A popular phrase these days is “If you are not paying for it, you are the product” the thing is, with social media of all types - including multiplayer games, even if you are paying for it you are still the product, what’s more you are the workforce too.
That is, multiplayer play can be seen as a form of ‘productive leisure’ or more simply labour.
Looking more widely, a useful but perhaps gross simplification of the range of notions of play-labour may be seen as sitting on a continuum with utopian views of play at one end and dystopian views of digital labour at the other.
Ludotopian
At the utopian end there is the view that I term Ludotopianism (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2009/02/ludotopian.html) the idea the play outcomes can make the world a better place. The kinds of game that advocates of this ideology such as McGonigal (http://janemcgonigal.com/) espouse tend to be things such as ARG’s that requite an intense investment on the part of some players to achieve the game goals. While these goals are framed as socially good outcomes what is occurring in the practice of play is clearly a form of labour that is, in the most part, un-paid. Simpler versions are things like Google’s Image Labeler (http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/).
Ludocapitalism
At the other end of the spectrum is the dystopian view that: practices of digital production have been turned into a way of for the capitalist system to profit from our every action and inaction, making us willing participants in breakdown between leisure / work / home to the point that we enjoy the act of commoditising our identity.
Morini & Fumagalli reference Marx’s Das Kapital to provide a direct link with immaterial labour:
“No matter how variously working tasks or productive activities can be considered useful, it is a physiological truth that they are functions of the human organism, and that all these functions, their content and their shape are essentially expenditures of brain, nerves, muscles, human organs (Marx, 1964: 68)”
From this kind of link to classical Marxism the dystopian view of ‘free intangible labour’ has multiple facets. It charts a shift from a division of leisure and labour that were separated by space, time and practices; through ones where tele-working and mobile communications devices gradually eroded the barriers between home and work; to the present day state where our very expression of self is set within a prescribed valorized structure in which we constantly strive to perform ourself yet are simultaneously alienated.
Thinkers have variously described this as “shift from industrial-Fordist capitalism to biocapitalism” (Morini & Fumagalli) or “a ‘calculable’ person, ‘one who knows his or her value as calculated by an external, refereed source’” (Hearn citing Postman).
The production of digital artefacts that typifies much of the free labour we find on the net shares many of the characteristics of labour that has given foregrounded by a strain of feminist socialist critical theory. That is, the theories which posit that certain forms of labour are systematically dis-valued by capitals structures. This process involves both side-lining the practices outside the accepted sphere of production, defining them within the context of gender roles and negating facets such of the labour practice such as components of emotional labour. Typically such activities have included child rearing, domestic work and crafts.
Like these so-called feminized forms of labour, digital artefact production is also simultaneously marginalised from the norms of capitalist production and necessary to support those means of production. Digital production is variously framed in in terms of practices including: leisure (thus non-labour), craft or self-expression. Some forms of production of digital artefacts also require emotional labour through the expression of self in the creative act.
These creative acts feed the capitalist system – we either pay for hosting or we are spectacle and spectator, a social media ouroboros swimming in a sea of advertisements.
What’s more content in the expressions of opinion from ratings and ‘liking’ to blogs theorists of left might argue far from empower individuals as certain digital rhetorics have it. Rather, with this mode of digital production we fall into a system where power asymmetries (class distinctions) that are maintained if not strengthened through giving us the illusion of autonomy and empowerment. Further we are alternatively producer, consumer, spectator, judge in a cycle constructed entirely within the constrains of the capitalist ethos. Someone is making money from our individual or collective acts, and it’s not us. The biggest trick of all is that many fooled in to believing that this is some how in or best interest through the service of democracy.
Turning to social networks, critics from the left would argue - first, that far from being a simple leisure pursuit (as some may still think) the act of networking in the circumscribed mode that social networking software confines us to serves to increase our networked-social capital which in turn increases our value as a knowledge worker. More and more we are called upon or choose to use our social networks to solve problems for our employers. We use these networks to find our next job or next employee so cutting down on the costs of the hiring process and making the network every more vital.
‘Friending’ and ‘linking’ expands the work beyond the closed utility of networks for employers – these acts turn our relationships and very being into an on going process of creating and managing our identity and the identity of others. We digitise and evaluate our relationships in where the public and data mining software to count, evaluate and extrapolate us: ‘It’s X’s birthday in Y days – by them stuff”. The irreducible is reduced ‘It’s complicated is the most subtle relationship we can attain’. When we are not present, we are not poking, or swapping, our down time is as much a metric as our up time.
By carrying a mobile phone we create a trail of data that it of use to companies at the very least to optimise networks and at best as a sellable data item, to be re-combined and sold back to us.
Gamercommodification
What then of online games? This strain of leftist critic does not seem to have paid much attention to online gaming. Though they can be likened to many of the existing subjects of contemporary Marxist analysis. Multiplayer game practise often include elements found in the analysis of: free production of digital artefacts, crafting, reality TV, feminized work, and others.
The most blatant form of the type of ethos that critics from the left critique is the multiplayer Freemium model. Here those that play for free are given the ‘reward’ or payment of being able to play the game in return for playing the game. More specifically a mass of players is needed to create the in-game community from which the rest of the business model works. Either players consume advertising and or they embody a community that instantiate value in the digital goods they buy or ‘earn’ access to through play - would you buy a digital item that has the sole purpose of decorating your room for $10 if no one knew you had it? Maybe, but would you buy another?
Thus as players we are performer, spectators in a themed reality TV show where are acts are confined to those that the designers allow us and our expression of self is confined to the brand images we have a choice of – Warcraft is a brand. Even when we are given free rain, such as in Second Life, we have so internalised these structures that what do we do – reproduce them endlessly, we create to consume and through so doing strive towards our own sense of alienation.
As Molesworth (2007) has noted (and I have commented upon elsewhere) the notion of Flâneur is highly applicable to the online game experience. Virtual Spaces are constructed to support the gaze onto the world, onto each other and self-reflexively onto us. Got to any major city in WoW and you will observe a spectacle of display. Of course this all falls within a cycle of production and consumption into which we embed our identity only to have it commoditised and spat back out at us.
The next step in this mode of production includes acts such as Guild Membership, Alpha / Beta Testing, Fan Art, Machinima and wiki’s. Each of these requires a much deeper commitment to production and consumption of the game, but let’s move to the final set: guild leadership and Add-on / mod creation.
Add-on / mod creation was the practice that Kücklich picked out in his plabour piece – here the notion of free labour is brought into sharp focus. Add-ons for things like WoW are often free though enhance the game experience dramatically – many priests will say that it’s almost impossible to play WoW at a high level without HealBot. Hence this is a direct displacement of paid labour, what’s more some Add-on’s are effectively co-opted by Blizzard – the recent quest display system is oddly similar to the Add-on QuestHelper.
The mod scene also act as a form of training and picking ground for the games industry which is taken to the extreme through selectively elevating just enough mod writers etc. to industry status, and making a sufficient public performance of this that the community is incentivised to go on creating free works that drive the sales of boxed product.
So a Marxist might suggest that games and gamification (which is just an extension of willing complicity) are a capitalist triumph because they make us happily complicit in our own exploitation. And we have not even looked at the processes within games: Animal Crossing and early training to be a wage slave ‘my first mortgage’ – anyone, anyone?
People’s republic
One of the main criticisms levelled at the Marxist analysis of these contemporaneous practices is that the theory really relies on exploitation – but who’s being exploited?
Certainly there are elements of Social Networking where one can put forward an argument that people give away much more than they realise – there are various consequences of this that they the individual may not intend. Though the most exploitative must be acts such as identity theft which, I believe, falls outside the sort of exploitation that the far left seek to locate in the practices.
Focusing on multiplayer games – one can describe them in terms of free labour but this seems to ignore the nature of games and ignores the goods that players receive. For multiplayer games to work there must be some minimal level of co-operation, even if that is an agreement to be and opposing player. The nature of group play is that everyone plays for themselves and for each other in the sense that the ‘other’ is needed for the game to work.
Beyond this in games, and to a large degree in social networks, individual derive pleasures from the acts that above I’ve described in terms of free labour. Here I’m not denying that it is labour, but questioning whether an analysis based on presumptions of exploitation get to the important aspects of what’s going on.
While formally I reject the social contract description of games one might take on the language of the left and oppose the notion of MMOs as synthetic model of the capitalist system by seeing them much more like a commune where the labour of each is shared by all.
“Factions of Azeroth unite; you have nothing to lose but your buffs”
Kal Marksmaker, lvl 85 Goblin
Hearn, A. (2010), Structuring feeling: Web 2.0, online ranking and rating, and the digital 'reputation' economy, ephemera, volume 10, number 3/4 (nov 2010): http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/10-3/10-3hearn.pdf
Kücklich, J (2005),Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry, Fibre Culture Journal, Issue 5, 2005: http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-025-precarious-playbour-modders-and-the-digital-games-industry/
Malably, T., (2003), Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City, University of Illinois Press.
Molesworth, M. (2007), Monsters and the Mall: Videogames and the Scopic Regimes of Shopping, The University of Tokyo,
Situated Play: Proceedings of the 2007 Digital Games Research Association Conference: http://www.digra.org/dl/display_html?chid=07312.56350.pdf.
Morini, C. & Fumagalli, A. (2010), Life put to work: Towards a life theory of value, ephemera, volume 10, number 3/4 (nov 2010): http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/10-3/10-3morinifumagalli.pdf
Cool piece, Ren. I, too, have been wondering how to deal with this play-as-work phenomenon and how it fits into the standard labor/leisure paradigm, though my analysis as an economist is decidedly not Marxist in nature. But you've put an interesting spin on the question by pointing out that multiplayer gamers provide a service both to each other and to the game company.
One rather hand-wavy way to deal with this conundrum is to propose that the $14.99/mo is already discounted according to my own contribution to other players' enjoyment, and therefore to the company's profit. That is, but for the fact that I am enhancing the game for others, I would be charged, say, $15.50/mo instead. Perhaps in this alternative world, the company uses the extra revenues to hire people to play with me. Once the population reaches a critical mass, however, the 'paid extras' are no longer necessary. Consider that free trials get people to pay for the game, but also simply get a lot of people playing at once. In other words, companies take an initial hit in hopes of recouping the loss later on.
But I think its harder to come up with a suitable, standard economic answer to the question of why people engage in the tasks necessary to produce, say, Auctioneer or wowwiki, or to lead a raiding guild. Why do people labor to play? Lately I've been playing with the American Time Use Survey published by the BLS to ask whether certain classes of truly leisurely activities - whether watching television or throwing frisbee or painting or whatever - lead to people having higher incomes. It stretches the bounds of reason to suggest that, say, planting a garden is done for the purpose of gaining higher income in the future (and there is an enormous practical problem of establishing the direction of causation). Nevertheless, it would be nice to start teasing out some kind of explanation in economics of what leisure really is and why people engage in it, because up to this point it has received very little scrutiny.
Posted by: Isaac Knowles | Jun 14, 2011 at 04:05
In one of his Van Rijn stories Poul Anderson defined games as "work you don't have to do". I always thought that was very nicely put.
Posted by: Stabs | Jun 14, 2011 at 12:17
Isaac > Perhaps in this alternative world, the company uses the extra revenues to hire people to play with me. Once the population reaches a critical mass, however, the 'paid extras' are no longer necessary. Consider that free trials get people to pay for the game, but also simply get a lot of people playing at once. In other words, companies take an initial hit in hopes of recouping the loss later on.
One point I meant to make in the more whimsical section that seemed to drop out during editing was the proposition that at a certain critical point companies should pay guild leaders as the lifetime in-direct value of a guild leader is so high that it’s worth the small margin to keep them.
In a sense companies to pay to get players, they just don’t pay the players they pay other companies. In the more ‘casual’ market and more and more in the freemium market metrics such as Customer Acquisition cost vs Life Time Value become much more important.
> But I think its harder to come up with a suitable, standard economic answer to the question of why people engage in the tasks necessary to produce, say, Auctioneer or wowwiki, or to lead a raiding guild. Why do people labor to play?
Is this ‘the problem of altruism’ or something different?
I'm always a bit suspect of economics as from a non-economist point of view it seems to have problems like this, which suggests to me it’s models have the wrong motivation set.
Is this a psychological question? Maybe people create wiki pages etc because they enjoy it - they like to see the fruits of their labour, as an added bonus other people get to use their stuff, which is nice, and may reflect on them positively.
> Nevertheless, it would be nice to start teasing out some kind of explanation in economics of what leisure really is and why people engage in it, because up to this point it has received very little scrutiny.
That’s interesting. Is it because it’s fundamentally too challenging? Is there an economics world view that the world does not fit into?
Perhaps the fact that a lot of our leisure is conducted in a space where it can be defined and counted is a great help for economists etc as we have much better data than we did for gardening or other pursuits you mention.
Also there was a recent study about productivity and how time off makes people more productive (and I think creative). So if we wanted to draw a line between work and leisure then maybe it’s any form of leisure at a first analysis – I guess this must have been done, I’m soo not an economist.
Posted by: Ren Reynolds | Jun 14, 2011 at 13:10
Ren > Is this ‘the problem of altruism’ or something different?
Well, I think that depends on your views on what altruism actually is. From the evolutionary
psychologist's perspective, it seems as if all altruism comes down to a question of how it benefits the purveyor of altruistic acts. Similarly, (mainstream) economists usually understand altruism as a quid pro quo : What I do benefits others as what others do benefits me.
> Maybe people create wiki pages etc because they enjoy it - they like to see the fruits of their labour, as an added bonus other people get to use their stuff, which is nice, and may reflect on them positively.
I'd say this is a correct description, but I don't think it escapes utility analysis. If, relative to its costs, an action brings me more pleasure than all alternative actions, then I will take that action. So if formatting and distributing information and the appreciation of my work by others makes me happier than any alternative action, and if the cost of doing so is small enough, then why wouldn't I write wiki articles? Any economic analysis of individual action is based on a highly formalized utilitarianism, which is fundamentally a psychological theory of human motivations.
The leisure/labor paradigm leads to some obvious problems. As Gary Becker pointed out in a classic paper in 1965, we don't simply consume leisure as if it were a pill. We also expend time on it. To me, this sounds an awful lot like leisure itself is something that we are laboring at. So how does one escape the conclusion that leisure is not just a mislabeled form of labor?
As for why the area is untouched, it could be that labor economists see their job as one of explaining the micro-level causes of the economic fortunes and failures of the individual person or of individual markets. Research in this area is of great interest to policy-makers, and I think much of the value of economists to society derives from their highly formalized system of theoretical and empirical tools, because it allows them to give straight answers to straight questions. But our usual assumption about government is that it seeks to improve social welfare. So, if people are better off with 'more' leisure or are more productive with 'more' leisure, then you should encourage it, right? So it is with that idea in mind that I want to pursue the question more vigorously. What is leisure, how does it create value, and then how can it be manipulated to improve welfare?
Posted by: Isaac Knowles | Jun 14, 2011 at 18:14
Isaac,
Thx for the reference, I'll read the paper.
Isaac Knowles > To me, this sounds an awful lot like leisure itself is something that we are laboring at. So how does one escape the conclusion that leisure is not just a mislabeled form of labor?
My lack of understanding of how terms are used in Economics makes it hard for me to say something useful here. I guess the issue comes down to what the terms connote on your field, I'm not sure why leisure cannot be a form of labour that has as specific set of intentions and intended outcomes, functionally it can be exactly the same as labour in many respects, functional descriptions are often lacking.
I certainly support your urge to research this more. In the policy circles that I hang out in it does seem that notions of leisure are no the proper subject of a policy debate - so I can see why this area has been overlooked by parts of the academy that see it as part of their role to influence the debate.
Posted by: Ren Reynolds | Jun 19, 2011 at 16:14
Is this not another instance of a particular kind of issue that suffers from its vulnerability to subjective personal interpretation? If I enjoy doing it, it's leisure. You can call it whatever you want; it's not your reality I'm experiencing. In that case you need to make me understand why your interpretation matters or should matter to me, i.e., so what?
My own interest in the subject of playbour or whatever you want to call it, is that we can't seem to achieve it in the workplace. But, to the extent it functions AS leisure time for the playbour worker, it may be absolutely impossible by definition to have the same phenom. arise at work (although, isn't this what actors are always saying when they accept their Academy Award? "I'm so lucky I get to work at something I enjoy doing so much." Yah bro, I'm jelly.)
Posted by: Lindax | Jun 29, 2011 at 14:52
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.101.4.1601
That's an article just published in the American Economic Review discussing the importance of group size to willingness to contribute to public goods. In this case, its a natural experiment using Chinese Wikipedia contributions around a particular time period in which the government blocked access to the site. They find that when the block goes into effect, the amount of contributions from unlocked individuals falls precipitously. Contributes to evidence that what really drives people is amount of enjoyment others get from their work. More deeply, it means that the quantity of usage of the resource I produce matters for how much I am willing to produce.
Posted by: Isaac Knowles | Jun 29, 2011 at 15:01