Unfortunately Golumbia passed away recently and is sorely missed. He explicitly states in the story that a game “without play” was not intended as a “sick burn” of any kind, and that he himself enjoyed these games. As a sometimes Minecraft player, I can for sure see there are indeed many elements of work within the game, as well as some necessity to create order and preserve oneself by securing shelter and resources. The joke “the children yearn for the mines” is a direct reference to this same observation, and Golumbia’s paper only shows this dynamic might be a good question to be concerned about. I don’t quite see where you are going with this claim that his conclusions are outdated, other than making a side point about changes in game genre conventions over the past decade.
“Play” and “not play” are far from value judgments, but rather fairly intense loaded terms that came out of the application of Husserlian logic to fields like Anthropology, History, Linguistics, and so on in a movement called Structuralism:
If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinity of a field cannot be
covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is,
language and a finite language—excludes totalization. This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is
to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these
infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an
inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something
missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions.(Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play)
So to take it back to the video game example, Minecraft is missing a strongly defined narrative where a JRPG has, to a much greater extent, a central narrative that binds the player into a story where there are few choices and a lot of work-like “grinding.”
The temptation and danger of AI is its conceptualization as the center of a narrowing marketing gimmick of hucksters.
It’s very good for this discussion that we compare modern era chattel slavery with the feudal arrangement of serfdom, and I am glad you brought this up. In the premodern Christian medieval context, slavery was all but completely forbidden, with most of slave trade in Europe taking place between the pagan fringe and the Islamic world in places like Dublin, which were set up to traffic peoples captured in these raids. This is in stark contrast to the systematic chattel slavery of colonial powers of the modern era, which purchased and utilized slaves in entrepreneurial schemes. The common controversy was between dehumanization by 18th century sciences and church insistence upon the humanity of other races. However, by the time of the 18th century the church had long deprecated its worldly functions and was often little more than a shattered and subservient arm of various nation states. Serfdom explicitly forbid the displacement of peoples, and while it certainly was a form of servitude it was not one that broke families or had a motivation in profits. It was closer to a protection racket than to ownership.
What hospitality really meant in practice is hard to reconstruct from texts, but perhaps the greatest exemplar of virtue in the medieval era is Saint Francis of Assisi. His innovation was an order which accepted the most extreme poverty in order to be closer to the glory of God. Your fearful phrase, “overwhelmed by beggars,” is a modern perspective, as being beggars indeed provided the Franciscans with a spotless reputation. Indeed, when Byzantium faced an overwhelming influx of poorly-prepared crusaders out of the West, the failure of their hospitality formed much of the enmity which would later lead to their becoming a target for invasion. There is no rule which says a value must be practical or fair, and indeed this virtue of hospitality did occasionally set off international conflict.
As for this “You have to include X and Y” type rhetoric, no, I don’t have to do what you say. Don’t be rude. I am trying to contrast Christendom, medieval arrangements and society, to The West and the development of increasingly secular nation states in the modern era. I will talk about Islam now because that is a striking example of how the sudden appearance of a religion with extreme emphasis on textual rather than oral tradition quickly generates a class of literate experts and clerics. Indeed, new textual traditions rapidly propelled natural philosophy and societal organization forward by advancing literacy. If religion really did cause “dark ages” as the industrial-era mythology suggests, one would expect the Islamic world to have plunged into idiocy rather than making so many advancements. If Christianity indeed held back science, then why was the church the primary organization dedicating resources to intellectual life throughout the middle ages?
The big fallacy is that the church could have held back science at a time when it didn’t even exist yet. At the time of Galileo, there was no “scientific method” and no literature rationalizing why or how such a non-existing concept might be useful. We don’t see the concept of a “scientific method” until the industrial era! How can the church hold back something which doesn’t yet exist? And then, when science does actually exist, this is an era in which the church has not had worldly power for centuries. They are long gone as an intellectual force! There is some dumb kind of knock-on effect where some religious people now feel the need to deny and hold back science, and it is fair to say that religious people in the industrial era have the desire to hold back science. But they simply don’t have the power anymore, they are no longer the center of learning.
It’s certainly true that we are more sophisticated than more religious societies of the past, however, the cause and effect relationship you are implying is utterly conventional. The only problem is that upon nearly every consideration of the actual history, it is utterly wrong.