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.
The idea of play as labour or games as productive or play / work not being opposites - is not new. Kücklich (2005) wrote Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry, where he looked at modding culture as a particular form of labour within emerging play practices. Malaby (2003) wrote about the cultural use of games and gambling in Greece as a way to manage uncertainty through, in part, the production of determinative outcomes; and many here and elsewhere have long rejected the play / work dichotomy.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
Brett Arends of the Wall Street Journal offers ten reasons why he does NOT want an iPad for Christmas. Reason number 7: The games. Writes Arends:
"Yes, they're great. But that's the problem. Computer games are as addictive as cigarettes. And this is a habit everyone is taking up, not quitting. This is why I dumped my iPod Touch. Am I alone? Maybe. But I don't think so. I know lots of people with horror stories about addiction to immersive games. Someone I know—now, as it happens, a British member of parliament—once sat down to play Civilization, a role-playing game, on a PC one Saturday evening and didn't finish until three o'clock ... Thursday morning. (He stopped when he ran out of cigarettes.) And that was on an old PC. Games on the iPad are more intense than ever. A friend recently showed me some of the serious news apps on his iPad. I noticed that to get to them he first had to "wave" us past several screens of games. Is he really using his iPad to read that article about the Indonesian economy, or is he playing Angry Birds? Hmmm. You make the call."
On IGN, an announcement for the Michael Jackson MMO we've all been waiting for: Planet Michael. The announcer 'couldn't stop laughing'. No violence. You win using 'the power of dance'. Using your keyboard, not your actual body. Free to play. Virtual items will be available for 'real-world currency'. Charitable contributions enabled.
From the press release:
Planet Michael will be an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael’s music, his life and the global issues that concerned him. Entire continents will be created that will celebrate Michael’s unique genius in a way that underscores his place as the greatest artist of all time. Michael’s longtime fans will feel at home as they find themselves in places that seem familiar and yet unknown at the same time, and new generations will discover and experience Michael’s life in a way never before imagined. At its core, Planet Michael is a massive social gaming experience that will allow everyone, from the hardcore fan to the novice, to connect and engage in collaborative in-game activities with people worldwide.
Though my initial inclination was to disparage, maybe this could work... MMO universes drawn from the world-views of famous individuals. Elvis-verse? BeatlesWorld? DalaiLamaUniverse? PicassoPlanet? LadyGagaLand! I'm impressed that Planet Michael's mechanics are designed to uphold his pacifist leaning and philanthropic efforts, and I can imagine that forays into his imaginings are ripe with possibility <chortle>.
I predict the vanity MMO will become a trend, and as much as I hate to say it, could be the break-through-to-the-mainstream (the Second Life commercial push all over again). What do you all think? Will we see the Housewives of Beverly Hills obsessed with their first virtual worlds?
According to a four-page article in today's New York Times, there's this 3D virtual site called Second Life where people can log on and make virtual houses. This one guy actually made a Mexican-style "villa", in a virtual "neighborhood." He says his virtual "neighbors" come over for visits with their "avatar", just like in the real world. Huh!
It's called First Life. Read a beta review here.
"Three Mages form a PuG only to discover they share the ‘follow yonder star and drop off phat l00t’ quest."
your turn,,,
A template for a safe game (from the makers of the notoriously dangerous and unhealthy GTA, surprisingly enough) has emerged at the Tokyo Game Show, as reported in America's finest news source.
As the elves continue working on the Ludium's final report (which should be out in a couple of weeks), they came across the following footage. Courtesy of documentarian Jeanette Castillo.
I’ve cracked this whole MMO marketing thang,,,
Yup, the secret appears to be - put the word ‘war’ in your title.
This staggeringly obvious observation only hit me the other day when someone in the TN office mentioned that they too were liable to get confused between Warcraft and Warhammer (the project which, like a rugby ball (or small slippery pig), seems to have been dropped and picked up again and is now in the hands of Mythic).
Then I thought: hold on, Warcraft, Warhammer, Star Wars Galaxies, and the latest big-hitter Guildwars (reputed to have 250k accounts already!) , what -is- it with 'war' all of a sudden?
Taking the lead from the MMO marketing gurus, surely the public is crying out for Warring Warriors of War World - how could it fail?
Those of a trivial disposition might want to suggest best / worst MMO titles or imagineer some of their own.
No, this one.
It hurts all the time now. And I know why. It’s WoW. I thought it was just me then I read Tanya Krzywinska’s latest “Hardcore” piece over at DiGRA where she talks about WoW and “the toleration of aching shoulders”.
I realised last night that my ache comes specifically from holding down the right mouse button to navigate or the left to move the camera view while I run.
Which made me think: is each computer game typified by its own unique set of self inflicted injuries?
EQ-finger anyone?
Oh, and does anyone else have WoW-shoulder and do you know any good stretching exercises?
PainStation pfft!!
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We're confident this tool will improve the site. Enjoy!
It is humbling almost to the point of despair to discover that fifteen dozen screenfuls of ponderous commentary produced by a small liberal-arts faculty's worth of beardy gamer geeks can, with almost zero loss of insight, be reduced to the three panels of a Penny Arcade cartoon.
Blizzard's two-headed ogres were a joke, as was my riff on them. But the best gag of the day was from eGenesis and A Tale in the Desert...
Ren referenced David Wong's brilliant article about the impending video game crash and it deserved a link here. A typically brilliant mix of fact and humor, it deserved a front page link to the three people who hit this site without having read /.
Apparently the result of some kind of concerted campaign of disruption, the NPC was first reported about 12 hours ago in Lineage, Ragnarok, and Final Fantasy Online. Several hours later it (apparently 'he') appeared briefly in Anarchy Online and the Euro servers of Dark Age of Camelot and EverQuest. Five hours after that he was sighted in Camelot's US-Based servers, then, about ten minutes ago, in SOE's EverQuest/US and Star Wars Galaxies servers, and EA's Sims Online cities.
The mob appears to be a magic-user NPC, as he wears red cloth armor and equips a prodigious tomb or book. He has a number of deerlike familiars, though whether the pets are summoned or charmed or tamed is unclear. Another critical piece of equipment is a large red vehicle that was observed to sustain amazing top speeds and unheard-of maneuverability ratings.
The NPC's book seems to enable some sort of faction check against a PC who hails him, because, while the NPC does not give out quests, he does distribute an item apparently based on this faction check. There were some clear patterns in the loot table, i.e., with necromancers, cabalists, warlocks, any lizard race characters, and Star Wars Imperials tending to receive either A Potato or A Piece of Coal, neither of which had any special properties and appeared to be junk. Clerics, Paladins, and overt Star Wars Rebels seemed most frequently to receive a rather nice item, often one they had been wishing for. A bug seems to block the faction check against most dark elf, drow, twilek, zabrak, and fiend-type females, as if the NPC could not decide whether they were naughty or nice. The NPC was especially kind to all players on Firiona Vie (EQ), Guinivere, Percival, and Nimue (Camelot), while distributing literally tons of coal on servers like the Zeks in EQ, and UO's PvP shards. In Sims Online cities, the NPC seemed to fall into a serious pathing error, running from house to house distributing coal and potato items without responding to any hails or faction-check attempts, then de-spawning abruptly. Moreover, in all worlds, players who had been sitting in one spot continuously for more than ten hours, doing the same thing over and over and over, always got A Potato. Other attributes that led to bad faction: using numbers in place of letters in chat; kill-stealing; camp hogging; running a brothel; twinking; eBaying; doing academic research. Good faction came from role-playing, helping newbies, guild leadership, and being witty from time to time.
We await some information from devs of these worlds to determine whether this was an outside intervention or some sort of collective scheme. Early reports suggest that the player base is outraged at this obvious attempt to tie a loot-distribution system to player behavior. In most worlds, we can expect server roll-backs to 11:59pm December 24, then life as usual again.
And he's got a point. Read more here.