Chapter

Playbour and the Gamification of Work: Empowerment, Exploitation and Fun as Labour Dynamics

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.

Abstract

Ferrer-Conill critically analyses the trend of incorporating playful thinking and game elements within working processes among organizations and businesses with the promise of worker empowerment and self-realization. Focusing on the notion of playbour and gamification of work, this chapter discusses and contextualises practical and theoretical outcomes of adopting technologies that on the one hand promise turning labour into fun and enjoyment, and on the other hand are based on opaque assemblages grounded in exploitation, surveillance and control. Ferrer-Conill concludes that the traditional frictions between work and play are mediated by contradicting labour dynamics embedded in a technological assemblage that attempts to both empower and exploit the employee, whose only choice is to play or revolt.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.

... Yıldırım (2020) mentioned that teachers use MOOCs because they can observe the online learning environments, participate in discussions and access the free resources of high quality. Furthermore, some teachers consider working with MOOCs as leisure because participation in MOOCs is completely voluntary for teachers (Liyanagunawardena et al., 2013), which can be characterised by playfulness (Törhönen et al., 2019) since they merge work with fun regarding MOOCs, and this kind of combination is defined as Playbour (PL) (Ferrer-Conill, 2018). More recently, research has focused on digitization of working environment associated with "PL". ...
... With the development of ICT, the working environment and cultures have been greatly transformed. ICT has advanced the working communication and patterns beyond the geographical constrain, allowing people to merge work within free time (Törhönen et al., 2019), and this kind of working transformation is called playbour (Ferrer-Conill, 2018). The concept of playbour refers to a combination of play and labour associated with the capitalist mode or value of production (Lund, 2015) and organization, considered playfulness, fun, and leisure (Goggin, 2011). ...
Article
Full-text available
This study aims to understand the perception of university teachers on MOOCs and explore the critical drives that impact teachers to work with MOOCs based on an incorporated model of theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and Playbour (PL). Besides, this study also adopts Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory to include the culture as a moderator to explore how university teachers with different cultural backgrounds perceive MOOCs. The results show that Attitude (ATT), Subjective norms (SN) and Perceived behavioural control (PBC) are crucial determinants that impact teachers’ behavioural intention (BI) towards MOOCs. Besides, PL is found as a strong mediator to explain the great importance of ATT of university teachers to adopt MOOCs. Regarding the moderating effect, the significant difference in Spain and China are detected to explain teachers’ BI towards MOOCs. Additionally, the validity and model fit of the incorporated model are proved, which further enriches the field of TPB to explain teachers’ behaviour towards MOOCs.
... A diversified body of work offers practical examples of the blurring of work and play dimensions in the contemporary world [9,28]. Not only video games are often designed to mirror already existing social structures, such as work ecosystems [16], but playing itself has been interpreted as a form of productive and immaterial labor [26]. ...
... The entanglement between the work and the play dimensions may radically affect organizations in the real world, as gamification practices at work may suggest (e.g., [9]), and shape the dynamics occurring among their members. This may also happen in games. ...
Conference Paper
The goal of this research is to study the organizational dynamics that are enacted by amateur players, streamers, and professionals in a multiplayer First-Person Shooter video game, namely Call of Duty: Warzone. These categories of players represent different “work-play” conditions, as they have different motives for playing. I assume that these players may enact different organizational behaviors to reach their objectives. To explore this hypothesis, I have been conducting a digital ethnography within an Italian gaming community since 2021, employing observations, semi-structured interviews and analysis of the communication exchanges occurring during the gaming sessions. In the literature, a cross-comparison between these players is currently missing. This work may then clarify how different “combinations of work and play” may affect players’ behaviors and organizational dynamics, as well as how they may be differently impacted by the design of the game.
... Wikipedia). But it is also evident in practices that aim to either merge play with work, such as gamification [1,2] , or merge work with play such as playbour [3][4][5][6]. ...
... The term, and concept, of digital labour has been associated with different activities within digital formats and services [24,25,36], whereas playbour has often been associated with the gaming culture [3,4,6,44]. The basis for this type of labour relies on the prosumption of media content in digital formats, which is considered to generate value [43] through e.g. ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The increasing digitalization and gamification of different aspects of our lives has blurred the line between what we consider work and play. Therefore, our productivity may increasingly depend on how we negotiate and view our occupations and work. Through an online survey (n=382), this study examines the relationship between the perception of online video content creation as either work, play or equally as both, and the activities and income of these video content creators (streamers and YouTubers). The results indicate that those who view their content creation as work had the highest levels of activity and income, whereas those who associated their content creation with play, earned more income than those who regard their content creation equally as play and work. The results demonstrate the emergence of new forms of digital entrepreneurial practices in the work-oriented group, but also the highlight the increasing workification of our play activities.
... Autonomous are purposeful activities that create space for flourishing; they include attending to others and oneself and, in the process, altering social relations. Organising, as well as resting, sleeping, recuperating, loafing, idling, organising and relaxing, are part of this sphere of activity and represent sites of struggle that are increasingly marketised, narrowed, subsumed and turned into unwaged work that produces surplus value in the form of 'playbour' (Ferrer-Conill, 2018), 'prosumption' and 'co-production' (Glucksmann, 2016: 884-6). Bailey et al (2018: 22) succinctly express the necessity to acknowledge the work of changing our worlds: 'unless we recognize the primacy of labour, and the disrupting and disturbing effects that it always-already has, we end up with a "narrative of defeat" that is both politically debilitating and analytically inaccurate'. ...
Article
Full-text available
Mainstream feminist perspectives on social reproduction often portray non-disabled women as active providers of a service (care) to those assumed to be its passive, agency-less recipients. In response, this article accounts for social reproduction as a key factor in the reproduction of disabling capitalist social relations and argues for an understanding of social reproduction that no longer obscures the contributions of those considered to be ‘cared for’. Alternatives to what is termed here ‘the service model of care’ can be established through mobilising and organising for In(ter)dependent Living through an anti-productivist politics whose social relations prefigure alternatives against and beyond disabling capitalism.
... In fact, despite games are separated from the mundane by definition [6,15], the idea that ludic environments might actually be intertwined with "serious" contexts has taken hold in the last years. Not only video games are often designed to mirror already existing social structures, such as work ecosystems [21], but the whole idea that "play" and "labour" are antagonistic figures has been challenged recently [13,35]. ...
Conference Paper
The aim of this study is to investigate the organizational dynamics occurring in a multiplayer video game. The research involves E-sports professionals, streamers, and amateur players, who have different motives for playing and represent different “work-play” conditions, and explores how they differently enact organizational behaviors in the game. An ethnographic study within an Italian gaming community is currently in progress. I focus on “Call of Duty: Warzone”, a First-Person Shooter Battle Royale game which requires players to enact organizational efforts in order to reach the in-game objectives (e.g., defeat the enemy team). The study uses i) semi-structured interviews with amateur players and participant observation conducted in the game environment played by the amateurs, ii-iii) observation of gaming sessions, analysis of online content and semi-structured interviews with reference to streamers and professionals, iv) analysis of communication exchanges of all three types of players during the gaming sessions. I expect that players belonging to different categories will enact distinct organizational behaviors and give rise to various organizational structures. A cross-comparison between them, which is missing in current literature, would clarify how different modalities of combining work and play impact on organizational behaviors and dynamics.
... The creative class (Florida 2002) have new demands on their work and "new capitalism" (Sennett 1998;Boltanski/ Chiapello 2005) in many ways demand more from their employees (Gregg 2013), while simultaneously providing employees with (certain kinds of) empowerment and playfulness at work (for example in terms of architecture, furnishing, interior decoration, gadgets, perks, activities etc.). Ferrer-Conill (2018) writes that "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 trend is anchored in promised sources of worker empowerment, self-realization for employees and turning labour into a fun and enjoyable experience". ...
Article
Contemporary images of desirable work (for example at gaming companies or at one of the tech giants) foregrounds creativity and incorporates and idealises elements of play. Simultaneously, becoming one of the best in some particular leisure activity can require many long hours of hard, demanding work. Between on the one hand work and on the other hand leisure and play, we enter the domain of games and sports. Most classical sports originally developed from physical practices of moving the human body and these practices were, through standardization, organization and rationalization, turned into sports. Many sport researchers, (sport) historians and (sport) sociologists have pointed out that sports have gone through a process of “sportification”. Cross-country skiing is an example of an activity that has gone through a historical process of sportification, over time becoming progressively more managed and regulated. Computer games are today following a similar trajectory and have gone from being a leisure activity to becoming a competitive activity, “esports”, with professional players, international competitions, and live streams that are watched by tens of millions of viewers.
... Naturally, gamification's goal of persuasion has been heavily criticized by different academic sectors as manipulative (O'Donnell 2014), alienating (Fuchs 2014), exploitative (Ferrer-Conill 2018), unethical (Perrotta et al. 2019); or as Ian Bogost carefully phrased it: "bullshit" (2014). Yet, a preemptive dismissal of gamification research by critical studies is exactly what has caused a lack of attention towards its impact on social justice. ...
Preprint
This chapter presents a model for positioning a research problem intersectionally when confronted with issues of automated discrimination. Through the example of gamification as a computational logic embedded in the algorithmic architecture of techno-capitalism, I illustrate the connection of intersectional justice with algorithmic computation as an exclusionary practice, and computer gaming as a techno-culture masquerading behavioral control through the neoliberal principles of fun and immersion — simultaneously always infecting computation with alternatives.
... This participatory culture manifests itself in social media users who are, albeit content consumers, participants in production as well, thereby fulfilling the notion of prosumption (van Dijck, 2009). In our contemporary era, the difference between play and labour has become blurred; hence the term 'playbour' emerged as a scientific area of study (see Ferrer-Conill, 2018). While users engage in social media activities, be it social relation maintenance, production of personal data or reproduction of already existing content through sharing, they are using their leisure time as unpaid labour for these activities, which is defined as 'the capitalist regime of time' by Christian Fuchs (2014, p. 97). ...
Article
Full-text available
This paper discusses the causal relationships among posted content types, the number of reached individuals and follower counts of a Facebook brand page by investigating the communication forms of a Hungarian Twitch.tv live streamer. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for the analyses' distributional properties is followed by the Kruskal-Wallis H test, which determines significant differences in content types in terms of their total reach, reaction, comment and share counts. The Kendall's tau-b tests are performed for the examination of interrelationships among the retrieved Facebook metrics. Furthermore, mediation analysis is conducted, wherein the antecedent role is taken by post type, the follower count appears as a consequent variable and the total reach count takes the mediator role in the proposed model. The results of the analysis conclude that the analysed Facebook metrics display statistically significant, strong and positive correlations with one another; additionally, post type has a strong, significant and direct influence on reached individuals and although they do not show a significant, direct influence on follower count, they display a significant, total effect on it. The paper thereby contributes to the existing online brand personality and gaming research, offering value to the research domain of online marketing and communication as well.
Article
Organizational scholarship on architecture often applies Henri Lefebvre’s conceived, perceived, and lived framework. Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell, most notably, have illustrated how architectural design exploits each of these, exerting managerial control through processes of enchantment, emplacement, and enactment. Although this “3E framework” has been productively applied to buildings from the modern and postmodern periods, its weaknesses become apparent in the current occupant-centric design period. Drawing on Actor Network Theory’s account of translation, we propose enrollment—a 4th “E”—which enables us to better capture the nature of spatial control in the occupant-centric design period. Our 4E expanded spatial control framework recognizes the tensions that Lefebvre originally observed, tensions concealed by Dale and Burrell’s otherwise rightly influential work. This expanded framework also augments our understanding of modern and postmodern periods: the dominant Building Movements of the past Century, we claim, have each engaged in a recursive enrollment of socio-political ideals.
Article
Full-text available
Dans le cadre d’un projet de recherche destiné à améliorer les techniques d’analyse d’imagerie médicale, notamment employées pour repérer ou suivre certains cancers, nous avons mené une étude de recherche création. Celle-ci s’est focalisée sur la création d'un jeu de société sérieux visant à aborder de manière ludique les bénéfices et les limites de différentes techniques. Dans cette optique, nous avons exploré diverses solutions ludo-sérieuses vers lesquelles nous diriger, ce qui nous a mené à une analyse des processus pouvant être mobilisés. Nous présentons ici une revue de la littérature scientifique à ce sujet et clarifions les différentes formes d'applications pratiques qui émanent plus ou moins du concept de jeu, en les catégorisant. Par la suite, nous examinons les processus considérés pour élaborer un jeu de plateau à but utilitaire et plus particulièrement à but de partage de points de vue. Nous détaillons ainsi les étapes de conception que nous avons suivies, en mettant en évidence les diverses démarches employées et le résultat accompli.
Article
Full-text available
Gamification is the general name for trying to increase the motiva-tion for serious work or activities that are considered boring by spangling them with unserious game elements that are considered fun and thus trying to get more efficiency from them. There are three kinds of gamification, which are in-ternal gamification, external gamification, and gamification aiming at produc-ing behavioural change. Among these, internal gamification is credited with in-creasing the enthusiasm and job satisfaction of employees in gamified work-places, and thus productivity; external gamification is credited with improving customer satisfaction and/or brand loyalty of the target audience for companies or institutions; and gamification aiming at producing behavioural change is credited with increasing user engagement and thus success, especially in educa-tion and health. However, gamification is criticised on the grounds that it is in-compatible with or destroys the idea of play; that it prevents the awareness of exploitation or alienation while increasing exploitation and deepening aliena-tion brought about by capitalism, i.e., that it is an ideological device; that it fa-cilitates control by mediating the transfer of the body to an algorithm and sur- veillance, in short, that it is a biopolitical tool. There could also be noteworthy implications of looking at gamification in terms of Kantian ethics. In fact, for Kant, what makes a deed moral or good is not the positive consequences of the relevant behaviour but the good intention or will behind it, and the good will is found in what is done for the du ty’s sake, not in what is in accordance with the duty only. Although gamification brings people closer to acting in accordance with the duty, as a non-duty incentive mechanism, it moves them away from acting for the duty’s sake, that is, away from what is moral, simply from the good.
Article
“Sıkıcı kabul edilen ciddi iş yahut etkinliklere eğlenceli addedilen ciddiyetsiz oyun öğeleri bulaştırarak, söz konusu iş yahut etkinliklere yönelik şevki artırmaya, onlardan daha fazla verim almaya çalışmanın genel adı” olarak tarif edilebilecek olan oyunlaştırma, dâhilî oyunlaştırma, haricî oyunlaştırma, davranış değişikliği yaratmayı hedefleyen oyunlaştırma olmak üzere üçe ayırılabilir. Bunların arasında dâhilî oyunlaştırma, oyunlaştırılmış iş yerlerinde çalışanların çalışma şevk ve iş tatminini, dolayısıyla verimliliği artırmakla; haricî oyunlaştırma şirket veya kurumlar için hedef kitlenin müşteri memnuniyetini ve/veya marka sadakatini artırmakla; davranış değişikliği yaratmayı hedefleyen oyunlaştırma ise özellikle eğitim ve sağlıkta kullanıcı katılımını, dolayısıyla başarıyı artırmakla övülür. Ne ki, oyunlaştırma, oyun fikriyle uyuşmadığı yahut onu tahrip ettiği; kapitalizmin beraberinde getirdiği sömürüyü artırıp yabancılaşmayı derinleştirirken sömürünün veya yabancılaşmanın bilincine varılmasını engellediği, bu bakımdan ideolojik bir aygıt olduğu; bedenin bir algoritmaya taşınmasına ve gözetime aracılık ederek kontrolü kolaylaştırdığı, kısaca biyopolitik bir araç olduğu gerekçeleriyle eleştirilir. Oyunlaştırmaya Kant etiği açısından bakmak da dikkate değer sonuçlar ortaya koyabilir. Nitekim Kant için bir eylemi ahlâkî yahut iyi yapan, ilgili davranışın olumlu sonuçlarından ziyade, iyi niyettir ve iyi niyet de yalnızca ödeve uygun olmakla kalmayan, aynı zamanda ödevden dolayı yapılanda bulunur. Oyunlaştırma ise, her ne kadar kişileri ödeve uygun eylemeye yaklaştırsa da ödev dışı bir teşvik mekanizması olarak, onları ödevden dolayı eylemekten, yani ahlâki olandan, basitçe iyiden uzaklaştırır.
Conference Paper
The current paper aims to analyse the complex array of practices entailed by teams and esports professionals by looking at one of the most peculiar phenomena of the esports field: gaming houses, i.e., “co-operative living arrangement[s] where several players of video games, usually professional esports players, live in the same residence” [1]. Representing one of the first attempts to assess the role of gaming houses as emerging esports spaces based on new forms of playbour and production of and by users, the paper comprises an innovative adaptation of PRISMA protocol for literature and scoping reviews to shed light on how the technological, material, and social elements are enacted through gaming houses’ activities, which mirror the ones entailed by digital platforms. In fact, through the three moves of encoding, aggregating and computing users’ interactions [2], gaming houses (re)produce virtual and analogical goods, translating consumer practices and profoundly influencing the broader esports ecosystem. Finally, by framing themselves as ideal hives for pro players, i.e., a prototypical breeding ground for esports professionals, these structures push for new paradigms of work-life balance and users’ production, thus leading to a further reflection on the nature of play and working practices in our contemporary network society [3].
Book
Full-text available
In Posthuman Buddhism and the Digital Self, Les Roberts extends his earlier work on spatial anthropology to consider questions of time, spaciousness, and the phenomenology of self. Across the book’s four main chapters – which range from David Bowie’s long-standing interest in Buddhism, to street photography of 1980s Liverpool, to the ambient soundscapes of Derek Jarman’s Blue, or to the slow, contemplative cinema of Tsai Ming-Liang – Roberts lays the groundwork for the concept of ‘dwellspace’ as a means by which to unpick the shifting spatial, temporal and experiential modalities of everyday mediascapes. Understood as a particular disposition towards time, Roberts’s foray into dwellspace proceeds from a Pascalian reflection on the self/non-self in which being content in an empty room vies with the demands of having content in an empty room. Taking the idea of posthuman Buddhism as a heuristic lens, Roberts sets in motion a number of interrelated lines of enquiry that prompt renewed focus on questions of boredom, distraction and reverie, and cast into sharper relief the psychosocial and creative affordances of ambience, spaciousness and slowness. The book argues that the colonisation of ‘empty time’ by 24/7 digital capitalism has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of the corporate mindfulness industry, and with it, the co-option, commodification and mediatisation of dwellspace. Posthuman Buddhism is thus in part an exploration of the dialectics of dwellspace that orbits around a creative self-praxis rooted in the negation and dissolution of the self, one of the foundational cornerstones of Buddhist theory and practice.
Article
Full-text available
Hubungan industrial antara perusahaan aplikasi dan pengemudi ojek online di Indonesia dirumuskan secara kontraktual sebagai kemitraan. Pendefinisian pengemudi sebagai “mitra” alih-alih “pekerja” dalam kemitraan dimanfaatkan oleh perusahaan untuk menghindari kewajiban memberikan hak dasar dan jaminan sosial pekerja. Ketimpangan relasi terlihat dari otoritas penuh perusahaan untuk mengatur tarif dasar, mengontrol pembagian keuntungan, hingga memutus kemitraan secara sepihak. Dalam merespons kondisi kerja eksploitatif tersebut, sejumlah pengemudi justru mempraktikkan “kemitraan ganda”, yaitu bermitra dengan lebih dari satu perusahaan secara bersamaan. Sebagai analisis politik produksi, riset ini menelaah praktik kemitraan ganda dengan menggunakan teori gamifikasi kerja yang menjelaskan bahwa pekerja dirancang untuk abai terhadap realitas kondisi kerja melalui internalisasi persepsi terhadap kerja yang menyenangkan serta memberikan nilai tambah. Berdasarkan data yang diperoleh melalui studi pustaka dan wawancara terhadap pengemudi di Kota Depok, tulisan ini berargumentasi bahwa praktik kemitraan ganda merupakan upaya resistansi individualistis dari pengemudi untuk menyiasati kerentanan kerja akibat celah regulasi kemitraan dalam rangka memenuhi kebutuhan sosial-ekonomi. Rendahnya kompetensi yang dibutuhkan untuk bekerja sebagai pengemudi dan bonus insentif yang disediakan oleh sistem kerja ojek online melalui gamifikasi menjadi alasan kuat bagi pengemudi untuk bertahan dengan profesinya. Tulisan ini menggarisbawahi pentingnya peran negara dalam mengatasi masalah kerentanan kerja pengemudi ojek online melalui harmonisasi hukum ketenagakerjaan di Indonesia.
Book
Full-text available
Failure is a popular topic of research. It has long been a source of study in !ields such as sociology and anthropology, science and technology studies, privacy and surveillance, cultural, feminist and media studies, art, theatre, !lm, and political science. When things go awry, breakdown, or rupture they lead to valuable insights into the mundane mechanisms of social worlds. Yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less visible, valued, and explored. In this book the authors re"ect upon the role of creative interventions as a critical mode for methods, research techniques, !eldwork, and knowledge transmission or impact. Here, failure is considered a productive part of engaging with and in the !eld. It is about acknowledging the ‘mess’ of the social and how we need methods, modes of attunement, and knowledge translation that address this complexity in nuanced ways. In this collection, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners share their practices, insights, and challenges around rethinking failure beyond normalized tropes. What does failure mean? What does it do? What does putting failure under the microscope do to our assumptions around ontology and epistemologies? How can it be deployed to challenge norms in a time of great uncertainty, crisis, and anxiety? And what are some of the ways resilience and failure are interrelated? Contributors: Jessamy Perriam, Emma Fraser & Clancy Wilmott, Kat Jungnickel, Annette N. Markham, Anna Hickey-Moody, Linda Dement, Jen Rae & Claire G. Coleman, Julienne van Loon & Kelly Hussey-Smith, Li Jönsson & Kristina Lindström, Sam Hind, Lekshmy Parameswaran, Syrus Marcus Ware, Nanna Verhoeff & Iris van der Tuin, Olivia Khoo,Grace McQuilten, Chantal Faust, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Sybille Lammes, Larissa Hjorth, Kate McLean and Julienne van Loon.
Article
Full-text available
The article discusses the glocalized socio-spatial form of European production as socially crisis-ridden. Combining literature from transnational production network theory, critical political economy, labour process theory and feminist geography the article shows that a European production regime has developed which is based on the transnationalization of economic and competitive parameters on the one hand and multiscalar social fragmentation of labour processes on the other. Its very logic is, hence, functional economic integration based on labour's socio-spatial disintegration. The regime pushes for what we can call the feminization of work because it systematically cuts the former, patriarchal and uneven connection between waged work and socio-political integration. As feminist debates show, progressive perspectives have to be transnational and multiscalar and they have to include fundamental questions about the concept and status of work in society.
Conference Paper
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.
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this article is to define the concepts of playing, working, gaming, and labouring, through a literature study, and to construct a typology. This typology will be used to create a field model that is structured by the horizontal parameters of qualitative-quantitative (characteristics) and the vertical parameters of activity-result (in focus). It is shown how this model can be used to visualise different theoretical positions in empirical material, which connects to the concepts and their relations. Working and labouring are distinguished into a trans-historical and a historical, capitalist, category, and likewise playing and gaming, where the former is the trans-historical category and the latter the historical one. The main focus of the article, since working and labouring is well covered within the critical Marxist tradition, is on playing and its relation to working, with the aim of understanding and criticising the concept of playbour.
Article
Full-text available
According to previous research, contemporary journalism is undergoing a quantitative turn. The uses of data and metrics have started to permeate digital news websites in various ways. However, there is a lack of research on how gamification is applied to journalism practice. This article examines how the quantification of news production, readers’ interactions, and use of game mechanics have started to permeate journalism practice in digital outlets. Methodologically, this article focuses on the sports news website Bleacher Report as case study, drawing data from an analysis of the gamified system in which journalists are quantified and rewarded with points and badges according to their writing metrics, and a set of interviews with journalists who work for Bleacher Report. The results show that while data and metrics become the main component to assess journalists’ capacities, the process of automated quantification and the competitive playfulness of leaderboards are perceived as motivating affordances.
Article
Full-text available
Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mech­anics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institutions by calling attention to social media logic—the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—underpin­ning its dynamics. This logic will be considered in light of what has been identified as mass me­dia logic, which has helped spread the media's powerful discourse outside its institutional boundaries. Theorizing social media logic, we identify four grounding principles—programmabil­ity, popularity, connectivity, and datafication—and argue that these principles become increas­ingly entangled with mass media logic. The logic of social media, rooted in these grounding principles and strategies, is gradually invading all areas of public life. Besides print news and broadcasting, it also affects law and order, social activism, politics, and so forth. Therefore, its sustaining logic and widespread dissemination deserve to be scrutinized in detail in order to better understand its impact in various domains. Concentrating on the tactics and strategies at work in social media logic, we reassess the constellation of power relationships in which social practices unfold, raising questions such as: How does social media logic modify or enhance ex­isting mass media logic? And how is this new media logic exported beyond the boundaries of (social or mass) media proper? The underlying principles, tactics, and strategies may be relat­ively simple to identify, but it is much harder to map the complex connections between plat­forms that distribute this logic: users that employ them, technologies that drive them, economic structures that scaffold them, and institutional bodies that incorporate them.
Chapter
Full-text available
What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of “gamification.” What if our whole life were turned into a game? What sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel is today becoming reality as “gamification.” As more and more organizations, practices, products, and services are infused with elements from games and play to make them more engaging, we are witnessing a veritable ludification of culture. Yet while some celebrate gamification as a possible answer to mankind's toughest challenges and others condemn it as a marketing ruse, the question remains: what are the ramifications of this “gameful world”? Can game design energize society and individuals, or will algorithmicincentive systems become our new robot overlords? In this book, more than fifty luminaries from academia and industry examine the key challenges of gamification and the ludification of culture—including Ian Bogost, John M. Carroll, Bernie DeKoven, Bill Gaver, Jane McGonigal, Frank Lantz, Jesse Schell, Kevin Slavin, McKenzie Wark, and Eric Zimmerman. They outline major disciplinary approaches, including rhetorics, economics, psychology, and aesthetics; tackle issues like exploitation or privacy; and survey main application domains such as health, education, design, sustainability, or social media.
Article
Full-text available
Gamification combines the playful design and feedback mechanisms from games with users' social profiles (e.g. Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn) in non-game applications. Successful gamification practices are reliant on encouraging playful subjectivities so that users voluntarily expose their personal information, which is then used to drive behavioural change (e.g. weight loss, workplace productivity, educational advancement, consumer loyalty, etc.). The pleasures of play, the promise of a 'game', and the desire to level up and win are used to inculcate desirable skill sets and behaviours. Gamification is rooted in surveillance; providing real-time feedback about users' actions by amassing large quantities of data and then simplifying this data into modes that easily understandable, such as progress bars, graphs and charts. This article provides an introduction to gamification for surveillance scholars. I first provide brief definitions of gamification, games and play, linking the effectiveness of gamification to the quantification of everyday life. I then explain how the quantification in gamification is different from the quantification in both analog spaces and digital non-game spaces. Next, I draw from governmentality studies to show how quantification is leveraged in terms of surveillance. I employ three examples to demonstrate the social effects and impacts of gamified behaviour. These examples range from using self-surveillance to gamify everyday life, to the participatory surveillance evoked by social networking services, to the hierarchical surveillance of the gamified call-centre. Importantly, the call-centre example becomes a limit case, emphasizing the inability to gamify all spaces, especially those framed by work and not play. This leads to my conclusion, arguing that without knowing first what games and play are, we cannot accurately respond to and critique the playful surveillant technologies leveraged by gamification.
Article
Full-text available
By making work seem more like leisure time, gamification and corporate training games serve as a mechanism for solving a range of problems and, significantly, of increasing productivity. This piece examines the implications of gamification as a means of productivity gains that extend Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management, or Taylorism. Relying on measurement and observation as a mechanism to collapse the domains of labour and leisure for the benefit of businesses (rather than for the benefit or fulfilment of workers), gamification potentially subjugates all time into productive time, even as business leaders use games to mask all labour as something to be enjoyed. In so doing, this study argues, the agency of individuals – whether worker or player – becomes subject to the rationalized nature of production. This rationalization changes the nature of play, making it a duty rather than a choice, a routine rather than a process of exploration. Taken too far or used unthinkingly, it renders Huizinga’s magic circle into one more regulated office cubicle.
Article
Full-text available
Gamification is often promoted as a user-centred initiative, engaging and motivating the alienated masses. Yet is such rhetoric reinforced by the design of these programmes? By incorporating a diverse suite of theoretical frameworks that accounts for the social, cultural and psychological effect of design features, this article argues that gamification too often invokes organization-centred design, treating users as zombies: senseless mechanisms urged onwards by a desire for extrinsic rewards. Gamification still often fails to acknowledge the user’s context and innate psychological needs. This can be accomplished in practice through an incorporation of motivational psychology and a concurrent shift towards user-centred design, accounting for the situatedness of the participant. Further, this article claims that for gamification to reach its full, radical potential, it must not only transform the way the user is evaluated and rewarded but also the activity the subject is tasked with performing.
Article
Full-text available
Gamification as the process of turning extra-ludic activities into play can be seen in two different ways: following Bataille, we would hope that play could be a flight line from the servitude of the capital-labour relationship. Following Adorno and Benjamin, however, we might discover that the escape from the drudgery of the worker leads to an equally alienating drudgery of the player. I argue that gamification might be seen as a form of ideology and therefore a mechanism of the dominant class to set agenda and to legitimize actions taken by this very class or group. Ever since the notion of gamification was introduced widely, scholars have suggested that work might be seen as a sort of leisure activity. This article analyses the controversial dialectics of play and labour and the ubiquitous notion of gamification as ideology.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of mass-market consumer software that takes inspiration from video games. Usually summarized as "gamification", this trend connects to a sizeable body of existing concepts and research in human-computer interaction and game studies, such as serious games, pervasive games, alternate reality games, or playful design. However, it is not clear how "gamification" relates to these, whether it denotes a novel phenomenon, and how to define it. Thus, in this paper we investigate "gamification" and the historical origins of the term in relation to precursors and similar concepts. It is suggested that "gamified" applications provide insight into novel, gameful phenomena complementary to playful phenomena. Based on our research, we propose a definition of "gamification" as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
There have been many location sharing systems developed over the past two decades, and only recently have they started to be adopted by consumers. In this paper, we present the results of three studies focusing on the foursquare check-in system. We conducted interviews and two surveys to understand, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how and why people use location sharing applications, as well as how they manage their privacy. We also document surprising uses of foursquare, and discuss implications for design of mobile social services.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Location-sharing services have a long history in research, but have only recently become available for consumers. Most popular commercial location-sharing services differ from previous research efforts in important ways: they use manual 'check-ins' to pair user location with semantically named venues rather than tracking; venues are visible to all users; location is shared with a potentially very large audience; and they employ incentives. By analysis of 20 in-depth interviews with foursquare users and 47 survey responses, we gained insight into emerging social practices surrounding location-sharing. We see a shift from privacy issues and data deluge, to more performative considerations in sharing one's location. We discuss performance aspects enabled by check-ins to public venues, and show emergent, but sometimes conflicting norms (not) to check-in.
Chapter
What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of “gamification.” What if our whole life were turned into a game? What sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel is today becoming reality as “gamification.” As more and more organizations, practices, products, and services are infused with elements from games and play to make them more engaging, we are witnessing a veritable ludification of culture. Yet while some celebrate gamification as a possible answer to mankind's toughest challenges and others condemn it as a marketing ruse, the question remains: what are the ramifications of this “gameful world”? Can game design energize society and individuals, or will algorithmicincentive systems become our new robot overlords? In this book, more than fifty luminaries from academia and industry examine the key challenges of gamification and the ludification of culture—including Ian Bogost, John M. Carroll, Bernie DeKoven, Bill Gaver, Jane McGonigal, Frank Lantz, Jesse Schell, Kevin Slavin, McKenzie Wark, and Eric Zimmerman. They outline major disciplinary approaches, including rhetorics, economics, psychology, and aesthetics; tackle issues like exploitation or privacy; and survey main application domains such as health, education, design, sustainability, or social media.
Chapter
What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of “gamification.” What if our whole life were turned into a game? What sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel is today becoming reality as “gamification.” As more and more organizations, practices, products, and services are infused with elements from games and play to make them more engaging, we are witnessing a veritable ludification of culture. Yet while some celebrate gamification as a possible answer to mankind's toughest challenges and others condemn it as a marketing ruse, the question remains: what are the ramifications of this “gameful world”? Can game design energize society and individuals, or will algorithmicincentive systems become our new robot overlords? In this book, more than fifty luminaries from academia and industry examine the key challenges of gamification and the ludification of culture—including Ian Bogost, John M. Carroll, Bernie DeKoven, Bill Gaver, Jane McGonigal, Frank Lantz, Jesse Schell, Kevin Slavin, McKenzie Wark, and Eric Zimmerman. They outline major disciplinary approaches, including rhetorics, economics, psychology, and aesthetics; tackle issues like exploitation or privacy; and survey main application domains such as health, education, design, sustainability, or social media.
Book
This book presents a fundamental reassessment of the nature of wage labor in the nineteenth century, focusing on the common use of penal sanctions in England to enforce wage labor agreements. Professor Steinfeld argues that wage workers were not employees at will but were often bound to their employment by enforceable labor agreements, which employers used whenever available to manage their labor costs and supply. In the northern United States, where employers normally could not use penal sanctions, the common law made other contract remedies available, also placing employers in a position to enforce labor agreements. Modern free wage labor only came into being late in the nineteenth century, as a result of reform legislation that restricted the contract remedies employers could legally use.
Book
Why play is a productive, expressive way of being, a form of understanding, and a fundamental part of our well-being. What do we think about when we think about play? A pastime? Games? Childish activities? The opposite of work? Think again: If we are happy and well rested, we may approach even our daily tasks in a playful way, taking the attitude of play without the activity of play. So what, then, is play? In Play Matters, Miguel Sicart argues that to play is to be in the world; playing is a form of understanding what surrounds us and a way of engaging with others. Play goes beyond games; it is a mode of being human. We play games, but we also play with toys, on playgrounds, with technologies and design. Sicart proposes a theory of play that doesn't derive from a particular object or activity but is a portable tool for being—not tied to objects but brought by people to the complex interactions that form their daily lives. It is not separated from reality; it is part of it. It is pleasurable, but not necessarily fun. Play can be dangerous, addictive, and destructive. Along the way, Sicart considers playfulness, the capacity to use play outside the context of play; toys, the materialization of play—instruments but also play pals; playgrounds, play spaces that enable all kinds of play; beauty, the aesthetics of play through action; political play—from Maradona's goal against England in the 1986 World Cup to the hactivist activities of Anonymous; the political, aesthetic, and moral activity of game design; and why play and computers get along so well.
Chapter
Meaningful gamification is the use of gameful and playful layers to help a user find personal connections that motivate engagement with a specific context for long-term change. While reward-based gamification can be useful for short-term goals and situations where the participants have no personal connections or intrinsic motivation to engage in a context, rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation and the long-term desire to engage with the real world context. If the goal is long-term change, then rewards should be avoided and other game-based elements used to create a system based on concepts of meaningful gamification. This article introduces six concepts—Reflection, Exposition, Choice, Information, Play, and Engagement—to guide designers of gamification systems that rely on non-reward-based game elements to help people find personal connections and meaning in a real world context.
Article
The term Big Data is applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target, currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set. This chapter addresses some of the theoretical and practical issues raised by the possibility of using massive amounts of social and cultural data in the humanities and social sciences. These observations are based on the author’s own experience working since 2007 with large cultural data sets at the Software Studies Initiative at the University of California, San Diego. The issues discussed include the differences between ‘deep data’ about a few people and ‘surface data’ about many people; getting access to transactional data; and the new “data analysis divide” between data experts and researchers without training in computer science.
Conference Paper
Gamification is a growing phenomenon of interest to both practitioners and researchers. There remains, however, uncertainty about the contours of the field. Defining gamification as “the process of making activities more game-like” focuses on the crucial space between the components that make up games and the holistic experience of gamefulness. It better fits real-world examples and connects gamification with the literature on persuasive design.
Article
To attempt a fundamental definition of the concept of labor appears superfluous because there is a tacit agreement in economic theory to avoid a “definitional” concept of labor as such and to conceive of labor only as economic activity: the praxis within the economic dimension. “The general concept ‘labor’ has received such an indeterminate content through its ordinary uses that it is hardly possible to unequivocally demarcate it. It is precisely this situation that gives the representatives of economics the right to utilize a specific economic concept of ‘labor’ that is not derived from a general concept of ‘labor’ but, rather, through another procedure.”
Book
This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. "Sharing," "friending," "liking," "following," "trending," and "favoriting" have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become "social."
Book
Contents note continued: 13.Class and Exploitation on the Internet / Christian Fuchs -- 14.Acts of Translation: Organized Networks as Algorithmic Technologies of the Common / Soenke Zehle.
Article
Gamification, the idea that game mechanics can be integrated into assumed "non-game" circumstances has gained ascendance amongst champions of marketing, behavior change and efficiency. Ironically, some of the most heated critique of gamification has come from the broader community of "traditional" videogame developers. Connecting broadly to projects surrounding "big data" and algorithmic surveillance, the project of gamification continues to expand and intensify. This paper examines the complex relationship between game designers and the rise of arguments in support of gamification. I analyze the various actors and interests mobilizing arguments, deconstructing their underlying assumptions about the relationship between games and social phenomena. Turning toan analytic framework rooted in the Assemblage of Play (Taylor 2009) and emergent coercive forms of (played) control (Taylor 2006), the essay critiques assumptions on either side of the debate on the role of games and play. The strained connections between debates on gamification and broader interest in serious games offers an important moment to explore algorithmic surveillance.
Book
Millions play Farmville, Scrabble, and countless other games, generating billions in sales each year. The careful and skillful construction of these games is built on decades of research into human motivation and psychology: A well-designed game goes right to the motivational heart of the human psyche. In For the Win, Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue persuasively that game-makers need not be the only ones benefiting from game design. Werbach and Hunter, lawyers and World of Warcraft players, created the world's first course on gamification at the Wharton School. In their book, they reveal how game thinking--addressing problems like a game designer--can motivate employees and customers and create engaging experiences that can transform your business. For the Win reveals how a wide range of companies are successfully using game thinking. It also offers an explanation of when gamifying makes the most sense and a 6-step framework for using games for marketing, productivity enhancement, innovation, employee motivation, customer engagement, and more.
Article
This conversation started in Prague, the Czech Republic, during a panel moderated by Irena Reifová at the symposium ‘On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergence’. The event was organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University. The text contains a series of discussions. First, there is a conversation about the nature of the participatory democratic utopia and participatory culture and how groups take (or do not take) advantage of the affordances of new and emerging media. It also emphasizes the political nature and potential of popular culture and touches upon its connection to institutionalized politics. Three other key areas are mentioned: the role of different cultures of leadership, the significance of organizations in structuring participatory processes, and the need to enhance civic learning, providing more support for participatory cultures. This is combined with an interlocking discussion about the definition of participation and how it is tied up with power. It covers the differences between participation and interaction, engagement, interpretation, production, curation, and circulation. Finally, there is an underlying strand of discussion about the role of academia, focusing on the relationship between critical theory and cultural studies, the need to deconstruct our own frameworks and the question of which language to use to communicate academic research to the public.
Article
With the emergence of user-generated content platforms, 'users' are typically referred to as active, engaged and creative contributors of content, as illustrated by new hybrid terms such as 'produsers' or 'co-creators'. This article explores user agency as a complex concept, involving not only the user's cultural role as a facilitator of civic engagement and participation` but also his economic meaning as a producer, consumer and data provider, as well as his volatile position as volunteer or aspiring professional in the emerging labour market. We need such a multidisciplinary approach to user agency if we want to understand how socio-economic and technological transformations affect the recent shake-up in power relationships between media companies. advertisers and users. Video-sharing site YouTube serves as a case study. The 'you' in YouTube not only refers to content creators, but also to data providers whose profiled information is capitalized by site owners. Commercialization of user-generated platforms and incorporation of self-produced content in digital environments powered by Google render user agency even more complex.
Article
This article focuses upon the concept of ‘affective economics’ arguing that it should be expanded to include a consideration of emerging forms of data-mining including ‘sentiment analysis’ and ‘predictive analytics’. Sentiment analysis in particular seeks to manipulate consumer behaviour by gathering data about emotional responses and conducting controlled experiments on consumers. Any consideration of affective economics should include the ways in which marketers seek to manage consumers through the collection not just of demographic information, but of extensive real-time databases of their online behaviour and conversations.
Article
More Americans now play video games than go to the movies (NPD Group, 2009). The meteoric rise in popularity of video games highlights the need for research approaches that can deepen our scientific understanding of video game engagement. This article advances a theory-based motivational model for examining and evaluating the ways by which video game engagement shapes psychological processes and influences well-being. Rooted in self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000a), our approach suggests that both the appeal and well-being effects of video games are based in their potential to satisfy basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. We review recent empirical evidence applying this perspective to a number of topics including need satisfaction in games and short-term well-being, the motivational appeal of violent game content, motivational sources of postplay aggression, the antecedents and consequences of disordered patterns of game engagement, and the determinants and effects of immersion. Implications of this model for the future study of game motivation and the use of video games in interventions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
Facilitating engaging user experiences is essential in the design of interactive systems. To accomplish this, it is necessary to understand the composition of this construct and how to evaluate it. Building on previous work that posited a theory of engagement and identified a core set of attributes that operationalized this construct, we constructed and evaluated a multidimensional scale to measure user engagement. In this paper we describe the development of the scale, as well as two large-scale studies (N=440 and N=802) that were undertaken to assess its reliability and validity in online shopping environments. In the first we used Reliability Analysis and Exploratory Factor Analysis to identify six attributes of engagement: Perceived Usability, Aesthetics, Focused Attention, Felt Involvement, Novelty, and Endurability. In the second we tested the validity of and relationships among those attributes using Structural Equation Modeling. The result of this research is a multidimensional scale that may be used to test the engagement of software applications. In addition, findings indicate that attributes of engagement are highly intertwined, a complex interplay of user-system interaction variables. Notably, Perceived Usability played a mediating role in the relationship between Endurability and Novelty, Aesthetics, Felt Involvement, and Focused Attention.
Article
As the boundaries between play and work are becoming increasingly blurred among digital games, avid player labour is increasingly harnessed as a source of revenue. This article focuses on "modders", hobbyists who build on existing retail game titles, and the strategies the game industry uses to motivate and persuade these hobbyists to produce content that most effectively benefits the industry. Special focus is on industry-organized mod competitions that form an area of experimentation where the potentials of free modder labour are tested.
Article
Social Text 18.2 (2000) 33-58 --Karl Marx, Grundrisse Working in the digital media industry is not as much fun as it is made out to be. The "NetSlaves" of the eponymous Webzine are becoming increasingly vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization (www.dis-obey.com/netslaves). They talk about "24-7 electronic sweatshops" and complain about the ninety-hour weeks and the "moronic management of new media companies." In early 1999, seven of the fifteen thousand "volunteers" of America Online (AOL) rocked the info-loveboat by asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owes them back wages for the years of playing chathosts for free. They used to work long hours and love it; now they are starting to feel the pain of being burned by digital media. These events point to a necessary backlash against the glamorization of digital labor, which highlights its continuities with the modern sweatshop and points to the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the question of labor in a "digital economy" is not so easily dismissed as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation. The NetSlaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet; they also embody a complex relation to labor that is widespread in late capitalist societies. In this essay I understand this relationship as a provision of "free labor," a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, and yet undervalued, force in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this essay also tries to highlight the connections between the "digital economy" and what the Italian autonomists have called the "social factory." The "social factory" describes a process whereby "work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine." Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs. Far from being an "unreal," empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large. Support for this argument, however, is immediately complicated by the recent history of critical theory. How to speak of labor, especially cultural and technical labor, after the demolition job carried out by thirty years of postmodernism? The postmodern socialist feminism of Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" spelled out some of the reasons behind the antipathy of 1980s critical theory for Marxist analyses of labor. Haraway explicitly rejected the humanistic tendencies of theorists who see labor as the "pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world." Paul Gilroy similarly expressed his discontent at the inadequacy of Marxist analyses of labor to describe the culture of the descendants of slaves, who value artistic expression as "the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation." If labor is "the humanizing activity that makes [white] man," then, surely, humanizing labor does not really belong in the age of networked, posthuman intelligence. However, the "informatics of domination" that Haraway describes in the "Manifesto" is certainly preoccupied with the relation between cybernetics, labor, and capital. In the fifteen years since its publication, this triangulation has become even more evident. The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices such as "supplementing" (bringing supplementary work home from the conventional office). Advertising campaigns and business manuals suggest that the Internet is not only a site of disintermediation (embodying the famous death of the middle man, from bookshops to travel agencies to computer stores), but also the means through which a flexible, collective intelligence has come into being. This essay does not seek to offer a judgment on the "effects" of the...
Article
This paper outlines the concept of produsage as a model of describing today’s emerging user-led content creation environments. Produsage overcomes some of the systemic problems associated with translating industrial-age ideas of content production into an informational-age, social software, Web 2.0 environment. Instead, it offers new ways of understanding the collaborative content creation and development practices found in contemporary informational environments.
Article
Computer game modification, or "modding", is an important part of gaming culture as well as an increasingly important source of value for the games industry. The example of Counter-Strike, originally a modification of the first-person shooter Half-Life, and subsequently sold as a stand-alone product for Xbox and PC, shows that "mods" can not only increase the shelf-life of the games industry's products, but also inject a shot of much-needed innovation into an industry seemingly unable to afford taking commercial risks.Modders, however, are rarely remunerated for taking the risks the industry itself shuns. While successful modders, such as Counter-Strike's creator, Minh Le, enjoy a celebrity status that enables them to find employment in the games industry, many modders are either uninterested or unable to translate the social capital gained through modding into gainful employment. The precarious status of modding as a form of unpaid labour is veiled by the perception of modding as a leisure activity, or simply as an extension of play. This draws attention to the fact that in the entertainment industries, the relationship between work and play is changing, leading, as it were, to a hybrid form of "playbour".The following paper analyses the relationship between the modding community and the games industry from a political economy perspective, without disregarding the pleasures and rewards individual modders may derive from their work. Within this context, the questions of whether modders can be regarded in terms of a "dispersed multitude", and how the power that comes with this status can be realised more fully, deserve special attention. At the same time, this paper seeks to gain insight into the changing relationship between work and play in the creative industries, and the ideological ramifications of this change.
Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide (Updated and with a new afterword)
  • H Jenkins
Rules of play: Game design fundamentals
  • K Salen
  • E Zimmerman
The ambiguity of play (2. printing, 1
  • B Sutton-Smith
Playbour, farming and labour
  • J Goggin
The de-gamification of Foursquare
  • R Wilken
Digital disconnect: How capitalism is turning the Internet against democracy
  • R W Mcchesney
  • RW McChesney
Fandom as free labor
  • A De Kosnik
  • A Kosnik De
Gamification. Motivations & effects. PhD
  • J Hamari
What computer games can and can’t do
  • J Juul