The "Pleasure Governance" of Ludocapitalism——How Enjoyment Becomes a Disguise for Exploitation

Contemporary digital games have evolved into a key arena for capital accumulation and new forms of exploitation. Their core mechanism lies in transforming players' pleasurable experiences into a covert instrument of exploitation through what this study terms "pleasure governance." Based on a quantitative survey of 358 valid questionnaires and in-depth interviews with 11 players of diverse profiles, this research analyzes how such governance integrates psychoanalytic, ideology critique, and biopolitical theories to program desire, colonize time, and commodify social relations. The gacha mechanism functions as a "desire programmer" that manufactures cycles of continuous engagement; mission and season systems act as "time planners" that reframe leisure into structured labor; and social display systems serve as "identity performance arenas" that drive symbolic consumption. Despite clear awareness, players remain deeply immersed, exhibiting a cynical addiction wherein the subject is recruited as an affective laborer, self-optimizer, and symbolic consumer. By modulating circuits of pleasure production, ludocapitalism achieves a comprehensive colonization of life-time, affective energy, and social relations. There is an urgent need to explore paths of transcendence through regulation, community praxis, and critical self-reflection.

digital games; governance of pleasure; political economy of desire

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