Designing a Greedy and Earth-Devouring Cat: Towards a Critical Feminist Approach to Gamification

ABSTRACT

In recent years, gamification has been widely implemented for sharing knowledge about, making sense of, and imaging futures. This article considers how gamification could be mobilised as a feminist method of futures. It presents a case study of making the idle game Square Cat in which a cat destroys and devours the entire earth. Much of the existing work on gamification examines games and gamified apps that have already been produced. The case study offers different insights into gamification practices by providing an account of the process of designing and developing an experimental game. Square Cat makes visible and bodily felt the ambiguous affective dynamics of the asset-driven logic of late capitalism, and how it shapes human-environment relations. It parodies the embodied habituation of repetition and reward feedback, dramatises idle games’ structure of accumulation, and rejects the narrative of linear progress. In so doing, it reworks the binary logic of game and asks to entertain a form of play where the relation between winning and losing, subject and object, becomes confounded, and where futures are multiple even as the game’s beginning and end appear predetermined.

KEYWORDS:

• Game
• gamification
• feminist method
• experimentation
• cute

Introduction

How might experimenting with gamification be used as a feminist method of futures? In recent years, gamification has been widely implemented to shape everyday lived practices. Gamification is here understood of as not simply the application of the logic and design of games to nongaming phenomena (Deterding et al. 2011; Fuchs et al. 2014), but more broadly as ‘a formal and cultural counterpart to neoliberalism’ (Jagoda 2020, 44) that ‘exceeds a narrow design strategy of importing games into nongame activities’ (2020, 9). Following Patrick Jagoda’s theorisation, gamification includes ‘[f]orms of gameplay that range from idle play or background stat acquisition to focused engagement with mobile or console games condition a subject to accept the logic and practice the habits necessary to sustain competitive entrepreneurship of oneself’ (2020, 44). On this account, both games and gamified apps are forms of gamification. Feminist research on gamification practices have shown how the gamification of issues of health (Lupton and Thomas 2015), beauty (Elias and Gill 2017), violence (Jerreat-Poole 2020), environment (Chang 2019) and activism (Cross 2016) reproduces intersectional relations of power through embodied and affective modulations.

This article takes inspiration from and contributes to this field of research by experimenting with gamification that also reworks the binary logic of the ‘fundamental structural inequalities’ (Flanagan 2020, 197). Many critiques have noted how the binary logic -– a system of valuation that produces an inter-related set of others, for example the feminine, the racialised, the sexualised, the non-human, as occupying the position of lack and less than - organises the structure, content and design of games (Flanagan 2009; Ruberg and Shaw 2017). The most obvious example is the win-or-lose outcome of games. However, the question as to how to reconfigure it in gamification practices remains under-explored. This article presents and analyses an experimentation that creates a mobile idle game called Square Cat: Idle Fish Eater in which a square-faced cat jumps, eats fish, destroys objects, and gains in-game currency.

The idle game is a game genre that is also called incremental, clicker or offline game. It has become increasingly popular in recent years. Although most mobile idle games are free to download, they could be highly profitable. For example, the top grossing idle game title ‘Gold and Goblins’, where the player helps goblins to get gold from mines, reportedly generated $13.1M net iAP (in app purchase) revenue in the first quarter of 2022.¹ As the word ‘idle’, ‘incremental’ and ‘clicker’ indicate, the key features of idle games include the incremental increase of in-game currency, repetitious clicking or tapping, and the possibility to progress even without interacting with the game. According Mobile Free to Play, a consultant that has worked with many major mobile game companies such as Google, Android and the Warner brothers, ‘The games play themselves!’ ² Idle games’ game mechanics are straightforward, demanding minimal physical input like clicking or tapping, with little need for deliberation. In many cases, players can use in-game currency to purchase an automated clicker function, which generates clicks automatically once initiated. This accelerates resources collection or in-game currency accumulation, requiring less active engagement from the player. The rules of idle games are easy to understand, often designed to be intuitive without the need for a tutorial. Additionally, the goals of idle games are clear, with a sense of reward upon achievement. Game features such as power-up items serve as further incentives, boosting in-game currency per click and enhancing the rewarding nature of each interaction. Despite variations in gameplay and themes, idle games adhere to the binary logic, where winning and progression are immediately rewarded and reinforced through repetitive clicking.

This article analyses how experimenting with idle game mechanics fosters ambivalence towards, and rework the binary logic of, game. It argues that while recognising its links with capitalist logic of domination and control and ‘neoliberal sensibilities of behaviour modification’ (Pedwell 2017, 65), experimenting with gamification could be mobilised as a feminist speculative method whose representation of future affords seeing the present anew (Hamilton 2019). This article proceeds as follows. First, I provide a brief overview of the concept of gamification. I elaborate upon the binary logic of game, what it means to consider game and gamification through the lens of experimentation, as well as how gamification might be used in line with feminist political and ethical orientations.

Second, I present and analyse the making of Square Cat as a case study. Much of the existing work on gamification examines games and gamified apps that have already been produced. Their focus is typically on questions such as how users interact with games or gamified apps, how and what kind of data is collected, for what purpose, and whether and how gamification could be an effective pedagogical tool. This article offers different insights into gamification by providing an account of the process of designing and making an experimental idle game, whose mechanics of repetition and reward feedback are also key features of nudging techniques (Chaudhry and Kulkarni 2022). Significantly, it demonstrates how experimenting with gamification could be done in practice as a shared endeavour engaging interdisciplinary knowledge and expertise, cultivating its civic value (Chang 2019; Walz and Deterding 2014). By way of conclusion, this article suggests that gamification can be used to refuse to refuse the binary logic of game, thus offering up experimental possibilities for feminist method of futures.

Gamification – Repetition and Pre-emptive Futures

Gamification is often used to nudge players or app users to adopt behaviours that are seen as socially, politically and economically desirable. For example, it has been used to educate about sustainability, biodiversity and climate related issues (Douglas and Brauer 2021), and to promote healthier lifestyles (Liu 2021; Lupton 2016), and socially accepted behaviours (Vanolo 2019). Much research on gamification focuses on the possibilities and limitations of utilising gamification for sharing knowledge and supporting behavioural change. For example, reviewing games and gamified apps in the context of climate change and sustainability, Douglas and Brauer (2021) note that in some cases, gamification seems to increase incentives to engage in sustainability practices, especially for the users and players who are already interested in these practices. However, it is unclear how sustainable such behaviour changes are. The success of an app entails not only good design and game mechanics, but also its users’ commitments in learning and continuing to use it. Interestingly, as Douglas and Brauer (2021) observe, the increased knowledge and the sense of reward, which are considered central features of gamification, often do not lead to behaviour change.

For this strand of scholarly work, the problem with gamification lies in its design and implementation, and not in how the individual is rendered the cause of and the solution to a set of pre-defined problems that gamification practices claim to solve (Jagoda 2020). By distinction, others have turned their attention to how gamification targets the individual and produces pre-emptive futures. For example, some studies investigate the mechanics and effects of the repeated sensory stimulation of the reward feedback in digitally mediated games and apps. As Jarosław Kopeć notes, such repetition constitutes a ‘habit loop’ (2015, 23) of ‘cue, routine, reward’ (Duhigg cited in Kopeć 2015, 23). Similarly, Matthew Tiessen observes the hypnotic ideal of gamification design, where the reward feedback for repetitive tasks will result in additive responses, and

over time, more and more daily events and professional activities will develop a sort of virtual ‘achievement layer’ that primarily reflects gamers’ abilities to fulfil their desire to click buttons, remain distracted, follow guidelines, achieve top scores, and make it to the next level. (2014, 260)

In the scenario of what Tiessen calls future over-run by gamification, players’ actions are oriented towards quantified achievements and are driven by the reward sensations such achievements generate. Consequently, their decision-making is usually confined to the predetermined boundaries set by the game or the gamified app. Moreover, the loss of agency for thinking and imagining otherwise goes hand in hand with the exploitation of affective labour. As Jamie Woodcock and Mark R. Johnson write, gamification captures play ‘in the pursuit of neoliberal rationalization and the managerial optimization of working life and labour’ (2018, 542).

These studies shed light on how gamification combines habituation with reward, further reinforcing the binary system of valuation. How then might the pedagogical capacities of gamification be utilised not to foreclose, but to speculatively imagine, futures anew, and to understand and live the present differently? To address this question, I turn next to the binary logic of game and the concept of experimental games.

The Binary Logic of Game and Experimentation

In his recent book Game: Animals, Video Games and Humanity, Tom Tyler (2022) provides a post-anthropocentric account of game that questions the prevalent tendency to treat animals as targets and objects of games, or mere disposable entities. Tyler identifies and elaborates upon three layers of connotations of game. First, game is a form of past time, an entertainment, that may or may not be digitally mediated. The key features of game include rules of playing structured by an either/or logic, an objective of playing that often takes the form of winning or losing, and a feedback system (Salen and Zimmerman 2003), which is an embodied and affective correspondence/comparison between the players’ inputs and the game, that is made more palpable and bodily felt in recent years with the implementation of haptics. The completion of a game often entails a combination of skill and luck.

Second, animals are the other of game. As Tyler writes,

during the late Middle Ages, the term came to be associated with that particular kind of hunting, the ‘chasing, catching and killing animals, which is to say hunting, and was used to refer specifically to those wild beasts who were the hunter’s quarry’ (2022, 2)

It is perhaps not a coincidence that one of the first games released by Nintendo in 1980s is called Duck Hunt. In the game, the players use a moulded plastic pistol to shoot fast flying ducks on the screen. It follows then that the argument that games are anthropo-normative concerns not simply how games centre on human subjects, but how the objectification of and the violence towards animals are internal to, and irreducible elements of, the form and logic of game. Significantly, a growing number of games are now designed to cultivate care of and empathy towards animals. They achieve this by using animals as game characters and/or by integrating the unique physical characteristics, sensory abilities and experiences of animals into the gameplay (Caracciolo 2021; Chang 2019). However, the question remains as to how and to what extent games might enable transformation of the anthropo-normative valuation if their very form and logic are binary and oppositional.

Importantly, Tyler suggests reimagining game via its the third connotation, that is ‘the disposition or attitude of those ready and willing to try something new or challenging’ (2022, 5). Tyler uses one episode of the TV series Sarah & Duck to illustrate this point. Duck and Sarah – a seven-year-old girl – are friends. In this episode, they come up with an alternative way to play a computer game that is not meant for ducks, because ‘[b]eak and wing are ill-suited to the computer keyboard’ (Tyler 2022, 4). As Tyler describes ‘Sarah herself becomes Duck’s avatar: he sits on her head, and controls her movement with deft taps of his wings and feet to indicate left and right, forward and so on’ (2022, 4). For Tyler, playing game differently entails refusing to refuse its binary logic. This means not simply turning the object of play into the gaming subject, or making the loser the winner, or shifting from the position of defence to attack. Instead, it could take the form of playing like a loser, or latently adopting vegan value as the lens, structure, logic and orientation of play and critique.

The possibility of enacting alternative ways of playing within a game speaks of its experimental nature. The key features of experimentation include: First, the construction of a scenario with predefined hypothesis informed by a linear notion of cause and effect, a controlled environment with a set of variables that can be either tested or studied, and a set of rules and protocols that define the spatial and temporal scale and process of the experiment; Second, these scenarios and environments engender a sense of immersion for the experimental subjects; Third, the goal of experiments or experimental approaches more broadly is to innovate through trial-and-error. In fact, failures and losses are essential features of experiment, because they are seen to testify to the value and credibility of the innovation. ³ Moreover, the risk of failing intensifies the gimmick and the spectacle of the experiment (Ngai 2020).

Experiment, however, is not neutral. In their introduction to the recently edited volume Methodologies of Affective Experiment, Kundsen, Krogh, and Stage (2022) observe the coloniality of experiment both in terms of its historicity and its contemporary application. As Kundsen, Krogh, and Stage (2022) note, the emphasis on innovation and the newness of experimental science was emergent in the European colonial practices of exploring new territories. Moreover, the experimental subjects are often the bodies who are seen as the disposable other ‘such as prisoners, prostitutes, orphans, people with disabilities, mentally ill, hospital patients, slaves and the colonised’ (Kundsen, Krogh, and Stage 2022, 10). For example, the Danish racialised housing politics – a social welfare experiment - that began in 2010 targeted large groups of minority-religious and minority-cultural groups, who were forced to move away from their home and their social networks.

Experimentation is applied across a wide array of fields including science and technology, literature and art, business, and social interactions. The history of gamification is closely tied to the ascendence of experimentation as a method of knowledge production and as a social and cultural form. As Jagoda shows, gamification is a specific economic, political and cultural paradigm that is shaped by four interlinked contexts: ‘the economic method of game theory, the world-building program of neoliberalism, the theories and applications of behavioural economics, and the rise of video games as a media form’ (2020, 45). Experiment situates at the intersection of these paradigms. It follows then that ‘games can be understood as experimental in ways that accord with both earlier experimental art forms (such as the modernist novel or avant-garde cinema) and with forms of scientific hypothesis testing (such as the randomised controlled trial)’ (2020, 36).

More specifically, games can be seen as an experimental technique from the following three perspectives. First, it cultivates the neoliberal rationality of competition and the entrepreneur subject, who must continue to work, even when unemployed, to ‘maintain a competitive edge and sharpen an appetite for victory’ (Jagoda 2020, 22; see also Adkins 2018). Second, it provides the form and technique for the experimental logic of problem-solving. Puzzle games such as Candy Crush ‘invites the player to reverse engineer the designer’s algorithm and solve the problem of each level’s puzzle’ (Jagoda 2020, 255). The genre of ‘serious games’ is said to support learning and solve complex social and political problems, ranging from ‘the spread of emerging infectious diseases (e.g. Plague Inc.) to refugee crises (e.g. Darfur is dying) to political conflict (e.g. Peacemaker) to corporate business practices (e.g. McDonald’s Video Game)’ (Jagoda 2020, 43). Third, game contains within it the desire and possibility to experiment and to play, differently.

Jagoda proposes a notion of experimental game as problem-making rather than problem-solving, where making ‘a problem means to remain open to values, worldviews, criteria for success or failure, or ways of living that might not be available at the outset of a creative process’ and therefore ‘cannot seek primarily to manipulate possibly for a predetermined end’ (2020, 256). In a similar vein, Knudsen et al. suggest that experimentation could translate ‘methodologically into creative, ludic or spontaneous manners of trying something out or into (e.g. everyday) practices of trial-and-error in which the process itself is prioritised over the formulation of predefined results’ (2022, 14). It follows then that instead of foreclosing futures based on prescriptive framing of the problems and how to solve them, experiment could be more processual and open-ended. For both Knudsen et al. and Jagoda, affect is key to the experimental potential of experiment. It affords expression of and insights into the contingent, embodied, and more-than-human relationalities that challenge the binary anthropo-normative system of valuation and decentre the figure of the isolated and self-interested individual subject.

The following analysis of the making of Square Cat takes inspiration from the theorisation of experimental game as both a social and cultural phenomenon, and as a research method that ‘(1) intentionally craft milieus aimed at (re)presenting hitherto hidden or unnoticed aspects of the social world; (2) engage with unpredictability in non-linear (e.g. playful) ways; (3) imagine, test or in other ways give the future a provisional form’ (Kundsen, Krogh, and Stage 2022, 16). It contributes to the scholarly work of game and experimentation by further challenging the binary logic that underpins the strict division between problem-solving and problem-making and between prescriptive and open-ended futures. As I will show in the next section, experimental game as a feminist method of futures entails a fundamental reconfiguration of the logic of game in embodied and affective ways.

Designing a Greedy and Earth-devouring Cat

In 2019, I collaborated with Jonas Nyman, a game developer, to make Square Cat. On Google play store, the game’s description reads ‘An idle game where you are a cat that eats fish and breaks objects. You earn coins for eating fish and breaking objects. You can use these coins to unlock items for your cat to wear.’ Although I had no prior experience in developing games, I had been interested in learning game coding and design. I followed the news of the mobile game industry, especially the gamification of environment related issues. At the time of developing the game, I had taken beginner level courses on C# programming and on the Unity game engine, which is a game development tool especially popular among mobile game developers. Square Cat took three months to develop – design and coding – and launch. It has so far gotten 100 downloads. Jonas made the last update in April 2020 that included new items that could be purchased in the game. In preparation for making the game, we played a couple of trendy idle games to understand what made them fun and addictive. We also watched tutorials to learn the algorithm for calculating incremental progression and discussed the game play and game characters. I learned to make some of the game art and practiced coding the cat’s movement. In the following section, I approach the making of the game as a feminist experiment, taking inspiration from the three perspectives proposed by Knudsen et al.

(Re)Presenting (Un)Recognised Aspects of the Social World

My analysis draws on but also slightly differentiates from Knudsen et al.’s in the sense that it does not only focus on revealing the otherwise unnoticed or inaccessible phenomenon. The strict division between accessible and inaccessible, noticed and unnoticed, is untenable in the case presented here. The mechanics of repetition and reward feedback of idle games are sensed through embodied process of habituation and in fact often expected and demanded by players, even if they could become unnoticed during the process of play. The issue of environmental degradation has gained significant attention in recent years, and yet often perceived as distant. The issue here is then not simply about gamifying and representing what goes unnoticed in the social world, but about how to experiment with these ambiguities and the ambivalent affects they generate.⁴ Following Susanna Paasonen, I understand working with ambiguities to mean ‘holding on to mutually conflicting meanings and impacts without doing away with irreconcilable differences and tensions that cut through them’ (2023, 86). This approach, as I show next, allows for gaming the game.

My objective in learning to make Square Cat is two-fold. First, I want to understand the logic and mechanics of idle games, and the socio-economic and cultural changes this genre of game reflects and responds to. I have been curious about the popularity of idle games. It seems counter-intuitive to play a game that requires so little, if at all, play. Playing idle game does not necessitate any technique or strategy. Actions such as clicking and tapping in these games are often devoid of strategic thinking and can be easily automated in most idle game titles. These games nudge players to keep playing by rendering reward and progression default. Learning to make an idle game provides first-hand understanding in how the game mechanics are produced and designed. Second, I am interested in the entire game development process. Before deciding the theme and game play, I explored the app store to get a better sense of the elements that make a game attractive and appealing for players. In many ways, game development is always an inter-subjective process. As the developer, researcher and participant of the experiment, I assume multiple roles – both that of the player and the developer. In intertwining various issues such as the manipulation and monetisation of attention and boredom in games (Liu 2020), the environmental crisis, and the asset-driven logic of accumulation of late capitalism, my intention is to latently mobilise a feminist lens that quietly reshape the logic of game. That is, rather than simply attacking or defending, I aim to engage the player, including myself, in a way that encourages alternative interpretations of the social world that Square Cat represents. Through this process, it may be possible to envision and explore different futures.

Square Cat features a cat that cycles through a process of jumping, eating fish, demolishing objects, collecting coins, purchasing more objects to destroy (see Figure 1), buying power-up items and accessories, and collecting more coins. The cat grows bigger in this process. In Square Cat, coins are easily obtained by devouring fish and demolishing objects. As the cat jumps up and down, it eats fish. And as it lands, it causes damages to the objects until they are destroyed. To make the cat jump, players only need to tap on the screen, with faster tapping resulting in quicker jumps. Fish are automatically spawned, while objects can be purchased using coins.

Figure 1. Objects that can be purchased in the game.

To accelerate the process, players can utilise their accumulated coins to buy power-up items, one of which is the fish magnet, as shown in Figure 2. Once activated, the fish magnet enables the cat to consume more fish in a single jump. Its power-up effects persist for 15 minutes at a time. Another type of power-up item falls under the category of bodily accessories, exemplified in Figure 3. These accessories encompass various clothing, wigs, hats, shoes and glasses, each conferring a specific power-up effect. For instance, the cap displayed in Figure 3 boosts the damage caused by each jump, thereby reducing the time required to damage objects and generate coins. Alternatively, players may choose not to play the game as coins accumulate automatically while they are offline. The game app will send notifications notifying the player about the pending reward and expressing the cat’s longing for their return. Upon resuming the game, players are informed about the amount of unclaimed coins awaiting their collection (see Figure 4).

Figure 2. Fish magnet power-up.

Figure 3. Accessories.

Figure 4. Players are rewarded for returning to the game.

Square cat simulates the asset-driven logic of capitalism. The game character – the cat – that represents the player, is simultaneously an entrepreneur and an asset – the subject and the object of investment. It enhances its size, appearances and power through practices of consumption – eating fish, buying accessories, objects and power-up items – and destruction. In the logic of asset economies, ‘asset appreciation (i.e. balance sheet expansion) interacts in a mutually reinforcing way with the ability to borrow, leverage and make new investments’ (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020, 22). However, Square Cat is not a faithful representation of late capitalism, but a feminist parody that effectively exposes and critiques its destructive and oppressive nature, as well as the inherent ambiguities within it. The game serves as a critical commentary on the prevailing model of economic growth that is conditioned upon and leads to excessive consumption and environmental destruction. The embodied sensation of repetitious tapping visually translates into jumps, ingestions, destructions and the cat’s increasingly enlarged body. The game makes the connection between the idle game mechanics, the nudging techniques, the asset-driven logic of contemporary capitalism, as well as the environment crisis, palpable to the player.

Furthermore, the repetitive and circuitous process in Square Cat provides a tangible experience of the affective temporality specific to late capitalism, which could be best described as ‘frenetic inactivity’ or ‘non-stop inertia’ (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020, 74–75). The jumps, feasts and destruction occur in the same jump, mindlessly and chaotically, yet rhythmically. This induces a sense of boredom and passivity since there are no alternatives to playing the game other than continuing to make the cat jump. And yet, the immediate reward feedback from eating fish and demolishing objects could also generate pleasure and excitement for the player.

Instead of creating new gaming rhythms and habits, Square Cat experiments with the existing idle game mechanics. It echoes Carolyn Pedwell’s assertion that, ‘current tendencies and forms of habituation are precisely what need to be felt, appreciated, and reflected upon if we are to approach affirmative transformation’ (2017, 87; emphasis in original). In making visible and bodily felt the linkage between the mechanics of repetition and reward feedback, the specific workings of late capitalism, its affective and temporal registers, as well as its impact on the environment, Square Cat embeds the player’s experience of and desire for play of in broader societal, political-economic and environmental relations.

However, Square Cat not only represents these aspects of the social world, but also challenges them by experimenting with and dramatising the logic of idle game – accumulation as the means and the end. Unlike other idle games, Square Cat leaves out features such as leaderboards that visualise competition and makes achievements and progress in a game feel more engaging and meaningful. Leaderboards engender a social atmosphere even in single-player games where the player competes only with game characters. Competition adds a sense of win-and-lose to idle games where typical forms of loss such as the death of game characters or the failure to level up are not available.

Instead, Square Cat only demonstrates progression through the increase in the amount of collected coins and in the size of the cat. It deliberately lays bare the fact that the purpose for collecting coins is simply to get more coins. It does not offer any story to justify the cat’s need to endlessly grow and destroy objects, nor any features or additional game characters that, incentivise players to keep playing and returning to the game. Although buying objects and accessories might initially seem fun, they would become repetitive and unavailing over time. In so doing, Square Cat also renders ambiguous the reward of accumulation by showing that there is nothing to be lost and no possibility of losing. It invites players to pause, to hesitate and to wonder, even as they are mindlessly tapping away, why playing at all.

Additionally, Square Cat dramatises the logic of accumulation by making the choice of game items irrelevant for the outcome. It is typically recommended to create a clear sense of differential in return between the amount of game currency spent in a purchase (in relation to the total game currency accumulated) and the power-up capacity of the item (in relation to other items). In Square Cat, it becomes evident that the choice of the power-up items does not impact the gameplay significantly, as coins and fish are abundant and easily collected.

By pushing the logic of idle games to the extreme, Square Cat invites players to experience the game in various ways. They may find relaxation in the easy gameplay, enjoy the cuteness of the game character and items or appreciate the cat destroying objects symbolising the violence of humanity. Conversely, players may feel indifferent and bored towards rewards, realising that their choices are insignificant and ultimately confined by the game’s design. They may even laugh at the simple mechanics and find playing the game a waste of time. As I show next, these ambivalent responses are crucial for feminist approaches to experimenting with gamification, as they open up avenues for exploring different futures.

Non-Linear and Unpredictable and Possibilities for Different Futures

The game begins at the end, or in the beginning, or perhaps somewhere in the middle. In the opening scene, players are greeted with a black screen. As the camera zooms out, a cat’s anus comes into view. And then it becomes clear that the cat is floating in the space. What happened? How did the cat get there? Initially, my idea was to create a story about a cat that destroying everything on earth, driven by its insatiable hunger for fish and desire for destruction. Its only goal is to eat fish, demolish objects and collect coins which allows it to buy more objects to destroy. The cat would grow larger and larger until it floats in space, and the earth recedes to the background and eventually disappears (see Figure 5). The opening would also be the end of the game. However, the lack of description and clarification of the opening scene allows for different interpretation. Some may see it as an origin story of an alien cat visiting earth, while others might view it as an interlude where the cat ventures to other planets after wreaking havoc on earth. There is also the possibility that some players may not understand the point of the scene or find it irrelevant or unimportant.

Figure 5. The cat floats in space.

The game’s logic and mechanics revolve around repetitive and continuous accumulation of coins. However, it does not restrict the game to a singular timeline or storyline. Players are invited to interpret and imagine different narratives and temporalities. The design of the cat character and the objects available for purchase and destruction adds to the game’s ambiguity and evokes ambivalent affects. Cats are generally perceived cute, which makes them popular choices for mobile game characters. The square cat’s cuteness stems not only from its big eyes, outfits and accessories, but also its strange shape and appearance – square head, small body, wide-open eyes, and short and round limbs – and its clumsy and wobbly jumps. As Sianne Ngai writes, ‘Cute is in fact an aesthetic “of” or “about” minorness – or what is generally perceived to be diminutive, subordinate, trivial, and above all, unthreatening’ (2022, 17). For feminist analysis, cuteness holds significance due to its association with the feminine, the racialised and the powerless.

Crucially, cuteness is ambivalent. It can be both a dismissive and complimentary judgement. It can also cutify the cutifier. As Ngai explains,

while all aesthetic categories conjoin our recognition of a relatively codified experience to an equally conventional speech act, cuteness does so in a particularly revealing way: our judgement ends up mimicking the appearance it evaluates, collapsing the distance between object and subject. (2022, 20)

The ambiguity of cuteness generates contradictory affective responses such as ‘attraction and repulsion, tenderness and aggression, compassion and contempt’ (Ngai 2022, 22).

Playing as the square cat looks and feels cute. Unlike simulation games that imitate animals’ movements or utilise their unique behaviour or senses to structure the game play, Square Cat takes an anthropomorphic approach that feels peculiar. The square-faced cat does not move like a cat. Its jumps are rigid, limited to the directions of up and down, left and right. Its limbs do not move. And its landing lacks balance. Its eyes remain fixed, unblinking and its facial expression remains unchanged. When dressed in accessories such as a mask, a cape and a bow tie, the cat becomes simultaneously more and less cat-like and more and less human. Its communication with the player further confounds its identity. For instance, when offline, players receive notifications that read: ‘Meow, I have missed you.’

Players may initially find it endearing to see a square-faced and small-bodied cat devouring fish and destroys a variety of objects ranging from pumpkins to infrastructures that are seen to testify to the exceptional condition of the human status, such as power plants, TV, war machines, as shown in Figure 6. However, they soon discover that the cuteness is monstrous – a repetitive cycle of consumption, destruction and accumulation. The cat’s oscillation between powerful and powerless elicits conflicting responses. Players may perceive the cat as an object of care, control and identification, but they may also find themselves subject to the cat’s demands. Its jumps require repetitive clicking and tapping that become players’ habituated bodily movements, or attentive or inactive waiting when the clicks are automated. players may feel numb, scared, rewarded, joyous and bored, at the same time. The cutest element of the cat is its role as an English-speaking, resource-hungry and isolated arbiter (and saviour?) of earth, that simultaneously performs, resists and experiments with the binary logic of (idle) games, the asset-driven logic of contemporary capitalism and the underpinning anthropo-normative system of valuation.

Figure 6. Objects that can be purchased in the game.

Conclusion: How to Game the Game

Gamification has been widely implemented for sharing knowledge about, making sense of and realising futures. While it is important to make visible how gamification is used as a new form of behaviour governance and marketing tool that pre-empt futures, this article argues that critiquing is not enough. In so far as gamification techniques are already shaping everyday lived practices, it is crucial to consider how gamification could be mobilised as a feminist method of futures. To paraphrase Pedwell (2017), although gamification requires specialist knowledge and expertise, it cannot be left to the purview of experts such as game developers. The experimentation with making Square Cat is an attempt to game the game, that is, to make gamification experimental, all the while recognising that it has been and continues to serve exploitative and oppressive ends.

Rather than generating new habits of play, Square Cat experiments with the repetition and reward feedback mechanics of idle games. It makes visible and bodily felt the ambiguous affective dynamics of the asset-driven logic of late capitalism, and how it shapes human-environment relations. In dramatising the logic of idle games, Square Cat provokes ambivalent responses that might allow for rethinking the present and in so doing imagining future anew. This however does not mean that it provides a final unambiguous solution. The cuteness of square cat troubles anthropo-normative lens. It reveals and revolts against capitalist accumulation, excessive consumption and environmental degradation. However, its growing size and power also ends up destroying the earth. Square Cat thus performs the ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011) and ‘suffering agency’ (Elliott 2018) of capitalist binary logic where the options available for understanding, making and surviving futures only contribute to ‘further stunt our growth and flourishing’ (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020, 75).

As I have tried to show by thinking game and experiment through each other, a radical transformation of gamification necessitates reworking the binary logic and its anthropo-normative system of valuation that shape the logic, form and content of game. The practice of learning to design and make an idle game offers up possibilities to rework – drawing on, engaging, troubling, refusing and transforming - its logic and mechanics. Instead of pitting problem-solving against problem-making, Square Cat performs and compels reflection on a set of all-too-familiar problems including the monetisation of attention and affect by games, the asset-driven late capitalism, environmental degradation, and their racialised, gendered and anthropo-normative implications. It parodies the embodied habituation of repetition and reward feedback, dramatises idle games’ structure of accumulation, and refuses its story of linear progress. In so doing, Square Cat experiments with and games the game. It asks players to entertain a form of play where the relation between winning and losing, subject and object, becomes confounded, and where futures are multiple even as the game’s beginning and ending seem to have been envisioned in advance.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://igda.org/news-archive/idle-tycoon-games-market-overview/; last accessed January 3, 2024.

2 https://mobilefreetoplay.com/idle-games-everything-you-need-to-know/; last accessed July 3, 2023.

3 There is much debate about the difference between the pragmatic and speculative approaches to experimentation. Key to their divergence is whether an experiment sets to solve a pre-defined problem or to frame the problem in alternative ways (Kaljonen et al. 2019). This article does not directly engage with this debate. While it recognises the difference between these approaches, it does not consider the distinction between the pre-defined and the speculative as simply oppositional nor fixed.

4 According to Susanna Paasonen, ‘Whereas the notion of ‘ambivalence’ communicates attitude and perception of those doing the interpretation – as in people having mixed feelings about this or that – the term ‘ambiguity’ is attached to the properties of things (media representations, material objects, cultural debates) and their default shiftiness in terms of meaning making’ (2023, 92). In this article, I consider both ambivalence and ambiguities as different perspectives of affective complexities through which the subject and object co-emerge. These two terms are therefore used interchangeably.