ILPC 2026

 The aim of this work is to explore an industry scarcely addressed in the past by sociology and social sciences in general. Our intention is to reconstruct the first years of the beginning of the video game industry, from 1970 to 1983 in the United States, from the perspective of the Marxist theory of value (Marx, 2009, 2015).

From its origin, the video game industry was framed in the global capitalist competition to produce and accumulate value, and as such it determines part of the social construction of reality, as an arm of the social division of labour and as a commodity (and value) production process. Today what concerns us is the fact that "... virtual play trains flexible personalities for flexible jobs, shapes subjects for militarized markets, and makes becoming a neoliberal subject fun" (Dyer-Whiteford and de Peuter, 2009: 29-30), and our work its meant to take the first steps in to questioning that aspect of the video game industry.

To accomplish this we will consider the following questions: what capitals constituted the video game industry in the West between 1970-1983 and how were they related? More specifically in the United States, the birth place of the industry. What was the form that the relationship between labor (variable capital) and capital (constant capital) took in the industry? Paying special attention to the difference between manual or material labour, responsible for the valuation of videogames and consoles as physical commodities (consoles, cartridges, joysticks), and intellectual or immaterial labour, responsible for the valorization of the videogame as a virtual commodity and as intellectual property (software code, the design of microprocessors inside consoles and computers, artistic design).

The division between industrial capitalism (Fordism/Taylorism) and post-industrial capitalism (post-fordism/post-taylorism) and between material labor and immaterial or cognitive labor is essential to our analysis. These notions will be addressed from authors such as Carlo Vercellone (2011), Marcela Zangaro (2013, 2016) Pablo Miguez (2010, 2016) and Nick Dyer-Whiteford and Greig de Peuter (2009).