I’ve been a gamer since the original XBox launch. Before that, I’m not sure the term ‘gamer’ was real, and I had been too much of an arcade rat to do LAN parties. I preferred the competitive scene provided by downtown arcades in Boston and NYC. Virtua Fighter, dude. Here’s something crazy. When I first saw the move sheet for Virtua Fighter, it blew my mind. I know there’s an author who wrote a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but that’s how I felt about seeing all of the moves by every character typed up into a single document. I was floored. I couldn’t believe that somebody figured all of that out, and having done so I couldn’t imagine why they’d give away that secret knowledge. But there it was. Even given all the moves, it didn’t mean you could execute them at the right time without panic. That’s the nature of combat.
Now we are engaged in a great videogame that tests whether this gamer or any gamer can long endure. It is Starfield into which I have poured nearly 96 hours since Labor Day. I just completed [mostly I think] the corpo quest in the city of Neon, which is a rather ethically dodgy affair, depending on how stealthy you can be. It brings up a very interesting set of questions about corporate culture. Completing that quest has been insightful.
Every so often, I ask myself whether it is better to be the king of a small hill, or a prince at a higher elevation. Most of the time, my answer is that self-possession is a most valuable characteristic. Yet we are asked all of the time what we might do if presented with the opportunity to make X million dollars. Every man has his price. What’s mine? Dunno. Only Powerball tickets make me such promises, which I have ignored all but two times in my entire life. I think of who I might be if my first corporate stint at Xerox Corporation would have paid off. I knew all of the top executives of the division that built its revolutionary computers as well as some of the craftiest developers at OSBU South and PARC. As a young whippersnapper aiming for the six figure salary of some individuals I knew there (I had HR access) there was not much holding me back from full engagement in whatever political situation presented itself. I was all in. That is, I was until I started grasping the limits of internal politics and the costs of poor strategic planning. Long story short, I bailed after 7 years when the entire XNS / Interpress / Mesa architecture shrunk and faded in the face of OS/2 and AS/400. Thank God for Bob Metcalfe and 3Com or we’d all be using token ring today.
The consequence is that I never again trusted myself entirely to corporate scheming. It helped that I had a fairly good family, and especially the rigorous discipline of my USMC father. I would have needed strong mojo to resist the idea that my employer was ‘family’ if I didn’t have a proper family myself. I always looked at sloppy work done in the corporate halls and knew my father would never put up with such bullshit and the excuses that always come with it.
The fictional Ryujin Corporation hires your character in its operations bureau and your job, after you fetch coffee, is to plant evidence, sabotage and otherwise do non-violent dirt to your competitors. If you succeed (it helped that I had the power of invisibility) the early encounters, you get to know the characters of the executives and precisely what trouble you make for them should your assignments fail. They have little patience for failure and talk a serious game about their company’s reputation, etc. But in the end, it’s all about the money and power. This seems to be a bargain many Americans can’t seem to stomach. So perhaps a dichotomy is in order.
I am convinced that people who attach themselves to corporations for the feelings of loyalty, camaraderie and ‘family’ culture are deceived. I am equally convinced that people who attach themselves to philanthropy for the feelings of moral authenticity are equally deceived. I haven’t decided what to think about non-profits and think-tanks, partially because of my own self-interests and partially because I understand very well that we individuals have only limited agency. That, and churches have given up a lot of agency here in America. Now would be a good time to rewatch The Name of the Rose.
So there are those who err on the side of the sponsor, and there are those who err on the side of the self. In principle, Americans largely desire to believe that erring on the side of the self is morally superior. Let us suspend judgement on that concept for the moment. The nature of adherence to abstract principles, those you must adopt to stay in good stead with your corporation, your non-profit, your church, your association, these all put the self at risk. I ultimately believe that trust is the fundamental currency of society and that some measure of personal sacrifice is necessary for civilization. How much, though? An eternal question. Nevertheless, as Morpheus describes the Matrix, you feel it when you go to work, when you got to church, when pay your taxes.
So it is in that spirit of cooperation and sublimation that I chose to exploit my personal skills for the Scooby Snacks offered by the Ryujin Corporation. But I must confess that in the ultimate challenge, the final complication required of my character, I had to result to violence. I met my own limit of patience, of stealth, and my sense of self-preservation took over. I knew I was, as they say, way over my skis on this mission. The prize was ultimately worth it - which is to say, the Ryujin Corporation covered my ass, and having delivered this success, my vote and influence as an insider was able to run the day. It truly became my corporation with whose board of directors, I had sway.
Did the ends justify the means? I want to take simple take apart.
The ends of a corporation are ends that individuals cannot attain. To perform within legal boundaries for generations, to provide profits to anonymous shareholders, to achieve non-violent transfers of power to ambitious executives, these are accomplishments beyond the means an even ken of all but the brightest. Our world is run by corporations and governments, not by families and clans. So individuals are sacrificed to corporations for the benefits corporations are singularly capable of delivering. This has become more clear to me having played this particular videogame. I voluntarily played the corporate game within the game knowing that having the cover of this megacorp, I could do very specific and odd jobs that would make no sense as and individual [player] and gain me no gain. Only in the context of it being my assignment from Ryujin was there value. Only in the context of me sacrificing my character and/or sublimating my individuality to the aims of the corporate collective was there any specific good made fungible. A corporation that knows its business can do this.
A church. An army unit. A university. A government office. Any institution leverages and sacrifices individual selves for collective aims. The individual ends justify the individual means, but the collective has other priorities by which the individual is used, compromised or even sacrificed. This is the mutual agreement.
When foul play comes to light, when incompetence becomes manifest, the corporation, the church, the organization, the collective can survive. It doesn’t need to dodge the bullet that would kill the individual. Its very necessity, its larger footprint remains. It may pivot. It may whitewash. It may even insouciantly brag. It takes more than small arms fire to take down a castle, it takes a prolonged siege action. It takes the dedication of a larger and more powerful entity to cripple or crush one foul organization. There’s always a bigger fish.
Religious devotion, national patriotism, family loyalty. They all compromise the individual self.