This summer I've been busy writing an article that argues copyright law should be reformed to take greater account of authorial reputation as a motivator of creative production. The current draft is posted on SSRN here. While it might seem obvious to some readers that many artists create for love rather than money, our intellectual property laws (at least in the United States) tend to conceive of artistic production (protected by copyright law) as being motivated almost entirely by the pursuit of market profits. At least, the law of intellectual property conceives of copyright-protected works as simply valuable financial assets and investments of authorial labor that are made in pursuit of financial rewards.
I'd be interested in feedback on the article (here or by email) from Terra Nova readers -- while it isn't about virtual worlds, it does touch on many issues we have talked about here, such as Creative Commons, user-generated content, the Memex, advertising vs. content, etc. But this post is about one of the topics I didn't get a chance to explore in the article (it shows up in footnote 73 cryptically), namely, how factors other than the pursuit of reputation and money motivate creative production.
In particular, I think there is a strong claim that perhaps the leading motivator for creative production is "play." Much creativity, thoughout history, has been non-instrumental and non-utilitarian in the modern sense of those words. Rather creativity can be and has been, like Roger Caillois has said of play, an "occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money."
But what I'm wondering about now is how much the motivation of "play" actually draws upon the motivation that I focused on in the paper: the pursuit of social reputation. Perhaps some aspect of what we call "play" is largely about the pursuit of status? As exhibit A, I'd like to point to Dave Elfving's recent post about the similarities between the phenomenon of dorodango (explained here) and the joy(lessness) of the WoW grind.
According to Dave's take on dorodango: "It’s not the process that’s fun, it’s the end product and the potential for recognition that has the kids getting their hands dirty." And Dave ties this to the WoW grind, saying: "Players of MMORPG games are ultimately driven by a desire to improve their characters. It’s not about winning so much as it is about obtaining a massive, glowing, meat cleaver of a sword. A sword visible to everyone else playing the game."
So play in MMORPGs, at least in one player's view, becomes again a matter of seeking social recognition and enhanced reputation. Huizinga's magic circle is attractive to the player because it provides an opportunity for enhanced social status that is not afforded elsewhere. If this is true, then the real-money trade in virtual property should explicable (at least in part) as a Veblenesque instance of conspicuous consumption -- money is being transmuted into status. The reaction against the real-money trade is explicable in the same status terms -- the trade is an insult to the social status of those who consider themselves the true meritocracy. (Compare doping at the Tour de France.)
We've discussed Veblen's relevance to MMORPGs before at Terra Nova. But honestly, I'm not sure how much I buy into status-seeking as a primary motivator for play. It isn't clear to me that either Veblen or Caillois had a clear picture of the pleasures of play. Today, the economist Veblen is often criticized for basing his critique of conspicuous consumption upon what reads like a quasi-Puritanical faith in the virtue of material productivity. (As Brian Sutton-Smith points out in Chapter 11 of The Ambiguity of Play, this kind of approach doesn't bode well for play.)
And Caillois' statement about "pure waste" seems to reflect very similar sentiments -- the statement is made under the heading noting that in play "no goods are produced." Additionally, Caillois has been criticized for over-emphasizing the importance of agonistic modes of play, which lead inevitable to winners, losers, and status distinctions. For Caillois, even solo games such as crossword puzzles and flying kites are socially competitive. We always seem to play, according to Caillois, for an audience or against similar players elsewhere (see the beginning of Chapter III of Man, Play, and Games).
So I guess my question is this: Is Dave right that the primary motivator for the play of grind-intensive MMORPGs like WoW (and the making of dorodango) is the pursuit of social reputation? More generally, how much of the pleasure of "play" can be traced to the pleasure of social status that is found in "success" at play?
Photo credit: Eamonn Sullivan, who used a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license for the above picture of his first dorodango.
