On trains travelling in and out of British cities, it’s common to be confronted by a gallery of sorrowful portraits, peeping through the surface of ad posters. Kelly is distressed, John is abused, Samira is desperate. They need your help. But they don’t live in the same universe as you. Differently from the homeless person outside the station, or from the exploited migrant worker travelling next to you, their bodies live off the flow of digital data that springs from mobile phones worldwide. So grab yours NOW! By simply texting ‘life’, ‘feed’, ‘save’ to a phone number, you can restore their life-bars and improve the living conditions of these human tamagotchis. On the same phone on which you are playing Hay Day and Farmville, and by using very similar commands, you will be able to magically feed or shelter the virtual avatars Kelly, John, Samira, etc.
If this sounds like the description of a mediocre video game, it’s because it is. Gamification has been all the rage for years, and now it has reached the shores of charity campaigns. It goes without saying that a great number of charities provide very useful help to people in need, and it would be unfair to deride their efforts. Yet, their recent communication campaigns reveal something rotten at the heart both of the charity system, and of our own, contemporary reality-system.
Charities are not, and never were, the only possible solution to human suffering. Indeed, they should be considered as opposed to their natural alternative: politics. It is not a coincidence that in these twilight years of the welfare state, under the Tory moon, charities have taken an increasingly crucial role in social life. The transition from politics-based welfare to the charity system is not without larger consequences, and the recent turn towards ‘gaming-charity’ is the clearest example of this.
Whilst at the foundation of the welfare system was the idea that humans could cooperate to make each others’ lives as rich and pleasant as possible, the charity-system sees such cooperation as ontologically impossible. If the human protagonists of the welfare system were all substantially equal to each other, the charity system divides the world between two irredeemably different races. There are those who Have and those who Have Not, and the Haves can redeem themselves by throwing some spare change to their inferiors. This separation reaches its purest level in the new form of gaming-charity: while the Haves are really existing human beings, their inferiors become little more than tearful avatars. The Haves are subjects, the Have Nots are objects. According to this vision, the interaction between these two races is supposed to be the same as that between the gamer and the little furry creatures that populate Virtual Pet Games. Although these imaginary pets don’t really exist, they still need virtual care not to vanish entirely. If they vanish, the game is over – and that would be sad.
This shift in perspective reaches far beyond the field of charity. How can we ever create a society based on mutual support, if those with whom we share our world are not even made of the same stuff as we are? Clearly, it would be ridiculous to consider engaging in politics with barely-existing, virtual avatars. Unless, of course, we created them as ghostly enemies and we switched genre of video game: something between the strategy series Civilization, Nigel Farage’s racist construction of ‘the immigrants’, and David Cameron’s ‘feral underclasses’.
Indeed, we could say that life itself is a game, or as the ancients said, a theatre play to which we take part for a while. Yet, we still have a chance to decide the nature of this game. As soon as we cease to recognise each other as fellow players, and begin to treat our fellow humans as virtual objects, we find ourselves stuck in the anxious solitude of a Tetris match. A game we cannot win, but only struggle through, until the inevitable defeat.
Changing the nature of the game is the job of politics and of philosophy, but it is also something that we can do every day, even in our own private lives. First of all, by realising that the real Kelly, John and Samira are millions of impoverished and exploited humans with whom we can create networks of mutual support and join forces in a struggle for emancipation.
