The German philosopher of culture Theodor Adorno once observed that the products of mass entertainment secretly had much in common with work in industrial society. “Amusement in advanced capitalism is the extension of work,” he wrote. “It is sought after by those who wish to escape the mechanised work process, in order to be able to face it again.” He was speaking at the time of cinema and popular music (he especially hated jazz, the poor thing), but one wonders what he would have thought of videogames, so many of which themselves appear to offer little more than a “mechanised work process”.

If games are supposed to be fun, Adorno might have asked, why do they go so far to replicate the structure of a repetitive dead-end job? One very common idea in games, for example, is that of “earning”. Follow the rules, achieve results, and you are rewarded with bits of symbolic currency - credits, stars, skill points, powerful glowing orbs, whatever - which you can then exchange later in the game for new gadgets, ways of moving, or access to previously denied areas. The only major difference between this paradigm and that of a real-world job is that, whereas the money earned from a job enables you to buy beer and go on holiday - that is, to do things that are extraneous to the work process - the closed videogame system rewards you with stuff that only makes it supposedly more fun or involving to continue doing your job, rather than letting you get outside it. It is a malignly perfect style of capitalist brainwashing. Even the common idea in many Nintendo games of being able to take “time off” to play a fishing sub-game or catch chickens can be read, on this analysis, as a cunning subterfuge to keep the masses happy: after all, they are still caught within the system.

In the overarching economic systems of games as diverse as Super Mario Sunshine, Deus Ex, or Primal everything boils down to a matter of shopping. New skills - whether they be new physical moves, spells, or the ability to transform into a demon - are acquired instantaneously and thoroughly through currency exchange. The idea of gradually nurturing and learning a skill is largely absent, although this would be psychologically more rewarding. If I could save up and spend ten thousand quid to become an instant kung-fu master, that would be cool, but I wouldn’t be as proud of my kung-fu as I would if I had acquired the ability through the normal channels of years of hard training. Even a game as apparently sophisticated as Deus Ex can only offer a bland mechanical parody of “learning”, in which the next level of ability in, say, lock-picking can only be bought, not practised and learned for oneself.

The extent of the learning possibilities in most games boils down to becoming able to manipulate the mechanics, and memorising maps. The fact that new bits are added to the mechanics throughout the game, whether through increased physical activity or the acquisition of tools (Mario’s new nozzles, Link’s hookshot, Raiden’s high-frequency blade, and so on), does not make this a true learning process; rather, it amounts to a cynical carrot-and-stick routine. And though a beat-’em-up such as Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution is primarily structured around a gradual learning and practising paradigm, it is not the perfect expression of it, since the skills to be learned are “quantised”: you cannotexperiment with throwing a specific punch in slightly different ways, but must learn to manipulate sequences made up from the quanta of predefined and unchangeable moves.

It would surely be interesting to attempt a game, of whatever genre, in which you began with all the skills and gadgets or weapons you needed, but you weren’t sure what some of them were for, and needed to practise others to understand how to use them more effectively. Rather than the top-down, modular approach to “education” applied by current games, this would be a true process of exploration.

But again it seems that would be to give the player too much power, under the current wage-slave paradigm of videogame design. Big enemies have long been called “bosses”, but the real boss in such a structure is the voice that is constantly telling you what to do next. Sony’s architecturally lavish and conceptually bankrupt Primal is a good example of this: Scree, your somewhat lovable igneous sidekick, is really a middle manager disguised as a helpful friend. When Jen asks him for hints, he tells her what the designers have decided they have to do next, and there can be no argument. It’s not a mere velleity; it is an order. Meanwhile, the very first speaking character they encounter in Oblivion is a horned demon lord who immediately sets them off on a job: to find his son. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full sir.

Of course a comprehensible goal-oriented structure is a useful thing, to stop a videogame becoming a sprawling mess of undermotivated wandering and backtracking. But while the just-following-orders structure works acceptably in military-themed games such as Splinter Cell, which after all do pretend to be more or less “realistic” representations of the job of a counter-terrorist or special forces agent, where a commander delivers objectives and the soldier finds ways to implement them, the idea seems more rebarbative the further one strays from quasi-simulation into pure fantasy.

Apart from comic early representations of menial jobs such as Tapper or Burger Time, indeed, some kind of military position was for a long time virtually the only real-life job represented in videogames, apart from the venerable genre of football management. Yet what we are seeing now is an increasing labourisation of the game atmosphere: from the wry alternative employment market of GTA: Vice City to the square-jawed life fantasy of Toca Race Driver, games become structured around a fictional career.

It would be nice to think that the famous episode in Shenmue where you actually have to go and get a job driving fork-lift trucks within the game world was an ironic acknowledgment of the job-like nature of too many games. But perhaps it is inevitable that, as products of decadent late capitalism, most videogames will, consciously or not, reflect the same values. You go through a period of training, and then it’s all about success and shopping, keeping your head down, doing what the system expects. Make-believe jobs, as the Marxist Adorno might have concluded, are the opiate of the people.