Poverty

There are many ways to lose money. Being a 21st century parent is basically a license to do so. There is a point at which children realise that almost every TV programme has toys associated with it and, given that your average 6 year old can binge watch a single series of an entire programme in a few days, that carries the potential of multiple new toy demands per month. Such things can be shrugged off/put off till birthdays or Christmas, when the child will have inevitably moved on to another programme (inevitably just days before said occasion, after you’ve already bought the toys for the now passed fad), but sometimes something sticks, or you need a goal with an attached reward. This can be a toy but generally in the lower cost bracket this could be a (video) game.

As with almost everything in tech, games manufacturers are actually even better at squeezing cash out of you than the traditional ‘analogue’ media/toy tie-ins (to which they are also often corollary). The ‘free’ game with in app purchases model is hardly new, but it really has been finessed into an almighty piss-take in the world of kids' gaming. Witness the countless games where the free download contains one out of a possible ten small furry creatures with giant doe eyes or two out of a possible 20 locations. These are pretty obvious though, and funnily enough will either be accepted (and entered into the pantheon of pester) or rejected pretty quickly by my daughter. In many ways the more interesting games are the ones where everything is ostensibly ‘available’ but you either have to wait a genuinely long time (for a child, like 7 hours or 28 hours) for some of the most exciting items/features (even after you’ve earned the in-game currency to pay for them) or they’re priced in the game’s second currency, which can only be accrued at a glacial pace through gameplay. Of course waiting can be avoided or second currency can be instantly accrued through the simple application of the parent’s credit card. My daughter has a zoo building game that applies both of these concepts together: you can only buy certain things with serious amounts of the second currency and even the things you can pay for with the primary currency (such as zoo expansion) take an increasing amount of time to arrive after purchase unless secondary currency is deployed to get instant results. Obviously as a lefty liberal parent I find this repulsive and infuriating in equal measure. How dare these people attempt to make money from a game. Well not that, I don’t mind paying for things, it’s just I expect value for my money, what’s my ROI? If I drop £6 to pay for a game my daughter is going to play for a month or so, that seems bearable, if I have to pay £2.50 just to get her unicorn breeding program accelerated and then another £2.50 to expand the zoo in under a(n actual human) weekend and so on, I want real tangible results. I want to see a real fucking unicorn in my living room at the end of all that expenditure.

Perhaps by thinking about ROI (but excluding my woefully 20th century expectation of actual real world returns) is the right way to go about this. What is the game teaching my child after all, but the reality of the 21st century economy? The sooner she learns that you don’t really get anywhere in life without a serious injection of generational wealth the better. If a zoo game can help her realise the harsh reality behind her privilege then so much the better right? Except of course it isn’t teaching anything harsh, it is gamifying privilege. Kids will either get bored and quit, pester their parents into funding their success or (if they’re really determined) grind out the hours in soul crushing tedium to reach a fraction of the attainable goals. These are the only options allowable in the current version of the game of life. Those who don’t have a benefactor of some form are destined to struggle through or drop out altogether. I’m pleased when my daughter gets bored of these simulacra of modern capitalist orthodoxy and drops out, but this is also a form of privilege. There is nothing in this system that allows you to drop out without a benefactor and that is what needs to change.

When I was a kid and I didn’t like the way the world was structured or I thought it was unfair, I was told by my elders and betters to grow up because that was how the world works. Now I’m very much grown up, I realise that their absolutist view of the world was not only miopically incorrect but also part of the problem I had originally identified. I realise that it is easier to tell a child that there is no alternative to the orthodoxy, but unless you truly believe that (or you are too afraid of change to contemplate it) then you are simply reinforcing the dominance of that orthodoxy. The broken system in which we live is largely sustained by the fact that the assumptions underpinning it (endless growth, trickle-down wealth, the efficiency of private enterprise, an ideal 2% inflation, etc) are treated as immutable constants in the equations of life, liberty and happiness. We look at the propaganda of the past, at the unquestioned belief systems that underpinned the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church for example and comfort ourselves that we could never be so deluded as to commit so unquestioningly to a belief system. Yet here we are in the streets protesting against the few feeble attempts our rulers have been allowed by their paymasters to implement in an attempt to to avert a species wide catastrophe because we are so entirely convinced that the system is good for us, even as it makes us poorer, less healthy and more lonely each and every year.

So I’m not sure what response I want most from my child when she runs up against cold hard capital. In many ways a child is the ideal capitalist subject: driven solely by novelty and a desire for continuous accumulation. Refusing them their every desire doesn’t teach them the limits of happiness through acquisition, it merely confirms their place in the capitalist caste system, whilst maintaining (or even enhancing) the desire for greater consumption. It would be great to find a way that she can transcend the urge to endlessly consume, but I can’t exactly cut her off from literally all of society. For now I’m just content that when she discovers there is a fiscal limit to her desires, she says “I wish there wasn’t any money.”