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beccaboxes · 2 years

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"Why I love doing domestic chores in video games

Thank you for subscribing, and welcome to the very first edition of HIGH RESOLUTION GORE & GRAPHIC VIOLENCE. Over the last two months I have played the game Cult of the Lamb for over 50 hours. Why?

WHAT IS CULT OF THE LAMB?

Cult of the Lamb is a video game where you play as a cute little lamb running a Satanic cult. It combines whimsically totalitarian community management (there is a menu option to “re-educate” dissenters) with traditional dungeon-crawling (AKA fighting monsters in a series of procedurally-generated rooms). Beating the monsters wins you gold coins and respect from your followers, which in turn allows you to accumulate “devotion”. Devotion is a currency made of faith, a bit like money.

Along the way you also gather blueprints to build furniture which you can use to decorate your cult’s home. There are a huge variety of items to collect, including “skull pile”, “skull candle” and “giant skull”. I’m messing, they’re not all skull-based: there’s also “Bone Sculpture” and “Barrel of Bones”.

In short, the game is half skirmish battles, half keeping your anthropomorphic animal followers happy through blood sacrifices and polyamorous wedding ceremonies. Basically, it’s a big Tamagotchi with a horny deathwish.

It’s also like a Tamagotchi in another significant way. But more on that in a moment.

THE CONTEXT: SOCIAL SIM MANIA

Even if you’re not into games, you’re probably thinking that Cult of the Lamb sounds a bit like Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The explosive success of ACNH got a lot of coverage during the pandemic, with 60 million copies sold worldwide.

Suddenly, millions of millennials were spending hours every day living on a virtual island where they could buy their own home and choose their own furniture: a welcome break from being forced to use your landlord’s Ikea bookshelf, which seems to have been constructed using only a nail bomb and a wish.

For my own part, I was instantly hooked on the ACNH fantasy of having a house large enough that things could be organised neatly. Often there are (made-up) scare stories in the press about violent video games inspiring real world terror attacks or murders. But over lockdown something even worse happened to me: Animal Crossing radicalised me into buying a shoebench.

ACNH and Cult of the Lamb’s home-making experiences are similarly appealing to generation rent and, along with the huge popularity of other sim games like Stardew Valley, there’s clearly a big demand for cozy simulations during these uncertain times.

So why am I so fixated on Cult of the Lamb in particular?

UNPLEASANT CHORES

Cult of the Lamb involves taking care of cute cultists. You need to build accommodation, farm food and cook meals. So far, so idyllic. The thing is, your followers also shit everywhere.

Once you’ve levelled up a bit you can buy them an Outhouse. Or the larger capacity Outhouse II (II fast II furious). But they still shit everywhere

So in between fighting off demons under the sea, creating a subsistence farm community and choosing which religious doctrines to impose on your growing cult, you also need to clean up poop.

But you do this with the press of a button. It’s swept up and gone, your stunningly-decorated base left pristine.

Now, like a lot of renters, my real interior design fantasy is exactly this: the dream of a home which COULD be cleaned. You know, where you could wipe a surface or mop a floor without bits of rust staining your cloth or wet lino lifting off the concrete.

So I guess what I’m saying is… pressing X to clean up the pixel-art shit of followers is intensely relaxing to me.

Because it’s an intoxicating sample of living in the world that REALLY rich people live in: the world where you press a button and stuff works. The world where, when something breaks, you call a guy and he fixes it. No endless calls and negotiations with pissed off call centre employees and letting agents. No visits from your landlord’s-friend’s-cousin who’s a trustworthy plumber, actually. No crap products that break after one use. It just works. Someone shits on the floor. It gets cleaned up. No hours scrubbing buckled lino. A wipe-clean world. It. All. Just. Works.

THE WORLD WHERE STUFF WORKS

Why is Cult of the Lamb’s window into this dreamworld so seductive? To explain, I’m going to make reference to the fantastic Postcapitalist Desire, which collects the last lectures of the late cultural critic and theorist Mark Fisher (buy it here or request it at your local library). It’s edited by Matt Colquhoun, whose writing I’d also highly recommend.

The third lecture is about consciousness-raising, which is the process of making people aware of their position in whatever power-structure you might be discussing - whether it’s the class system, the cis-het-patriarchy, or a cult run by a small lamb.

In this lecture, Fisher introduces the idea of “feminist standpoint epistemology” as used by the American philosopher Nancy Hartsock (my notes in square brackets):

I think there’s a good example in the Nancy Hartsock piece [The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays] about cleaning the toilet. In that scenario, the men, who are walking around with their highfalutin ideas about X, Y and Z, they’re completely ignorant of this reality of cleaning the toilet and what that means, which is a kind of metonym* for all immersion in materiality, or anything that operates as the basis for sociality as such – that is, the social reproduction of humans.

In a way, you could say that access to the lowest level of the materiality of things gives you the potential to have more knowledge of the totality […] The dominant group will just float by and not really notice you that much – that’s part of the reason they themselves don’t see the totality.

[*a part that represents the entire thing]

Basically: the men live in a magic universe where the toilet is always clean, and the loo roll is always hanging the right way. Cleaning the toilet makes the women grimly aware of how the world in which the men exist is created. Therefore, the women see the men’s reality for what it is: a fabrication. The toilet cleaners’ “standpoint” gives them potential access to the first stages of consciousness-raising, as well as the realisation that if the system which oppresses them is constructed, it can also be dismantled.

But the easy act of virtual toilet-cleaning in Cult of the Lamb performs the exact opposite process. It doesn’t make me aware of my position in the power structure; it helps me forget it. It is, to use another Fisherism, “consciousness deflating”.

And that is the stultifying dope-pleasure of these games: stuff just works.

For a moment we escape drudgery into the dreamworld, and imagine that we too could have domestic bliss without labour. Cleaning up and decorating become intensely satisfying acts.

You’re performing the ritual of home-making without having to do any of the work. Forget about the human sacrifice: this fake domestic labour is the most powerful ritual in the game.

Which brings me onto the second reason I like cleaning up shit in Cult of the Lamb.

AN ESCAPE FROM CYBERSPACE INTO CYBERSPACE

A lot of my enjoyment of Cult of The Lamb comes from the fact that you’re not only doing these domestic tasks (cooking, cleaning, decorating), but you’re also doing them when you get “home” from the dungeon-crawler element of the game.

Adrenaline-packed day at work slaughtering heretics, then back home to cook pumpkin soup which has a 5% risk of poisoning your followers, for some reason.

Sadly this clear divide between work and home in the game is such a huge pleasure because nowadays home isn’t safe from work. The tendrils of email and WhatsApp can reach you at every hour, through the all-too permeable walls of your damp flat.

In fact, work-cyberspace is so integrated with my living room that I have to take another jump inside a nested cyberspace to escape it: putting on headphones and sitting at my partner’s gaming PC (a safe-haven from my own emails).

The repetitive tasks of fake-cleaning and fake-cooking and fake-battling keep my hands too busy to check my phone. The clear boundary between work and home in the game are replicated in the act of me playing it.

The Italian philosopher and activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has this great concept of “cybertime” which I think really elegantly explains why we are often so overwhelmed by digital communication (my bold):

“Cybertime [is] the mental time that is necessary to elaborate info-stimuli coming from cyberspace. Cyberspace is a space of unlimited expansion by definition, since it is the virtual dimension produced by countless semiotic agents that project their signals in the infinite space of the Internet. […]

However, cybertime is not unlimited. On the contrary, the mental time available to a conscious and sensitive organism is limited by organic factors (sleep, disease, deterioration, attention limits), by cultural factors (beliefs , expectations from the world), and by emotional factors (affectivity, slowness needed for the psychical elaboration of signals). Therefore, the relationship between cyberspace and cybertime create the conditions for a continuous semiotic overproduction, which have psychotic effects on the mind exposed to the cyberspace flow, and the effect of overproduction on the economy.”

In short, it’s stressful getting lots of texts isn’t it?? Okay, I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea: you can’t keep up with all the messages coming in, and you fall into the habit yourself of producing even more communications.

Perversely, doing all-consuming “play-work” in this cyberspace videogame offers me an escape from cybertime.

CONCLUSION

As I’ve explored, I love Cult of the Lamb for several reasons.

Firstly, it makes simple domestic tasks rewarding, fulfilling the fantasy of an ordered home life, something which can seem impossible when your work is precarious, and your accommodation is British.

Secondly, the repetitive tasks and system of management create total immersion in a virtual space where work and home are separate.

But most of all, I enjoy it because it’s at times dreadfully, completely, frustratingly, boring. Farming, cleaning, decorating, levelling up followers: these repetitive tasks can suck away half a Saturday. However, being hooked into the game, rather than my emails or messages, puts me in a truly anxiety-free, almost meditative state.

Because in a world of fevered cybertime, a moment of boredom is a moment of peace. Or rather, it’s 50 hours of peace.

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