Yu Wenting, Chinese Department of China Academy of Art Graduate School.

A new mode of capital and power operation is quietly emerging in our time, which seems to be the most abundant and crazy in the mainstream commercial games at present. How to locate correctly and how to deal with rationally?

Recently, the 9 1 Youth Literature and Art Forum "Digital Capitalism and the Governance of Pleasure" hosted by the Institute of Marxist Literature and Art Theory of the Chinese Academy of Art was held online. The forum was given by Dr. Fu Shanchao, Chinese Department of Peking University. Fu Shanchao is a young scholar in mainland humanities who focused on game research earlier. Taking his research on video games as a case, the forum discussed "pleasure management" under the background of digital capitalism through cross-border dialogue with critical theory, public governance, new media researchers and vertical media practitioners. The forum was convened by Qin Lanjun, an associate researcher at the Institute of Marxist Literature and Art Theory of the Chinese Academy of Art, and invited Jiang, a professor of philosophy at East China Normal University, Dong, a professor of Chinese literature at north china university of technology, Liu Jinhe, an assistant researcher at the School of Management of Tsinghua University University of Technology, Zhu Jiayin, co-founder of Touch Music Network, Ye Taotao, the NExT studio of Tencent, and Deng Jian, a postdoctoral fellow at Peking University Boya School of Journalism and Communication.

Why are we talking about "happy therapy"? Fu Shanchao pointed out that in the context of digital capitalism, data and capital are juxtaposed and become factors of production, and data, as an intermediary of algorithms or rules, is also an element of power. The data contains the assumption of pleasure, and the platform side shapes and induces the user's pleasure mode by assuming what the user likes. This involves the ternary relationship model of platform, worker and user. As a monopolistic intermediary, the platform holds more power. The platform does not directly restrain workers, but uses rules and algorithms to mediate their own will and will. Workers directly face the rules and algorithms formulated by the platform and the judgments from users. This means that the power mode in digital capitalism is completely different from the discipline technology of discipline institutions. It uses less negative forces, such as issuing bans or punishments, but uses positive forces as much as possible; It does not take gaze as the medium, but pleasure as the medium; It shows not a centralized power, but a decentralized power, that is, "hedonic governance".

What is "the cure of pleasure"? Fu Shanchao believes that, as the content of stylized aesthetics of existence, pleasure itself can have many contents and enjoy in many ways. In governance, it becomes the hypothesis of collective behavior mode. Under the background of platform capitalism, the so-called "pleasure management" can be understood as that the platform makes most users conform to this pleasure mode by shaping and inducing the pleasure mode of users and workers, thus weakening the uncertainty of users and workers and gaining benefits; If it can keep repeating this kind of inducement and shaping, and let users from generation to generation keep repeating this kind of pleasure mode, then it will partially realize the self-replication of the business model, thus completing the governance.

How is the "governance of pleasure" applied in games? Fu Shan Chao analyzed this by taking "The Golden Hand Tour of Role Development" as an example. Why are players willing to pay for these "nurturing" roles? This kind of pleasure first comes from the charm of the character itself, but the emotional connection between the player and the character needs to be aroused again in the new performance. In other words, players can't get all the pleasure after buying the character and obtaining the right to use it. To cultivate the role, they need to continue to pay money and labor, and "cultivation" is only the threshold for getting pleasure. The next step is to show the role, that is, let the role play its own ability and charm. The pleasure gained during the exhibition is the most important pleasure in the role training class. From the perspective of political economy, this kind of game players do not have all the means of production needed for pleasure production after extracting the role, and some means of production need to be exchanged by the players with labor, which means that part of the players' pleasure is always pinned on the future, in which case the players' power is weakened. However, this kind of labor that allows players to exchange information needed to develop their roles is often repetitive and boring. This kind of labor is a means, not an end. Its purpose is to get the role and let the role perform in the level, so this kind of labor is a kind of alienated labor. To sum up, the players of this kind of mobile games are very similar to the employed proletarians, although they can completely occupy the final pleasure products.

The above-mentioned "governance of pleasure" means that in this case, the role of the player is the power to generate pleasure in the future; The alienated labor they pay is the ever-increasing sunk cost. On this basis, they need to rely on the producer/operator of the game, hoping that the new roles and levels added by the producer/operator can better realize their rights. Therefore, different happiness constitutes a competitive/hostile relationship. In the end, the completely parallel and unrelated happiness born equal in Hiroki Azuma's model contradicts each other due to the objective absence in the role-shaping class, forming a simple "life politics" and a happiness-related order.

In response to Fu Shanchao's speech, researchers in various fields and practitioners in vertical fields actively participated in the dialogue. Dr. Liu Jinhe from Tsinghua University supplemented Fu Shanchao's speech. In view of the "life politics" of pleasure mentioned by Dr. Fu at last, Liu Jinhe provided new thinking from the perspective of "meta-universe" based on the present. He asked: if the game is directly replaced by "meta-universe", is its life politics all-round? From this perspective, can Foucault's theory be combined with our present reality? Is it possible to transcend Foucault's discourse concept and theory and produce a new theory? These questions are thought-provoking.

Professor Dong from north china university of technology College of Law and Science mentioned that in the era of digital economy, the concept of "body" may change greatly. The human body can not exist and can be replaced by data. When each of us becomes a user and registers our own account, the human body and the subject are separated, and the real body disappears and is replaced by a "virtual body", that is, a virtual body. "Virtual body" is more convenient for data statistics, especially big data statistics and cloud computing, and it is also easier to be mastered and manipulated by the platform. At this time, a thorny question appeared: Who holds the data? Nietzsche said that God is dead, and Foucault said that people with capital letters are dead. Professor Dong believes that in the era of digital capitalism, people who are "virtual bodies" are also dead, because people are firmly in the hands of platforms. Based on this, he asked: Is it possible for people as virtual bodies to gain further enlightenment and liberation? At present, video games try to give players more editing rights, but also "give music", that is, to provide players with the possibility of creating their own happiness, which may not only be a reproduction of power, but also provide players with the possibility of creating themselves like works of art in a sense.

Professor Jiang from the Philosophy Department of East China Normal University believes that games are indeed the power to guide teenagers, but this guiding power can also be transformed into the power for teenagers to guide themselves. This game is very convincing. Its persuasiveness is not only reflected in persuading players to go to class and let them continue to play, but also in the inspiration and enlightenment of the game to players' abilities. It can make players return to themselves, guide and reflect on themselves, and even really awaken players' status and strength as the main body. Professor Jiang suggested that we might combine the power of reflection with happiness and try to get rid of the machine of happiness, instead of taking happiness as a trap, we should take happiness as a kind of motivation. The pleasure of future game promotion may be used as a force to guide and stimulate thinking, not just the temptation of krypton and liver explosion.

Zhu Jiayin, a well-known game media person, provided his own observation on the game from the perspective of pleasure management. He mentioned that five or seven years ago, online games usually punished players by providing negative emotions, encouraging players to charge or putting energy into the game. It seems that only paying players can get the experience of the game; But in recent years, some games have developed into a mode in which free players can have fun, while paying players will have more fun. In this mode, free players not only exist as the user experience of paying players, but also have their own game experience. It can be seen that today's game designers have created better ways.

Ye Taotao, the game designer of Tencent NExT Studios and director of the sunset room of the media lab, further talked about the difference between immersion and addiction according to the "game addiction" proposed by Professor Jiang. He believes that in the game experience, there are both addictive simple stimuli and immersive flow experience, just as the state of professional players playing games is different from that of ordinary players playing games and leisure, and professional players entering the immersive flow state also need the intervention of high-level cognitive ability. In addition, Teacher Ye Taotao raised several thought-provoking questions: Are there any self-technical video games? Can game developers care about humanities when playing games? How to play this self-technical video game?

Finally, Deng Jian, the host of this forum, added that under the background of digital capitalism, video games should have two sets of orders to run together. One is the symbolic order, that is, the so-called database consumption and lovely elements of Guangmu Azuma, which is itself the consumption of simulacra; The other is the algorithm order based on data or values. These two orders are intertwined and work together. Fu Shanchao responded to this. He thinks that the order of algorithm can be regarded as an economic order. As for the combination of symbols and data, Dr. Fu Shanchao pointed out that the main significance of virtual avatar in the game lies in the combination of symbol order and algorithm order.

Proofreading: Zhang