Elon Musk doesn’t just play video games—he lives them. He’s crafted a worldview where life is a conquest, every obstacle is a puzzle, and people are mere NPCs (Non-player characters).[1] This mindset now fuels his leadership at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he is speedrunning the U.S. government like it’s Factorio[2] on hard mode: slashing staff, hacking bureaucracy, and treating national infrastructure like a sandbox to break and rebuild. His guiding principle? Cut, tweak, dominate, repeat. Musk has bragged about drawing strategic insights from games like Polytopia, Factorio, and Elden Ring.[3] He even admitted to cheating in order to climb leaderboards in Path of Exile 2. Because for him, the only rule is to win. These aren’t fun facts about a quirky billionaire; they’re a warning signs. Musk is exporting a gamified mindset that sees conquest as creativity, and rules as optional.
But here’s the terrifying part: this isn’t a Musk invention. It’s Silicon Valley doctrine, born from decades of engineering culture shaped by gamified labor, competition, and a techno-fetish for efficiency. In my book Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm this gamified mindset, which is forged in the belly of the tech industry, is a tool of corporate control and has long been used to extract labor from engineers under the illusion of fun. Now, the system that governs tech firms is creeping into the state itself. Musk is no longer just managing Silicon Valley. He’s reprogramming power itself. In these dark times, Playing to Submission offers a rare glimpse into how power in tech firms is gamified, and how submission can be engineered through the seductive promise of play.
Squeezing Out Creativity
Play to Submission opens with a brutal paradox. In the age of informational capitalism, engineers are prized for their creativity—yet their labor is increasingly shaped by brutal intensity, endless iteration, and the logic of permanent beta. Crunch time, 100-hour work weeks, and work-life collapse are not exceptions but expectations. Musk’s glorification of pain-as-productivity is just a louder version of what tech culture has normalized for years.
So why do engineers put up with it?
Because they’ve been trained to see it as a game worth playing. My research reveals that many engineers don’t just work in games—they live by them. Their identities as gamers make them uniquely susceptible to corporate regimes that blur labor with play. Tech firms design environments that simulate game mechanics not to make work more enjoyable, but to transform passion into productivity and creativity. Engineers are seduced by quests, missions, rankings, and mythologies that turn suffering into progress and overwork into virtue.
These aren’t gimmicks. They’re tools of extraction. Just as industrialists once used songs and rituals to organize factory life, tech capitalists use narrative and fantasy to organize the digital shop floor. Engineers are drawn into characters, plots, and quests that turn every task into an adventure—and every success into a reason to work harder. To explain this dynamic, I build on the labor process tradition inaugurated by Michael Burawoy, a Chicago School labor ethnographer who described a game of “making-out” used on the manufacturing shop-floor to motivate competition between workers in a piece-rate system and drive high levels of production.
Gaming the System: How Labor Games Trap Engineers
Play to Submission marks an attempt to update Burawoy’s insights, highlighting a shift from a labor process defined by the rhythms and logic of a single game to one characterized by a multiplicity of games. Drawing from thirteen months of ethnographic work in Silicon Valley, my investigation advances labor game studies by documenting the development of a “field of games” that permeates every corner of engineers’ work-life. Via investment into the “field of games,” engineers’ “gamer subjectivity” is leveraged on the work-floor, contributing to their submission to workplace domination.
The book highlights four groups of labor games. Simulation games are integrated into core software development. Simulation games recreate heroic adventures where engineers “battle” bugs and “quest” for product launches. Every “scrum”[4] becomes a quest, every sprint a dungeon crawl. Racing games frame crisis response as time trials against machine failure. Crowdsourcing games invite engineers to “volunteer” extra time and skills to help develop its minimum viable products (MVPs)—camouflaging unpaid labor as self-directed play. Finally, pranking games approximate classic working-class humor and teasing. Engineers organize and patrol these pranking games in order to slay the “beast of monotony” in routine workplace tasks.
All these formats work precisely because they mirror the games Musk and his fellow tech elites adore—Factorio, Polytopia, and Elden Ring—where mastery is everything, and everything is a system to be conquered. But at work, the stakes are real. Engineers don’t feel forced to work overtime. They feel like they’re winning—until they’re not.
No Exit: When Play Becomes the Cage
Here’s where things get bleak. In this gamified system, there’s no off switch. The boundary between work and home collapses. Engineers’ leisure is absorbed into the production cycle. Their “gamer subjectivity”—creativity, crisis thinking, modding traits—is weaponized for constant innovation.
Once an escape from work, a way for engineers to disconnect from the space of production and replenish their energies, gaming now mirrors the pressures of production. The inevitable result is burnout.
One engineer I interviewed, Ben, had been a rising star at the firm I calls “Behemoth.” He walked away with a simple message: “I can’t do this anymore.” He wasn’t alone. Across my sixty-six interviews, the average tenure at Behemoth was just 1.88 years—far below the Silicon Valley average of 3.8. People burned out, broke down, or dropped out. The system was designed to exhaust them.
Yet many engineers remain complicit in their own exhaustion. Why? Because these games offer more than tasks—they offer identity, belonging, and the illusion of control. Winning inside the game brings prestige, status, and respect. Losing means irrelevance and invisibility. In a culture where self-worth is tied to performance, engineers keep playing even as the game devours them. That’s said, the true power of gamified labor lies not in coercion but in seduction. The system doesn’t force engineers to submit. It makes them want to.
The Future of Work
Playing to Submission isn’t just about tech workers. It’s about how game-based ideologies of domination are becoming the operating system of contemporary capitalism. From Musk’s DOGE state to gamified classrooms, fitness apps, and corporate dashboards, the logic is spreading: optimize yourself, conquer inefficiencies, play to win—or perish.
My ethnography is a warning. The lesson is clear: video games don’t merely reflect power, they rehearse it. Within their coded worlds, domination is rewarded, competition is glorified, and moral ambiguity is part of the design. As gamification invades into every corner of daily life—from the workplace to state government—it repackages control as fun, obedience as engagement. The longer we delay confronting this logic, the deeper it embeds. We must resist it before it becomes the new common sense.
[1] NPCs (non-player characters) refers to characters in a video game that are not controlled by players but by the game’s programming. They often serve narrative, functional, or atmospheric roles within the game world, such as quest givers, merchants, or background figures.
[2] Factorio is a simulation video game in which players construct and manage increasingly complex automated factories on an alien planet. Centered on relentless resource extraction, production line efficiency, and technological escalation, the game reflects and reinforces logics of industrial capitalism, often naturalizing extractivist and optimization-driven approaches to labor and the environment.
[3] Musk has often described his decision-making as influenced by video game logic. As reported in Fortune (“Elon Musk lives life like he’s playing a video game,” 2023. https://fortune.com/2023/09/12/elon-musk-biography-video-games-polytopia-life-lessons/). Polytopia is a war and empire-building game in which players expand territory, extract resources, and vie for domination. Elden Ring is a sprawling open-world role-playing game where players navigate a decaying universe through perseverance and combat, embodying an ethos of individual struggle and mastery.
[4] Scrum is a project management framework used in software development that breaks work into short, iterative cycles called “sprints” (typically lasting 1–2 weeks). Emphasizing flexibility, speed, and continuous feedback, Scrum reflects a broader shift toward agile, decentralized management in tech workplaces.
Read More
Wu, T. (2024). Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm. Temple University Press.
Author
Tongyu Wu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University specializing in the research of labor, organizations, information technology, migration, gender, and China studies