Insert Coin
1st February – 19th April 2023
Cable Depot, 8, Submarine Cable Depot, Warspite Rd, London, UK
Cable Depot is excited to present Insert Coin, an exhibition exploring predatory monetization practices within video games, specifically loot boxes, and the ongoing insertion of gambling mechanics into virtual experiences.
As our physical lives are becoming increasingly gamified the game industry has, for almost twenty years, been inserting ways of gambling real world money into video games. From purchasing extra lives to play another level in Candy Crush to buying new cosmetic options for your guns in Call of Duty, spending money within video games has become increasingly prevalent.
One of the most prevalent and destructive forms of monetization are loot boxes, consumable virtual items that are bought within video games which can be redeemed to receive a randomised selection of further virtual items, ranging from simple customization options for a player’s avatar or character to game-changing equipment such as weapons and armour. As the items are randomised players have previously spent thousands of pounds attempting to gain specific products in different games. As these gambling mechanics have become more prevalent, with considerable harm being done to young people and players with gambling addictions, loot boxes are now illegal in several countries, whereas recently the UK government decided that loot boxes will not be regulated under betting laws.
Insert Coin contains a number of new works centering around loot boxes, with the central piece being a larger-than-life 3D printed replica of a loot box from the popular 2019 video game Apex Legends, a free-to-play battle royale-hero shooter. The loot boxes in Apex Legends are visualised and known as “Loot Ticks” within the game world. Within the game they are a benign form of robotic tick, hidden across a given in-game map and are visualisations of Apex Packs (loot boxes) within the game, purchasable from the in-game store. It is somewhat ironic that Apex Legends has named their loot box after a parasitic arachnid that feeds on the blood of mammals, birds, and sometimes reptiles and amphibians. The work is produced using a marble filament, referencing ideas of power, wealth and commodity, with occasional use of clear filament to speak about issues regarding the lack of transparency within technology companies and the false promises implied by the gambling industry. The Loot Tick is hung in the middle of the gallery, caught in a custom-made bright orange cargo net, as if the loot box has been captured, ready to be dispatched or punished.
The act of visiting the exhibition space has been gamified, with visitors being encouraged to spin a rotating painting to win prizes. On entering the gallery you are provided with a loyalty card, traditionally seen in cafes to encourage repeat business where, if you buy nine cups of coffee, you’ll get the tenth for free. In this case, once stamped, the loyalty card enables the visitor to have one free spin of the painting. The painting, made up of six separate categories, enables the visitor to land on a series of algorithmically generated images of luxury items, consisting of private planes, houses, yachts, sports cars, private islands and passports. Once spun visitors are able to select their prize from a series of wall-based 3D printed shelves that contain a number of 3D printed sculptures resembling and referencing each of the six categories.
The other painting in the exhibition is an archive of twenty-five loot boxes from twenty-five different video games produced over the past fifteen years, from Fortnite to Call of Duty, illustrating the breadth of designs and how far these harmful practices have infiltrated the games industry.
The floor of the gallery is a red carpet painted with an orange repeating pattern, produced from and inspired by a variety of different loot boxes from a series of popular video games. The elaborate patten, accompanied by the somewhat grotesque colour scheme, references intricate casino carpeting, which is said to be overly complex and confusing in order to push visitors to keep their eyes on the slot machines and gambling tables whilst simultaneously creating a somewhat exciting, otherworldly, adrenaline-pumping atmosphere. The walls of Cable Depot have been painted bright orange, with the colour commonly associated with ideas of optimism and energy, referencing the initial appeal of loot boxes and gambling experiences, and continues to transform the gallery into a gamified, painfully stimulating, space.
The final work included in Insert Coin is a CGI video exploring the history of loot boxes from the point of view of an anthropomorphised loot box called Wally. The video travels through various video game landscapes, originally released in the early 2000s before loot boxes came to prominence, whilst Wally speaks to the viewer about the video game industry, their complex ancestral history and the part they play within the gamification of our lives. The video is accompanied by a small 3D printed version of the Wally, waving to audience members.
Insert Coin at Cable Depot is an exploration of loot boxes in video games, how they have transformed the video game industry and the gamification of everyday life.
The exhibition is accompanied by But we don’t do things because they are easy, hm? We do them because they are profitable!, a text written by Elliott Burns, seen below:
Born at the tailend of the 1980s, my introduction to economics was twofold, divided between: small assignments of pocket money issued by my parents; and the in-game currencies encountered on the GameBoy I share with my brother. On first consideration, a couple of pounds (£) to spend in the local corner store has only a visual correlation to the coins collected in Super Mario, yet, I’d like to propose that we might additionally understand them as both operating in an abstract realm. Insulated from whatever economic concerns we may have been facing as a family, my weekly combination of 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p and £1 coins born no relation to our wider economic situation and was purposely kept beyond comprehension. Money operated in isolation, its accumulation equated to either an extra life or a KitKat. Nothing further.
Thirty years later this is far from the case, as Bob Bicknell-Knight’s Insert Coin exhibition at Cable Depot reminds us, we have moved beyond an innocent and innocuous mode of financial awakening and into a pernicious education that addicts children, employs gambling mechanics, and exploits the needs of overstretched parents. Though this text will not linger on the contemporary condition, instead it offers a sketch of the phenomenological evolution of video game money, from an abstract value signifier, to in-game economics being an extended ludic component, and finally into function virtual coin. Consider it a primer. Or a set of moral tales.
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What difference exists between the currency encountered in Super Mario Land and the currency as experienced in Super Mario Land 2? This is not a trick question, it is posed in all seriousness.
Aesthetically their pixelated design is indistinguishable, leading us to assume they were the same currency issued by a Mushroom Kingdom central banking authority.* However, when considered in relation to the design of the game, two major adaptations are noticeable, representing fundamental shifts in the legal operation of finance and the cultural perception of wealth. Firstly, Land levels were strictly sequential, meaning that across the twelve stages a maximum amount of currency could be accumulated. Whereas, the overworld presentation of Land 2 meant that progressional limitations were lifted. To amass a small fortune a player could simply complete a level and re-run it. Secondly, the use of coins differs greatly. Upon collecting 100 coins in Land the player’s holdings are immediately exchanged for a 1-UP, whilst in Land 2 a total of 999 coins can be accumulated and need to be spent in casinos for a chance to win an extra life or power-up.
The earlier game is strictly situated in a metallist ideological frame. The world contains a finite amount of money which appears to be economically anchored to a precious metal, it is tangible and enforces a disciplined restraint. Moreover, a strict exchange rate is set and the currency is immediately circulated back into the wider economy ensuring its continual distribution. Land 2 still obeys the idea that money is real — trade is enacted by an intermediary material — however, in it the state loosens the regulations applied to the market. Money begins to operate in a more elastic way and is suggestive of a shift towards chartalism. On top of this we may even read early hints of neoliberal free market capitalism.
If we were to pin this transition to any human world equivalent, we might choose Nixon’s 1971 ending of the gold standard. The decision signalled that the US’s gold reserves were no longer sufficient to anchor the world economy and laid the groundwork for the types of speculative financial trading that have become commonly accepted today.
*Before anyone says it, I know that Super Mario Land was set in Sarasaland and Super Mario Land 2 took place on Mario’s private island, Mario Land. My running assumption is that they all operate under an EU styled single currency agreement, with the Mushroom Kingdom being analogous to Belgium.
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Though many players at the time were unaware, Grand Theft Auto 3 had a monetary limit. Discovered in 1772, by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, the number 2,147,483,647 (or 2 billion one-hundred and forty-seven million four-hundred and eighty-three thousand six-hundred and forty-seven) was then the largest known prime, only surpassed in 1887. The product of 2³¹, it is the largest number a signed (+/-) 32-bit integer field can hold. Unless an enforced financial cap is instigated, any game running on 32-bit computing will be automatically limited to this figure.
Through various means, determined players could slowly earn towards this lofty goal. In GTA3 you could earn a substantial amount by progressing through the main narrative and completing sub-missions, however, you would never close in on the cap by this route alone. To compliment your earnings you would need to take a job driving an ambulance, taxi or a police car; crash or destroy cars (an inexplicable means of reward); or murder pedestrians for the pills of stacked dollar ($) bills they left scattered around their corpses. Whichever your preferred means, the task was long and arduous, the pursuit of a small subsection of gamers particularly dedicated to the game, often a decade or more after its original release.
However, there was unfortunately one snag for these dedicated high-earners. The moment they earned a dollar over 2,147,483,647 an effect called integer overflow was triggered. Picture a speedometer approaching and reaching 999,999 miles or kilometres, as the driver keeps going another digit is added looping the reading back around to 000,000. With integer overflow the same is true, though the loop does not reset the player to $0 but takes them back around to the result of -2³¹. You have successfully earned $-2,147,483,647.
At first I thought about this as representing a financial crash, the result of bad actors and unchecked ambition mixed with capitalist greed. The greed and ambition part is wholly true, though seeing it as a crash in the traditional sense fails to grasp what is actually happening. The overflow effect is a product of limitations coded into the system and a myopic belief in technological determinism.
A financial system unrooted from metallism or chartalism and only responding to the efficiencies of technologically promised unlimited growth. Unrestrained potential. When actually it masked a fatal glitch.
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Grind. /ɡraɪnd/. I / you / we / they grind; he / she / it grinds; past simple ground; -ing form grinding. Few players of GTA3 would choose to grind their way to the maximum earnings cap, though the act of repeatedly slaughtering low-level enemies, smithing steel armour, or fast-travelling between towns to exploit differences in buy/sell rates is a hallmark of many RPGs and especially true of their communal brothers, the MMORPG.
Founded in 2001 by former Mighty Duck child actor Brock Pierce and online gaming aficionado Alan Debonneville, Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) set out to systematise lucrative grey market economies that were sprouting around popular online role playing games. In the early 2000s in-game economies could be divided into two camps, coin and experience — parallel products of the same actions, completing quests and felling foes, the prior could be used to purchase in-game goods and the latter to level up and invest in skills. Central to the MMORPG financial model was a requisite investment of player time (translated into monthly subscription fees), a slow accumulation of top-tier weapons and armour matched with an advanced and bespoke set of abilities. Attaining these goals conveyed status within the community, ensured participation in elite guilds and allowed the player to contribute to increasing hard raids. Pierce and Debonneville’s insight was to exploit wealthy player’s desires to reach these lofty positions and to off-shore the labour required to get there.
Using distributed teams of low-wage workers in China, IGE offered their services across the virtual worlds of: Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls, EverQuest II, Final Fantasy XIV, Lineage 2 RuneScape, Star Wars: The Old Republic, World of Warcraft and more. Though it would be WoW that became their key earner. For as little as 25¢ an hour IGE ‘gold farmers’ would play the games for extended durations, amassing virtual currencies and desirable or rare items. An online marketplace would then facilitate the exchanges for fiat money, earning the company huge sums. According to the Washington Post, the company made $2.7million from four games in April 2004, a year later that same month earned them $6.7million, and in October 2006 they made $8.5million.
Yet the company faced ongoing problems, many of the gaming companies prohibited the sale of virtual goods for real money and actively sought to ban players who engaged in these practices. Related to their pay-to-play subscription model, the option to bypass the grind could be seen as undercutting their market and was also seen to upset carefully calibrated in-game economies. In response, IGE hired Steve Bannon (yes that Steve Bannon) in 2005 to help take the company public through fundraising and brokering profit sharing agreements with the game companies.
Despite Bannon securing a Goldman Sachs spearheaded investment of $60million, the company would enter financial freefall. Blizzard, the company behind WoW, banned more than 30,000 accounts in May 2006. IGE was losing over $500,000 a month. A class-action lawsuit and investigation by Florida’s attorney general followed. What followed was a slow trail of adaptations, new names and change of ownership. Eventually IGE would no longer exist and the company that took its place would pivot operations, however, it would leave a legacy.
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At the opening we called this text a set of moral tales, though charting the trajectory of video game economies it is hard to see where the moral cuts in. An article by the Financial Times traced the ancestry of cryptocurrencies to games such as WoW and Second Life, these roots can be extrapolated into an ideology frame that believes in unlimited virtual expansion and promotes unchecked extractivism. Though gamers may periodically rally against exploitative loot-box mechanics and expensive season passes, it often appears predestined that the microtransaction marketplace will filter into all fields of gaming. This future does not look promising.
Yet, to close on a note of despair ignores the overlooked potential of ludic space as an opportunity to reimagine financial structures. When developing their in-game economies, most developers opt to replicate the capitalist dynamics they observe in meatspace (consider Tom Nook), though this needn’t be the case. A game — single player or massively multiplayer — is a design opportunity to build systems from the ground up. Play can be play testing. And new economic strategies can be prototyped with real time feedback and adjustment. If there is a moral to this story, it is a reminder that virtual worlds can run to different logics.
BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHT 