Capitalist Surrealism: Grind, Loot Boxes, and the Work of the Looter Shooter

• Authors: Armintor Marshall Needleman
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The last decade has seen the rise of a mini-genre of digital games colloquially known as ‘looter shooters’. Looter shooters such as the games in the Borderlands series swamp the player with guns, cash, armour and powerups to the point that an important game mechanism becomes converting the loot into liquid capital at various in-game repositories. Aside from the garish critique of late-capital overproduction, the endless fountain of ordnance and flashy goods is a ‘grind’ of its own which requires the player to perform labour to sort out the best loot. This article also formulates a theory of grind based on the mechanics of opening loot boxes. Although gacha can tempt the player to gamble on exciting mystery loot containers, by contrast, the grind is all about the predictable and the mundane, where narrative fails to appear on the horizon. The looter shooter continually upends the possibility of story, seamlessly deploying a twin grind/gacha mechanic to obviate both narrative and game, flattening it all into unlosable, yet ‘unwinnable’ work.

Keywords

EN

accumulation; Borderlands; disaster capitalism; FPS; gacha; grind; late capital; lootboxes; looter shooter; narratology; procedurality; roguelite

• Publisher: Univerzita sv. Cyrila a Metoda (Trnava)
• Journal: Acta Ludologica
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 80-93
• Physical description: Media and Communication, Game studies, Theory of digital games
• Document type: Article

Contributors

author

Armintor Marshall Needleman

• University of North Texas, Department of English