worry so much are a consequence of financialization—an inverted figure of the financial opportunist, a sign of what happens when speculation breaks the economic motivation of subjects. However, gaming is also inextricable from finance. The connection between video games and finance is obvious on the side of production. The global games industry generated US$109 billion in revenues in 2017 alone. ⁷ Game development is intimately bound up with financial speculation, not least because the video game industry is dominated by large publishing corporations beholden to shareholders. Games are regularly canceled mid-development due to worries about projected profits and developers are forced to “crunch” (work prolonged periods of overtime) to release games during optimal sales windows. Financialization determines what kinds of games get made and how they get made.

The most pervasive financial element of gaming has less to do with development than with how playing games cultivates a financialized form of subjectivity. Gaming models financial subjectivity by compelling players to act on the basis of risk assessment, to parcel out time in a manner corresponding to the rhythms of the gig economy, and to compete against others for access to credit. In short, gaming trains players to act like subjects of speculation. Gaming draws out the biopolitics of gaming—the manner in which the logic of digital games has become synonymous, at least tendentiously, with the governance of social life. Gaming may involve a sense of escape, but it also asks gamers to attune themselves to the rhythms of speculation.

It should come as no surprise that one of the most incisive critiques of gaming and financialization comes from William Gibson, whose fiction has examined the nexus of politics, society, economy, and technology for decades. Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral takes place during two historical periods—a near future (in the twenty-first century) and a far future (the twenty-second century)—linked through an unconventional form of time travel: information exchange across timelines via mysterious computer servers. In Gibson’s fiction, time travel doesn’t involve transporting a physical person to another time but exchanging data between discrete historical periods through a digital medium. Moreover, the act of establishing this connection introduces a fissure between the timelines, so the past to which the future connects is no longer that future’s past because it has branched off to constitute another temporal continuum. This image of bifurcating timelines is more than analogous to financial speculation. In Gibson’s fictional world, it’s a conduit for it: many of the novel’s central plot points turn on the efforts of the far future to manipulate the financial markets of the near future. One might think of these as attempts to game the markets, first, because such markets are already game-like (they involve investors evaluating one another’s moves or wagers in a rule-governed space of possibilities) and, second, because The Peripheral transposes the register of finance into the domain of digital games. Gaming isn’t merely the novel’s content; it’s the model through which Gibson articulates a critical account of neoliberalism, militarism, digital technology, and precarious labor. Some of The Peripheral ’s characters are literally gamers, but all of the characters have to negotiate complex passages between the digital and the physical, the virtual and the actual, the future and the present, as if they were playing a high-stakes game.

Gaming and the Speculative Subject

The Peripheral begins with a game. Flynne, also known by her gamer tag, Easy Ice, agrees to fill in for her brother, Burton, playing a “beta of some game.” ⁸ Burton knows little about the game, only that he’s being paid by a company, Milagros Coldiron SA, and that the action involved in playing is minimal: “Nothing to shoot. Work a perimeter around three floors of this tower, fifty-fifth to fifty-seventh. See what turns up” (3). In the game, Flynne spends her time chasing off “bugs” (aerial drones) from a loft apartment in a futuristic high-rise, until she witnesses another woman (whom she assumes to be a digital avatar) being killed by a strange mobile entity deploying “directed swarm weapons. Flesh-eaters, in the trade” (418). The novel’s description of the woman’s death reads:

The woman never moved, as something tiny punched out through her cheek, leaving a bead of blood, her mouth still open, more of them [nanobots composing the swarm weapon] darting in, almost invisible, streaming over from the pale-edged slit. Her forehead caved in, like stop-motion of Leon’s pumpkin of the president, on top of the compost in her mother’s bin, over days, weeks. As the brushed-steel railing lowered, behind her, on the soap-bubble stuff that was no longer glass. Without it to stop her, the woman toppled backward, limbs at angles that made no sense. Flynne went after her.

She was never able to remember any more blood, just the tumbling form in its black t-shirt and striped pants, less a body every inch it fell, so that by the time they passed the thirty-seventh, where she’d first noticed the thing, there were only two fluttering rags, one striped, one black. . . .

“Just a game,” she said, in the trailer’s hot dark, her cheeks slick with tears. (56)

This passage merges the digital and the physical, the virtual and the actual, so that the apparently fictional death of a woman becomes a visceral event. Although the text leaves the details of the gaming system vague, it seems as though it’s a virtual reality rig, involving a high-resolution screen, ergonomic chair, and intuitive controller. Whatever its technical specifications, the system generates a degree of immersion high enough to elicit intense emotion, registered in Flynne’s face becoming “slick with tears.” There’s little in the text’s description of gameplay to mark a clear distinction between the virtual world and the actual world, except that Flynne’s body has been replaced by a kind of quad copter with “gyros” and the surreal way the woman’s body decomposes at an accelerated rate. Gibson’s description echoes Brendan Keogh’s phenomenology of video games, according to which “the videogame experience” is “a coming-together of the player and the videogame not as preexisting, separate, distinct subjects or objects but as a cybernetic assemblage of human body and nonhuman body across actual and virtual worlds.” ⁹ Gaming is a feedback loop in which the embodied player and digital game constitute a semi-autonomous material experience—a blur of digital technology, virtual play, and human flesh. In this posthuman vision of play, the game modifies the player on an affective level—a visceral reprogramming of subjectivity through gameplay—but even so, the player remains inoculated from material trauma by the ontological distinction of virtuality. It is, Flynne reminds herself, “Just a game.”

Material realities intrude into the game, however. These realities include the fact that Flynne’s gaming is gig work, or contract employment; Flynne’s geographic position in the impoverished landscapes of rural America; and the narrative reveal that the woman in the “game” was a real person in the twenty-second century. Flynne was actually performing security, and the woman was really assassinated. The text introduces an indistinction between gaming and everyday life, so the ludic experience is workerly not only in its rhythms and goals but also in its capacity for producing effects in the nongame world. It might be tempting to read this indistinction as the erasure of the ludic, or the negation of the game by the exigencies of real life, but The Peripheral poses it in precisely the opposite terms as the conversion of everyday life into a game. The game doesn’t dissolve, it spreads, transforming from a sealed-off domain of play into a neoliberal hub of economic competition. The novel encapsulates this mutation when Wilf Netherton, a far-future character, responds to Flynne’s question—“Is it a game?”—by saying, “It’s a gamelike environment” (82). Netherton dissimulates in respect to the corporate intrigue into which Flynne has become mired, but he’s also speaking a certain truth: the logic of digital games cannot be confined to a distinct space of gameplay because social life has come to be governed by the kinds of algorithms—procedural, rule-based systems of conduct—we typically find in games. ¹⁰

The idea that the world we live in has become “gamelike” suggests two significant points. First, it implies a historical trajectory in which electronic games emerge from the research efforts of corporations and the military after World War II, then migrate into the entertainment industry, only to become generalized beyond conventional leisure through trends that include gamification (the application of digital game elements—especially scoring and ranking—to other aspects of life, such as physical exercise and romance) and casual games (games emphasizing short, intermittent bursts of play, usually on mobile devices, and often played between one task and another). ¹¹ Material reality becomes “gamelike” to the degree that the boundaries between work and leisure, military and civilian life, algorithm and social custom, the digital and the analog, have eroded. Gaming “reveal[s] itself as a school for labor, an instrument of rulership, and a laboratory for the fantasies of advanced techno-capital.” ¹² Implicit in gaming’s tendency to encompass every dimension of social life is its tendency to subsume subjectivity in an ideological and biopolitical way. It’s not just the world that becomes gamelike but the thought processes, feelings, and activities of subjects. More specifically, the conversion of social space into gamespace entails producing neoliberal subjects for whom every practice, recreation included, belongs to a competitive arena in which the goal is to outperform other players.

Gaming and financialization converge in the concept of a scored life—a life organized around rating and being rated and around the ethos of competition associated with ratings. It’s a genre of life that corresponds to Michel Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal society as an “enterprise society” (“not a society subject to the commodity-effect but a society subject to the dynamic of competition”) and of the neoliberal subject as human capital (“homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital”). ¹³ Neoliberalism transposes the form of the market onto the entirety of social relations—a marketization of social life analogous to the gamification of social life. According to Foucault, US neoliberal intellectuals formulate society less as an object of discipline than as a game, “an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game, rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.” ¹⁴ In this interpretation, neoliberalism does not compel subjects to conform to an extrinsic norm; instead, it cultivates an environment in which certain kinds of actions—marketable ones—are more likely to meet with success. Foucault’s analysis could easily be transposed to digital games, especially so-called open-world games, which accommodate player freedom by including nonlinear and emergent gameplay alongside linear narrative structures. For example, in Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, 2018), players might choose to spend hours playing poker or fishing instead of pursuing the story missions. Of course, power isn’t absent from neoliberalism; it takes the form of market transactions. In gaming terms, the player has freedom only to the extent that the rules of the game afford it—the open world is only as open as the developer’s code permits.

Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism has its limits. As Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper, and Randy Martin have argued, Foucault doesn’t account for the constitutive exclusions of neoliberalism—the production of subjects deemed unworthy of investment—nor does he anticipate the transition toward a speculation-driven model of subjectivity. ¹⁵ These shortcomings are partly because Foucault’s theorization of neoliberalism preceded current conditions of financialization and partly an effect of his methodological commitment to describing operations of power in an immanent manner. In Brown’s words, moving beyond these limitations means considering how financialization has “altered the figure of human capital from an ensemble of enterprises to a portfolio of investments.” ¹⁶ Financialized subjects are less interested in producing commodities than in pursuing lines of credit. They are investees or, as Michel Feher writes, “bearers of projects in search of investment. As such, the fate of their initiatives depends on whether they succeed in earning the confidence of individuals or institutions capable of sponsoring them.” ¹⁷

Financialized subjects are surrounded by a host of rating mechanisms, from credit scores to “likes” on social media, which rank the subject on the basis of their history and in light of their potential for future earnings. The result is that every subject is compelled to bear the risk of investment, whether or not they can weather the consequences. As Martin explains, we become creatures of risk, measured with regard not only to our capacity to bear risk but also our willingness to do so: “Risk also performs a moral function, by sorting out those with the disposition to embrace it from those relegated to being bad risks. The risk taker is a righteous agent of history; those at risk are left in the ashcan.” ¹⁸ The good speculative subject takes on risk, meaning she is willing to accept the terms of accreditation. She operates as a conduit for financial flows in the hope of ever-greater returns, while at the same time exorcising the constant specter of failure. She cultivates herself as an attractive portfolio of opportunities—a credit-worthy creature—even as she knows that beneath every speculative subject lurk the subprime: those who have taken on lines of credit but have failed to meet expected returns; those who have never been deemed worthy of credit because of race, geography, or other social conditions—in short, everyone who has been sacrificed to the altar of risk. ¹⁹

A description of Flynne readying herself for a gaming session calls attention to the intimate connections between gaming and risk management:

Something she’d gotten from Burton and the [Marine] Corps, that you didn’t do things in clothes you sat around in. You got yourself squared away, then your intent did too. When she’d been Dwight’s recon point, she’d made sure she got cleaned up. Doubted she’d be doing that again, even though it was the best money she’d made. She didn’t like gaming, not the way Madison and Janice did. She’d done it for the money, got so good at one particular rank and mission in Operation Northwind that Dwight wouldn’t have anyone else. Except that he would by now. (42)

The passage distinguishes Flynne’s object—money, not fun—and indicates how gaming requires a labor of preparation, of readying one’s body and mind for the concerted effort of gameplay. One has to get “squared away,” which is to say that one has to sand off the uneven edges of perception, feeling, or thought that might intrude on the attention the game demands. It’s a process of attuning the self to the fundamentally quantitative values constituting the algorithmic basis of gameplay. A flashback to another gaming session highlights the quantitative measure of what might be called gig play: “Players like Flynne were paid on the basis of kills, and on how long they could survive in a given campaign” (47). Flynne takes amphetamines on a “dosing schedule” to optimize her kill and survival rates. Gaming requires an enhanced state of awareness—an alertness in regard to perception (the ability to quickly pick out an enemy in the midst of other stimuli) and reflexes (the ability to rapidly translate perception into manual action). The goal is to enter into a state of “flow,” which is the opposite of reflective thought. “Not to learn it, [Burton] said, because it couldn’t be taught, but to spiral in with it, each turn tighter, further into the forest, each turn closer to seeing it [the state of ‘hunting’] exactly right. Down into that one shot across the clearing she found there, where the sudden mist of airborne blood, blown with the snow, was like the term balancing an equation” (48). The casual player becomes the hardcore gamer by entering a “spiral” with the algorithms of the game. It’s a matter of eliminating qualitative difference, critical distance, and lag from a loop in which the stimuli produced by the game’s code elicits physical input. It’s also a process of reduction, as the variability of play—the possibility space enabled by the game—gives way to the act of destroying the target, “like the term balancing an equation.”

Underlying this process of becoming a hardcore gamer is a general sense of economic precarity, the awareness that despite Easy Ice’s skill, she can always be replaced. The novel registers this precarity through the lengths Flynne goes to adapt herself to the game and through her assessment of what motivates the accountant against whom she competes. “She’d gotten to feeling that what the accountant most liked, about killing them, was that it really cost them. Not just that he was better at it than they were, but that it actually hurt them to lose. People on her squad were feeding their children with what they earned playing, and maybe that was all they had, like she was paying Pharma John for her mother’s prescriptions” (48). The Peripheral represents gameplay only insofar as it interrupts the seamlessness of the digital by calling attention to the material conditions of gaming. Class division may not appear in the virtual domain of the game, but it structures the feeling of play. For Flynne, what’s at stake is her mother’s survival via access to medicine; for the accountant, what’s at stake is a pleasure grounded in dominating other players. Differentials of risk mediate the experience of the game so that play always already harbors the constraints of capitalism.

Like neoliberalism, digital games involve a fantasy of equality: a vision of the gamespace as a perfect meritocracy in which skill and effort are the ultimate factors in deciding success. ²⁰ Ivan Ascher compares financialized class division to a horse race, reminding readers that “the ideological cover provided by neoliberalism cannot entirely conceal the fact that investors depend on other investors in relations that are at once reciprocal and thoroughly asymmetrical.” ²¹ He explains that this division is not between borrowers and creditors, or investment bankers and laypeople, but “between those whose lives keep placing them at risk and having thus to seek protection (say, in the form of a loan or an insurance policy) and those whose position of relative security, by contrast, gives them the opportunity to take risks—say, by lending to others or betting on their probability of default.” ²² The formal equality of players, epitomized by the relative equivalence of their in-game avatars, belies the embodied inequalities of speculative subjects, some of whom have the means to enjoy the game, whereas others need it to survive. If Gibson represents this class division through a first-person shooter (Operation Northwind ), it’s not only because that genre is so popular but also because its primary gameplay mechanism—what Mackenzie Wark calls targeting—captures the economic and libidinal appeal of online multiplayer gaming. ²³ These games depend on the collaborative efforts of players to transform virtual environments into arenas of lively competition, but they also require the disavowal of collaboration, because they privilege victory conditions based on eliminating competitors. As Wark explains, it’s also a matter of time: “Time is the enemy. Targeting attempts to transform time from a medium of events, where one thing alternates with another, to a medium of self-fulfillment, where, by picking out a deliberative line across its surface, you can make time register the integrity and significance of your character—and by proxy yourself—and reward it with the next level.” ²⁴ The hardcore gamer transforms time into a medium through which to accumulate profit and prestige; she invests her energy and skill into gameplay, speculating on the possibility of victory, or at least avoidance of the subprime condition.

Speculative Time

In The Peripheral , gaming is a way of thinking about the colonization of time by finance capital. The novel’s central conceit—digital time travel—transforms history into a game of speculation. The far-future denizens extract information from the past as a way of gaining advantage against competing corporate and governmental interests. In turn, the near-future characters leverage their own positions through the information they receive from the far future (especially information about technological innovations and market trends). There is, however, a fundamental fissure between the timelines, caused by the very act of producing “stubs.” “When we sent out first e-mail to their Panama, we entered into a fixed ratio of duration with their continuum: one to one. A given interval in the stub is the same interval here, from first instant of contact. We can no more know their future than we can know our own, except to assume that it ultimately isn’t going to be history as we know it. And, no, we don’t know why. It’s simply the way the server works, as far as we know” (92). The gap between timelines introduces epistemological uncertainty, as well as historical indeterminacy, the former being a corollary of the latter: time travel doesn’t lead to sovereignty over history because both content (the stub) and platform (the server) are opaque. This opacity enables speculation by creating a margin between the predictable and the unpredictable, a space where wagers on possible futures can occur. It’s what Lisa Adkins calls “speculative time,” operating not on the basis of “calculations of the probable, predicted, and projected from the present into the future” but through “calculations of the possible.” “In this calculus futures do not unfold from the known present, but the present is remediated by futures that have not yet and might never arrive.” ²⁵ In a sense, The Peripheral does little more than figure the time of speculation, using science fiction to represent the obscure complexities of high finance. On the other hand, the novel offers its own gaming of finance, not an opportunistic leveraging of history but an attempt to imagine a life beyond the biopolitical pincers of the good speculative subject and the subprime rabble.

The far-future characters of Peripheral are good speculative subjects insofar as they successfully manage to leverage their position in history. They are what J. Paul Narkunas calls “market humans.” “Market humans believe in their own powers of self-creation, with free will and an individuality that is supplemented only by a sense of community based on the freedom to innovate.” ²⁶ Market humans have faith in their own powers because they frame history as an engine of innovation: a temporal continuum whose units of measure are financial opportunities. This faith requires speculative subjects to immunize themselves from the negative consequences of risk. In Gibson’s novel, they do so through several means, including biotechnology, labor automation, and humanoid drones (“peripherals”), but the practice of constructing stubs is the pinnacle of this immunitary logic, as it allows market humans to exercise almost god-like power over subjects that cannot strike back. The “enthusiasts” of this genre of time travel operate as if the temporal continuum they connect to were a discrete unit of time, entirely knowable by virtue of hindsight. The dismissive terminology of “stubs” alludes to the fact that this kind of time travel introduces a rupture between timelines. It also indicates the potential for manipulation, the far future’s ability to leverage its knowledge of the past without needing to worry about blowback. It’s a form of temporal imperialism, or, as one character puts it, “We’re third-worlding alternate continua. Calling them stubs makes that a bit easier” (103). From the perspective of the far future, the stub dwellers are disposable avatars, less subjects of history than pieces in a game. Flynne makes this point directly: “It was like a game . . . We aren’t their past. We go off in some different direction because they’ve changed things here. . . . Their world’s not affected by what happens here, now or going forward” (192–93).

If the stubs exemplify the temporal dimension of speculative subjectivity, then the peripherals exemplify its spatial dimension. A peripheral is an “anthropomorphic drone” or “telepresence avatar”—a humanoid automaton controlled through a digital device connected directly to the human brain (175). Peripherals abolish the gap between embodied player and in-game avatar in a paradoxical manner: the player becomes her avatar by coming into the possession of another body—a machine body. It’s an extreme version of virtual reality, premised on the transformation of everyday life into a gamespace. Like in-game avatars, peripherals can even be upgraded. The peripheral literalizes the neoliberal articulation of society in terms of human capital, remaking the person into a bundle of technical capacities capable of being updated for a price. Even the substrate of these capacities is disposable, since the death of a peripheral isn’t synonymous with the death of its operator. Instead, the destruction of a peripheral is “game over”—not a final resting place but a temporary terminus in a loop designed to be repeated. As Keogh suggests, “game over” (avatar death) enables video games to complicate time by engendering loops in which players can learn from past gameplay experiences and experiment with different actions. ²⁷ However, The Peripheral suggests that this kind of inconsequential death—this immunity from risk—is synonymous with “third-worlding” stubs: it’s part and parcel of a system designed to concentrate power in the hands of the wealthy by outsourcing vulnerability to subprime subjects. ²⁸ Indeed, one of the novel’s antagonists, Hamed al-Habib, uses a peripheral to fake his own death as part of a scheme to monetize a floating island of trash. Whereas al-Habib’s death is only temporary, the deaths of the “patchers” (a kind of posthuman rabble following him) are quite permanent.

The Peripheral allegorizes the conversion of social space into gamespace through its narrative structure and style, as well as its content. The novel alternates between the near-future and far-future timelines from one chapter to the next. This alternation takes place quickly, most chapters not exceeding ten pages, some as short as two pages. What results is a formal analogue to the construction of stubs: the transition between chapters marks the contingency of historical conditions, the mutability of gamespace. Gibson’s prose style echoes this narrative speed: his sentences are modular and clipped, dropping subjects or verbs, coining neologisms that collapse ideas together. It’s as if the novel were trying to model itself after the rhythm of financialized capitalism, transforming the act of reading into a neoliberal training regimen: in learning to negotiate the rapid turnover of timelines and accept the disposability of bodies (peripherals), Gibson’s reader becomes a good speculative subject—a creature for whom the future is a source of profit accessed by means of credit (or fiction). Gibson’s novel could be compared to action games, described by Claus Pias as “time-critical” systems in which “play consists of producing temporally optimized sequences of action out of determined options.” “To play an action game means to perform a permanent act of accommodation [to the machine], the end of which is no longer the symbolic death of the player, who in his or her non-conformity has failed to be resurrected with a ‘sublime body.’ Rather, the process ends with a ‘victory’ over a machine.” ²⁹ Stuck in an age in which the digital is dominant, the novel does the only thing it can: it offers the fantasy of the hardcore gamer, that is, the promise of victory over one’s competitors, provided one is willing to surrender to the rules of the game.

The Peripheral may allegorize gamespace, but it also marks the irreducibility of social life to the digital. It emphasizes how digitization is a technological fact and a social process involving the separation of subjects of information from the nuisance of noise. It’s what Seb Franklin calls “control”: an episteme and set of technical procedures introducing “a break into the realms of both individual human activity and social formations, so that behavior, affects, and capacities appear as either (1) productive and representable (information) and thus deemed existent or (2) nonproductive and unrepresentable (not information) and thus denied existence.” ³⁰ The overlap between this opposition and that between good subjects of speculation and the subprime is not an accident but a consequence of the historical dovetailing of financialization and digitization. As a number of scholars have recounted, financialization has used digital technologies (as exemplified by high-frequency trading) and drawn on the conceptual frameworks of information science (not least of all game theory) to reformat the world as a competitive arena of speculation. ³¹ Gibson responds to this arena by representing the noise of social life not as a residue of historical progress but as another way of dwelling in time. For example, the novel emphasizes the dissonance between Flynne’s embodiment and her use of the peripherals: “The more time you spend here [in the far future], the more likely you are to notice dissonance on returning. Your peripheral’s sensorium is less multiplex than your own. You may find your own sensorium seems richer, but not pleasantly. More meaty, some say. You’ll have gotten used to a slightly attenuated perceptual array, though you likely don’t notice it now” (225–26). The felt difference between avatar and flesh implies an excess of the qualitative over the quantitative—a multiplicity irreducible to the discrete terms of financial and digital culture. This experience may seem minor, but the novel is replete with descriptions of characters suffering from a “surfeit of information, oceanic to the point of meaninglessness,” covered in tattoos of extinct creatures meant to memorialize what’s been lost to speculation, and reveling in being “chronic malcontent[s]” (383, 282). Gibson’s fiction doesn’t so much simulate an action game as teach readers how to recognize what is lost in the transition to gamespace: it cultivates an awareness of what fails to accommodate itself to the score.

The Peripheral is a metagame as much as it is a representation of gamespace. In general terms, “metagaming” means everything surrounding a digital game—all of the various activities, information, communities, and programs that exceed the actual playing of the game yet affect or build on the game in some way. The “meta,” as it’s also called, includes strategies for competing in multiplayer games, “mods” that hack games to change how they play or transform them into new games, online forums for sharing game tips, and “achievements” (digital trophies) for accomplishing specific goals in games. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux argue that metagaming denaturalizes our experience of games and, in doing so, creates critical potential for intervening into gamespace. They contend that “videogames operate as the ideological avatar of play: a widely held, naturalized system of beliefs that conflates the fantasy of escapism with the commodity form and encloses play within the magic circle of neoliberal capital.” In contrast, metagames “articulate a ludic practice that profanes the sacred, historicizes art, mediates technology, and de-reifies the fetish.” ³² There are ideological metagames, of course, or practices that operate as alibis for the military-industrial-entertainment complex—one thinks, for example, of the secret strategies that allow professional teams of gamers to compete successfully in high-stakes tournaments—but there are also metagames that ask how gaming might move beyond competition. These subversive metagames range from avant-garde games that overturn the dominant conventions of digital games to online activism that combats sexism in gaming culture.

The Peripheral is a subversive metagame not only because it criticizes the gamification of social life but also because it draws on gaming to imagine systemic change. To think of the novel as a metagame is not to suggest that it transcends gamespace. On the contrary, The Peripheral seems to say that the best we can hope for is not redemption but something like repair, or what the novel describes as “steer[ing]” history away from disaster, “no guarantee of what we’ll ultimately produce” (378). One probably would not call this approach utopian, but it does speak to a desire to reclaim our investment in the future, to conceive of time as something more than a medium of competition. Gibson asks us to speculate with him on the possibility not of escaping the game but of a “game changer”: the emergence of a world irreducible to the oppositions between digital information and noise, good speculative subjects and the subprime, capitalist futurity and the dustbin of history (442). The Peripheral knows the score, but it also believes in truly unpredictable possibilities.