Review: Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism

Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism is the first full-length book by Alfie Bown, editor of the excellent Everyday Analysis website and its books of compiled articles. It is very typical of the site’s tone, mixing the seemingly trivial with critical theory and evaluating the things that we do without thinking.

The book explores the implications of different types of enjoyment, and argues that no type of enjoyment, however trivial it may seem, is truly mindless. Bown argues that all enjoyment is in some way political, and goes on to look at Game of Thrones, Gangnam Style and Football Manager through this lens of critical theory.

The book gives an interesting insight into the politics of enjoyment, and it is so much a testament to the strength of its arguments that I now have to think about what I mean by ‘enjoy’ before saying that I’ve enjoyed something.

In Enjoying It all enjoyment is meaningful to the enjoyer, even that which seems to be nothing more than a pointless distraction. Applications such as Candy Crush, for example, are enjoyed because they seem so trivial, which then makes the work that we are eschewing, in favour of messing around on our phones, seem worthwhile in comparison. Candy Crush, then, is a way of coping with the lack of fulfilment we receive from our work, but Enjoying It is more than just a finger-wagging criticism of these capitalist tools designed to help us put up with the jobs we dislike.

One of the book’s strengths is that Bown himself seems to be a fan of these less highbrow pursuits he subjects to his analysis. He discusses Football Manager as if he wants to understand the nature of his own obsession, rather than use it to keep the reader on board during his discussions of Freud. For example, one chapter is about the problems with ideas of highbrow and lowbrow enjoyment, and Bown practices what he preaches here by seeming to enjoy both in equal measure.

Enjoying It is an interesting read and it more than matches the depth and quality of analysis on the Everyday Analysis website. I am only slightly troubled by one thing: the book’s structure.

The first chapter features possibly the most in-depth critical theory in the book, which feels like a little too much too soon. The studies of Deleuze and Lyotard would have been better placed if they were incorporated into later chapters, allowing the analysis of Candy Crush and Game of Thrones to gradually reach critical theory rather than working in the other direction.

This is only a small problem, though, as the case studies are almost as entertaining as the rest of the book, which pursues the Everyday Analysis project but adds even more depth to its ideas.

Everyday Analysis focuses on that which we do without thinking, but Enjoying It focuses on that which we intend to do without thinking. It suggests that Candy Crush and Football Manager are not enjoyed quite as mindlessly as we realise, or even as mindlessly as we want to believe.

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