by Michael Fleisch
about Michael Fleisch
Michael Fleisch is a managing member of Dpict, a member of The Value Web, a designer, a filmmaker, and a writer. He provides graphic facilitation and collaboration design services to clients all over the world, including the World Economic Forum and the Global Environment Facility, and has increasingly focused on supporting a movement to safeguard the Global Commons. In 2010, he founded Chase Public in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has co-authored several papers on video games and remains a cultural contributor to Hilobrow.com. Mike is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and wishes his wife and three sons could travel with him.
Borderlands
Abstract: Matthew Thomas Payne and Michael Fleisch argue that the inventory management at the heart of the Borderlands series reflects capitalism’s ritual logic by celebrating the pleasures of maximizing wealth and commodity accumulation. Furthermore, the ways in which players both follow and break the games’ rules of exchange reveal that capitalism is itself an uneven and exploitative gamified system.