Corporate Training

Awhile back on Twitter, the fashion writer Glenn O’ Brien (@lordrochester) wrote that competition reality television shows like Survivor serve as training guides for worker bees on how to thrive in the cutthroat corporate world. While Survivor doesn’t take place in a corporate setting, the formula of one contestant out-surviving the weaker contestants in order to gain recognition and wealth seems to align with the pervasive and harsh dog-eat-dog competitiveness in the corporate workplace. The Apprentice, set in a corporate location, more directly acknowledged the callousness of the workplace hierarchy whenever Donald Trump would gleefully fire a contestant. Many other reality competition shows from American Idol to The Biggest Loser likely also serve as training guides on how to aggressively ‘win’ over ‘losers’ at work.

While reality competition programs like Survivor or The Apprentice might very well train or inspire passive viewers on preparing for fighting in the corporate hierarchy, the games that David Golumbia mentions in “Games Without Play” are likely even more effective training guides on account of their interactivity. Diana picked up on this by mentioning that, “games prepare us for participation in a capitalist system”. As Golumbia writes, “I am suggesting that programs like WoW and Half-Life do not merely resemble the capitalist structures of domination, but that they directly instantiate them and, in important ways, train human beings to become parts of those systems” (194). This can be taken as a kind of feedback loop: the executive in a suit spends his workday trying to get to the top of the company totem pole at the expense of others and then comes home to play a computer game that not only further cements his aggressive mentality but helps train him to be a better and less empathetic workplace aggressor. Golumbia mentions that the creatures who need to be destroyed or exploited for players to succeed in some of these games are often physically grotesque. He writes, “Extremely ugly, even frightening, monsters are most often the target of aggression” (200), and these depictions reinforce the notion to players that weaker employees in the workplace are lesser beings that deserve to be shunned or mistreated for the worthy competitor’s advancement. Instead of cultivating empathy for others (like the games that Patrick Jagoda covers in “Gamification and Other Forms of Play”), games like WoW seem better at retarding empathy and fostering self-centered attitudes.