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Playbour and the gamification of work. Liminal spaces of empowerment and exploitation.
Abstract
In recent years, the trend of incorporating playful thinking and game elements within working processes has gained popularity among organizations and businesses. The rhetoric behind this phenomenon is anchored in newfound sources of worker empowerment, self-realization for employees and turning labour into a fun and enjoyable experience. This paper aims to critically analyze the practical and theoretical outcomes of gamifying labour by contextualizing such celebratory claims vis à vis technological opaque assemblages grounded in exploitation, surveillance and control.
While the appropriation of play for working and commercial purposes is nothing new, the rise of networked technologies used to automatically track, quantify and analyze worker behavior bring to the fore concerns about increasingly blurring of work and play, and the way in which productivity, motivation and labour politics are understood. But the instrumentatlization of play and games disrupts their “proper place” in society, generating liminal spaces that pack logics of empowerment and exploitation at the same time. By using several practical cases, this paper exemplifies the balance between the utilitarian and hedonic logics of gamification and the contradictory tensions between the empowering and exploitative motives behind its use.
... In traditional office settings, management can greatly impact worker attitudes and satisfaction rates [2]. When management-supported "play at work" initiatives are paternalistic-"mandatory fun"-workers may experience cynicism and distrust [37,85,38], but when employees voluntarily consent to workplace fun and leisure, it can increase positive affect and satisfaction [70,75,80,74,35,93,77]. ...
While past work has admirably supported crowd workers in improving their work performance, we argue that there is also value in designing for enjoyment untied from work outcomes--- what we call "tangential play.'' To this end, we present Turker Tales, a Google Chrome extension that uses tangential play to encourage crowd workers to write, share, and view short tales as a side activity to their main job on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Turker Tales introduces a layer of playful narrativization atop typical crowd work tasks in order to alter workers' experiences of those tasks without aiming to improve work efficiency or quality. Using speed-dating (N=12) and a pilot test (N=150) to inform our design, we deployed Turker Tales over one week with 171 participants, receiving 1,096 tales and 1,527 ratings of those tales. We found that our system of tangential play brought to light underlying conflicts (such as unfair working conditions), and provided a space for participants to reveal aspects of themselves and their shared experiences. Through Turker Tales, we critically reflect on the roles of researchers, designers, and requesters in crowd work, and the ethics of incorporating play into crowd work, and consider the implications of the paradigm we introduce both as a method of research through design and as a direction for design to support crowd workers.
This article presents the results of an ongoing ethnography of Uber drivers in Montreal. It draws on Jean-Pierre Durand’s “job centrifugation dynamic” (Duran, 2004) conceptual framework and offers a critique of Uber’s model of labour organization which promises “good money” and claims to create a “flexible” and “no boss” work environment. Deconstructing the Uber narrative, it exposes the central features - precarity, market control scheduling and app-subordination - which structures drivers’ daily work routines and highlights twofold process of “accumulation by dispossession”(Harvey, 2004). On the one hand, drivers’ de-proletarianization is dispossessing them from all sorts of labour protection/benefits or bargaining power. And secondly, because drivers are obliged to give the organization an unconditional access to efficiently exploit their own assets (cars/phones/Internet connection), they are being dispossessed from the value of their “dead labour” embodied in their private properties which are being monetized (Kenney and Zysman, 2016), exploited and consumed as part of the Uber process of value production.
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