The smurfological imagination

From our revolutionary smurf

Six months into university, I sought help.

“Smurfs Village is taking over my life,” I confessed. My therapist nodded ever so kindly. “I haven’t been sleeping for the past two months. I’m always on my phone. Harvesting crops. Planting more crops. Changing my time zone so I could harvest those immediately, I’ve been getting these Smurf-related nightmares…” so the session went.

I downloaded Smurfs Village — a mobile farming and village-building game for players aged 4-plus — with a clinical mindset. I was emulating methodology from Professor Bonnie A. Nardi’s book, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. For my sociology paper at Yale University under Professor Julia Adams, I was “investigating” the “capitalist-Marxist duality and the manifestation of creativity and individuality through self-directed world-constructive gameplay.” But then I was just kidding myself — I was simply obsessed with the game.

Upon deep, sociological reflection, I realized that Smurfs Village stages a fascinating confrontation between capitalist and Marxist worldviews. Smurf-world is modelled as a Marxist utopia (just wait, I’ll defend this point later).

However, as a player embodying what Max Weber describes as “the spirit of capitalism,” I brought a ferocity into playing the idyllic farming game that surprised even myself. I began asking myself: why do I try to maximize the productivity of my Smurfs in a game that’s supposed to be an escape from the capitalist nature of work? If what Weber calls the “iron cage of capitalism,” shapes even my attitude towards leisure, how can we ever escape?

Building Marx’s Paradise — One Mushroom Hut at a Time

Before I make the case for Smurfs Village as the epitome of a Marxist utopia, I’d like to help you visualize this world. Below are screen-captures of four Smurfettlements I created, in the Magic Grove, Mountain, Planet Swoof, and Village, respectively.

Consider this. In the world of Smurfs, all farmland is communal. Smurfs have no use for money. Dressed in near-identical work-pants, Smurfs often say lines like “Boy am I glad to get back to work! When can I start?” According to Papa Smurf, the village elder, it is within the innate nature of a Smurf to love working. Even Grouchy Smurf, who hates everything, specifically hates being unemployed. Each Smurf works according to his ability, and mushroom huts are provided to each Smurf according to his need.

While Marx’s critics can scoff at his idealism about human nature, claiming that “upon the abolition of private property all work will cease and universal laziness will overtake humanity,” this is by nature will not be the case for Smurfs. You cannot convince me that Smurfs Village is not the embodiment of a Marxist fantasy — the fact that Papa Smurf sports a beard nearly identical to Karl Marx’s is only the cherry on top.

Beyond surface-level similarities, Smurfs Village addresses key Marxist critiques of late-stage capitalism. I remember a particularly striking line from The Communist Manifesto, “the bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.” The market system has converted the doctor, the musician, the teacher, and the scientist into paid wage-laborers.

Smurfs Village addresses this capitalistic critique. Occupations in the game are held by “Specialty Smurfs.” Each professional niche is inhabited by exactly one specialized Smurf. Greedy Smurf is the village baker, Miner Smurf mines all the ores, Painter Smurf paints all the mushroom huts, and Reporter Smurf reports all the news. In philosopher Marshall Berman’s book, All that is Solid Melts into Air, he emphasizes that modern artists, intellectuals, and professionals, “must compete (often brutally and unscrupulously) for the privilege of being bought, simply in order to go on with their work.” When even creative work is proletarianized, and we all just work to sell ourselves piecemeal. But in Smurfs village, the halo around work remains very much intact. The game reflects our wish for work to be sacred again, for jobs to be equal again, and for money to be irrelevant for once. Yet it isn’t.

Enter the Capitalist Player

Smurfs Village was created to make money. Of course it is — although it’s free to play, its in-game purchases exploit human impatience. The game’s main money-making scheme is Smurfberries, magical berries that can be bought for real money (in packages for as much as $49.99) to speed up the growth of crops and the progress of the game.

Former players, you may have thought of this question already. If Smurfs don't use money, why are there coins in the game? Indeed, the game allows players to put Smurfs “to work” (planting crops, building huts, and going on quests) to earn coins and XP (experience points). In order to level up and purchase decorations for my village, I began strategizing about how I could maximize profit from my Smurfy labor force. Even when capital isn’t tangible, I still wanted to accumulate it.

Marx observed that “one fact is common to all past ages... the exploitation of one part of society by the other.” Through farming, a Smurf’s time is the player’s currency. The player's time, through ad revenue, is the game-makers’ currency. The player effectively imposes a wage-labor system on the Smurfs (although they are blissfully unaware), and time is parceled into growing slots. Through the player’s management of Smurfy tasks, she or he must also parcel their time (in the real world for harvesting and planting) to maximize profit accordingly. I find myself as the de-facto bourgeoisie, finding ways to exploit Smurf labor.

Even in Smurf-world, Berman’s claim about the nature of capitalism seems to hold: “the only activity that really means anything to its members is making money, accumulating capital, piling up surplus value, all their enterprise are merely means to this end.” The last thing I wanted to do is replicate the iron bars of capitalism within my village — yet, I did.

Replicating the Iron Cage of Capitalism

You may have been wondering why I’ve been describing capitalistic society as an “iron cage.” Max Weber gets the credit — the “iron cage of capitalism” is one of his most influential contributions to sociology, first appearing in his book, The Protestant Work Ethic. He explores why capitalism was so uniquely successful in America, eventually crediting our (yes, dear reader, I am American) Protestant faith, a religion that saw worldly success as a sign of divine predestination.

Then, the capitalist system started evolving a culture of its own, outgrowing its Protestant beginnings. A culture valuing overwork and profit becomes a cage when it constrains our freedom to develop into full individuals. I remembered the adults in my life molding my dreams into jobs that would earn me a high salary. Talents that were not marketable were not developed. It is not their fault––they have grown up in the iron cage, one that is so omnipresent that they couldn’t even see the bars. The iron cage of capitalism prevents us from developing into full individuality, and “if Marx is fetishistic about anything,” Marshall Berman argues, “it is not work and production but rather the far more complex and comprehensive ideal of development.”

At a café at Yale, I once overheard an undergraduate student bemoaning to her date that though the insights she gained from her humanities seminars were life-changing, they “are useless because they aren’t marketable.” Dear reader, I wish I made this up. In this absurd world, I find myself wanting, like Marx, a version of reality where we aren’t stunted in our upbringing to develop only the skills and talents that are marketable.

It was as if Smurfs Village heard that wish. A society without money, where Smurfs can just be Lazy, Grouchy, or Jokey without being punished for unproductivity, was made for me. And yet by playing the game, I brought the spirit of capitalism into Smurfs village. I imported what historian E.P. Thompson called the “holy equation of capitalism,” time equals money. Time is money.

Time is Money: Why We Desire Productivity, Even in Leisure

For a long time, I used Smurfs Village, ironically, as a productivity timer. Before I would start an assignment, I would gauge how much time it would take. I would then chose a crop with a harvest timeline that matches the length of my task. For my macroeconomics problem set, I would plant 1-hour strawberry crops. To get ready in the morning, I planted 30-minute blackberries. 8-hour tomatoes for sleeping, 15-minute cucumbers for chores, 2-hour brussels sprouts for brunch, and 3-hour peas to savor my sociology readings. Even a game that is made to consume free time can be repurposed as a mechanism to parcelize productivity. The difference between using crops to time my productivity rather than my Google Calendar is that my Smurfs would be productive with me––and I would be rewarded with money and XP after every task completion

Within Smurfs Village, I felt continuity in my progress. In contrast, my real-life progress rarely moved with perfect linearity as I faced setbacks, writer’s block, and similar imperfections. However, in Smurfs Village, there were rarely significant setbacks. No matter what kind of “productive activity” I did, my experience bar would always go up. And I liked that.

But why did the designers of Smurfs Village make farming and mini-games that felt like work? And why did I like it? I was never fond of real-life farming––and now I catch myself setting alarms to wake up in the middle of the night to harvest virtual corn. The monotonous, repetitive task of planting, tapping, harvesting, counting the hours between each harvest, and immediately replanting certainly feels like work.In fact, I was shocked to find entire Smurfs Village WikiForum pages where veteran players create tables and graphs of complex cost-benefit analyses tailored towards maximizing coins, XP when farming, discounting for the “hassle cost” of planting and harvesting, with evaluations of each crop’s “fit” for each player’s real-life schedule.

According to the forum, planting strategies are divided into “Overnight Crops” (“if you’re going to bed and will check your village when you wake up”), “School Day” (if you’re an elementary/middle/high school student and have not figured out a way to play Smurfs during the school day”), and “Active Player” (when you have a lot of free time to grow and harvest 2 or 3-hour crops, but “don’t really want to arrange your day around crop harvesting”). Another player posted a programmed Excel sheet titled the “Smurfs Calculator” to help “plant more efficiently in order to gain the highest amount of coins or XPs wanted.” Looking at the color-coded Excel sheet, I marveled at how players brought instruments of work into the game.

Not only are Smurfs Village players willing to whip out their calculators and Excel sheets to grow virtual crops, they were happily motivated to do it — much like the Smurfs were happy to tend to the crops. I came across one particular review of Smurfs Village in the app store posted by a user named King_Arth3r. At first, King_Arth3r was contented with having “some fun and a nice low level village,” and then he was increasingly drawn to “theorize,” spending “hours upon hours, days upon days, memorizing build times, finding the probabilities and chances... filling up a full sized whiteboard with graphs to find my optimum coin output, bending the laws of reality just to make MORE SMURFS.” King_Arth3r ends the five-star review with a self-diagnosis, “I have a problem.”

Despite this diagnosis, anyone who reads this review can discern the unmistakable tone of pride about putting in seriousness and dedication to the game. Similarly, in another game, World of Warcraft, as described by Bonnie Nardi in My Life as a Night Elf Priest, having raids in the game begin to “feel like work” could be seen as a benefit rather than a detriment. Treating the game like work “connoted focus, concentration, and empowerment.” In fact, farming in Smurfs Village and World of Warcraft creates a “reward directly addressed a player’s object of performative excellence and continual striving to ‘improve yourself.’” From these posts, I was reminded, again, that we are living in an iron cage where self-development is seen to be limited to practicing productive labor.

Changing the Clock and Overworking My Smurfs

After a month of gameplay, I discovered the age-old “cheat” for the Smurfs Village and other similar games––instead of waiting hours for crops to grow, bridges to be built, or exploration to be completed, I would change the time zone through my phone settings to “hack” the game’s internal temporal locus. Growing corn, instead of taking 10 hours, collapsed into a five-second process of changing my iPhone’s time settings 10 hours forward. Once I discovered this cheat, I would use it over and over again––with constant positive reinforcement. Game-makers evidently knew of the cheat and would give players a slap on the wrist each time. Papa Smurf would give players an unpunished warning that they “overworked” their Smurfs.

This distortion of the clock harkens back to Thompson, who observed with acuity that when capitalism began, “clocks at factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression.” We distort time to cheat because we are impatient. Or perhaps we are projecting our overwork-mentality onto our Smurfs. Our workers, being nonhuman, perpetually happy Smurfs, do not express their dissent or know they are being exploited.

Problematizing the Work-Play Dichotomy

Why is leisure in capitalistic societies often organized along the same lines as work? I have a theory. When players realize they may be wasting time playing Smurfs Village, they are conditioned to feel guilt. I noticed myself working harder to grow crops and XP-farm whenever I felt like I was wasting too much time playing the game. I seemed to double down on applying the holy equation “time=money” in the game when I was keenly aware of the opportunity cost of gameplay when I could be doing more “productive” tasks. Thus, Berman comes upon the fundamental rationalization of us, moderns, in iron cages: we are so accustomed to others treating our self, our time, and our passion as a means to an end, that we are slow to realize when we are, in essence, also exploiting ourselves.

By modeling games after work, game-designers cleverly reduce the guilt I would’ve experienced choosing non-productive play over productive work by blurring the distinction between the two. By tricking the capitalist mind, farming games lead players to feel as if they were satisfying their constant ache to be productive. Through work-simulating and earning-adjacent activities in a virtual space, our “sweet tooth” is satisfied so we do not feel our anxiety about “wasting time on leisure” creeping in during gameplay.

Even the portability of the game paralleled the portability of work in modernity. With minimal hassle, I could open my laptop up to work almost anytime, anywhere. It was even easier to open my phone to farm — and I could feel productive while playing without the guilt of letting my time slip through my fingers — “wasted” on non-productive leisure.

Saying Goodbye to Smurfs Village

After I finally said goodbye to Smurfs Village, I found myself a little sad. I had reconstructed my iron cage on a virtual canvas, as beautiful as it was. I made a world in my image, but I didn’t like my reflection in the world.

What is paradise to Marx? A space for the free development of everyone’s full potential. His fantasy is a yearning for freedom within community, individualism within collectivism. Marx sees development as the ultimate balancing point between the individual and the collective. In cartoon form, Smurfs Village showcases this “free development of all Smurfs for all” in the sheer diversity of passions and occupations held by Smurfs.

No occupation is better than the other, none are paid, and thus no social classes are created out of wealth stratification. Individuals do not see “development” as the continuous perfection of the self to become better commodified and sold to the market. Without wages, development is not used to climb the wage ladder to “seek social mobility” either, and each Smurf is happy to stay where they are and just find joy.

But in the real world, we “develop only in restricted and distorted ways” where “traits, impulses and talents that the market can use are rushed (often prematurely into development) and squeezed desperately till there is nothing left.” I borrowed those words from Professor Berman. He goes further to say that “everything else within us, everything non-marketable, gets draconically repressed, or withers away for lack of use, or never has a chance to come to life at all.” I theorize that we are drawn to video games, in a way, to attempt awakening the withered, repressed version of ourselves whose interests do not align with what is marketable or profitable.

I was a grown woman playing this game, but at the end of the day, it’s marketed towards children. Will children, having lived in this iron cage less, play differently from me? Nonetheless, Smurfs taught me that play is not just for children. This year, my resolution is to become more childlike. I want to play. I want to bring the passion I have for play into my work. I’ll try to bring about a future where we can all develop into rich individuals, undistorted and free from the iron cage of capitalism. But until then, I’ll cultivate my village.

Elaine Cheng

our revolutionary smurf