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The traditional role of the game, once deprived of a pedagogic, let alone sacral, function, has been to waste time.   Having to gamble is the fate imposed on those who do not labor: when all time is measured as labor time, then true leisure (rather than the recreation time of the laborer) is possible only as the negation of every positive form of productivity. The chance accumulation of money is the paradoxical compensation for having nothing to do in life but waste time.  Being exposed, in the most intimate fabric of existence, to mere fortune marks the exclusion from the realm of the living.  And perhaps one could even say that every idea of happiness as consequence or reward is the vision of estrangement from the true pleasures of the times, which remain in a certain way unimaginable.

But for quite some time, the game has done something different: it makes time.  The principle reward is “staying in the game” — gaining the maximum playtime from a single quarter.  The parlor has been replaced by the arcade: that odd space. at once natural and unnatural, in which the waste of time becomes its birth. One no longer seeks to waste time, but to earn the right, through the confluence of luck and skill (pinball is exemplary in this regard), to waste more and more time.  The time that one can waste is itself earned, while the value, if purely symbolic, of this earned, wasted time is secured by way of a hyperbolic accumulation of points.

Death has not been banished from the world of the arcade: only quantitative loss. Death is inevitable, but it is no less inevitable that one will die with a positive balance sheet. Production and consumption, in this way, have been sundered. Labor time appears as joy of making time and making money — as a pure excrescence on the consumptive cycle of life.