#playbour

122 days until submission (perhaps)

plan for today: bake bread, go to Kew to read some papers

WEEK 10: SOCIAL GAMING, PLAYING THE CROWD

Hi all, Second last blog post and I have to admit, I’m not particularly experienced in or fond of the gaming industry. No, I most certainly do not help the stereotype that all gamers are male in the slightest.  I do however remember growing up playing Space Invaders on our old PC computer, and having the occasional game of Mario Kart on the Play Station 4 with my brothers. While all these experiences were purely leisurely activities revolving around entertainment and bonding, the gaming industry, as we know it today has changed in both the horizontal and vertical sense. Vertically, there’s literally more games and mediums to play said games than ever, however, today I’d prefer to focus on the expansion of games in the horizontal sense.   Horizontally, the gaming industry has changed dramatically. Today the affordances of games allow any old Tom, Dick or Harry to contribute to a game simply by playing it, allowing for the creators to extract the relevant data. Why bother? Game modders, or those who make changes to games by code and content modification often “take creative risks that the creators eschews” (Goggin, 2011, p. 362). This blurring of the lines between play and providing a free service to game creators is often referred to as playbour. Whether or not this boarders on exploitation is however purely a matter of opinion (De Zwart & Humpherys, 2014). Which brings me to my opinion, which is based merely on a week’s education on the topic so bare with me. I believe that playbour is perfectly acceptable, even beneficial. It can certainly help game developers tweak and adapt games to make them more enjoyable to the public. Furthermore, the use of playbour may very well allow developers to keep the cost of the game down, a win for the public. (Guys, I hear making games is expensive.) As Goggin (2011) explains playbour is purely based on the notion that individuals view the tasks as an extension of play or get some entertainment from them. If they didn’t want to do the tasks they wouldn’t; no money means there’s no contracts, no overbearing bosses, no consequences.

Side note alert!

Just FYI, Goggin (2011) makes an extremely interesting observation that the once segregated spheres of work and play have come together not only in a play-work sense like the gamer example, but too in a work-play sense with workplaces wanting employees to be actively enjoying themselves within the workplace. This is being seen more and more in contemporary workplaces that are set up in a way that fosters fun within the workplace. Google Headquarters is a common example of this with millions of dollars spent in design that prompts “serious play, deep teamwork, and a holistically engaged staff” (Perkins, 2011).

Somebody recently asked me for a list of relevant material in you’re interested in teaching or learning about the intersection between labour and (digital) games. Here’s a brief list I just cooked up from my Zotero files. 

 Bogost, I. (2011a). Shit Crayons. Presented at the Game Developers Conference, San Fransisco. Retrieved from http://www.bogost.com/writing/shit_crayons.shtml    

Bogost, I. (2011b, May 3). Persuasive Games: Exploitationware. Gamasutra.com. Retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php   

  Castronova, E. (2001). Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier. CESifo Working Paper Series No. 618.    

Dibbell, J. (2003, January). The Unreal Estate Boom. Wired Magazine, (11.01).    

Dibbell, J. (2009). The Chinese Game Room: Play, Productivity and Computing at their Limits. Artifact, 2(2), 82–87.    

Golumbia, D. (2009). Games without Play. New Literary History, 40, 179–204.    

Hemsath, D., & Yerkes, L. (1997). 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.    

Joseph, D., & Williams, I. (2015). Games Without Wages. Retrieved from https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/modders-video-game-industry-valve-steam/   

  Kücklich, J. (2005). Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry. The Fibreculture Journal, 5. Retrieved from http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-025-precarious-playbour-modders-and-the-digital-games-industry/    

Nelson, M. (2012). Soviet and American Precursors to the Gamification of Work. In Proceedings of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference (pp. 23–26). Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2115483    

Pearce, C. (2006). Productive Play: Game Culture From the Bottom Up. Games and Culture, 1.1, 17–24.    

Postigo, H. (2003). From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-Industrial Transitions from Leisure to Work. Information, Communication & Society, (6:4), 593–607.    

Sotamaa, O. (2007). On Modder Labour, commodification of play, and mod competitions. First Monday, 12.9. Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2006/1881    

Terranova, T. (2003). Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Electronic Book Review. Retrieved from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary    

 The convergence of New Medias into today’s society has reconfigured the working markets and economic practices. Whereas in previous years, labor was a purely physical entity; times have shifted to allow digitalization and for maximized efficiency.

 Our new work practices can be seen as constantly evolving entities that allow global networking and instantaneous interaction. Time is now timeless, distance now irrelevant. New Media forms allow workplace flexibility and adaptability, whilst engaging core components of live marketing by being able to target audiences directly and effectively through monitoring respective interests from afar. In particular social media users i.e. Facebook, willingly feature their interests as prey for major companies who can seek out their likes, dislikes, needs and wishes and use this as a marketing advantage. Tim Andersen from The Guardian sums up what power this new hybrid engagement can have if done correctly in his article about real-time marketing

 “The power of social media is that it enables a new level of engagement between businesses and their customers, with the potential not only for insight into what is working and what is not, but also changed attitudes across the company thanks to direct feedback on the outcome of their efforts. That is the kind of real-time social media interaction that is worth striving for.” (2011).

 The progress in social media and the changing work landscape has developed in such a way that brands themselves can not only act as people would on social media sites, audiences expect it. It also has truly paved the way for audience engagement and allowing the public to have their say, and do their part to help spread word or make a true difference.

 Crowdsourcing in particular has become a huge component of digitalized marketing. Used to help companies sort through their products, gain ideas and develop companies, its huge potential has made way for many global scale successes and innovation. Facebook and Google are major players that utilize crowdsourcing well by openly giving away their codes to others in a bid redevelop their software. The key to the popularity of the event, seems to be that it actually feels like and event and something that others want to be a part of.

  ‘Work’ has become more social, more involved and participatory in most respects, demands the attention from producers and consumers; both now needing each other to survive. The blurring of private, social and professional practice of employees; now instigated at the hands of their employers, openly harnessing ‘Playbour’ (exploitable labor that feels like play) to get the best out of not only their employees, but consumers as well.

 Whilst this is a great initiative for some companies it is challenging to accept the ideas that no play comes for free anymore. The haze between voluntary and unsolicited or unknown work is constantly on the rise and just like musicians who play for free for the ‘exposure’, audience members are doing their best to come up with the latest and greatest idea that helps build upon a company’s reputation. In an instance, Google reps approached several prominent artists asking if they would allow their site to use their work for free, under the guise that their work would be seen by millions across the globe. Nearly 200 declined responses came through with artists disgruntled that a company that is worth billions is still too cheap to pay for the work they ask of others.

So, how long will it be until our addiction to social media plays havoc with our real-time lives and work and we truly become the ones working for free in a bid to expose ourselves?

  REFRENCES:

Books

  Gilpin, Dawn R, (2011). Chapter 11 : Working the Twittersphere : Microblogging as Professional Identity Construction. In Papacharissi, Zizi, A networked self : identity, community, and culture on social network sites, (pp.232 - 250). New York: Routledge. 

Fuchs, Christian, (2013). Chapter 5 : The Power and Political Economy of Social Media. In Fuchs, Christian, Social media : a critical introduction, (pp.97 - 125). London, UK: Sage Publications. 

 Online

  Use Their Work Free? Artists Say No to Google - NYTimes.com. 2014. Use Their Work Free? Artists Say No to Google - NYTimes.com.  Accessed 29 March, 2014.

Available at:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/business/media/15illo.html?_r=0.

10 Crowdsourcing Success Stories - InformationWeek. 2014. 10 Crowdsourcing Success Stories - InformationWeek. Accessed 29 March 2014

Available at:http://www.informationweek.com/10-crowdsourcing-success-stories/d/d-id/1096464.

 Real-time marketing done right means a focus on the customer | Technology | theguardian.com . 2014. Real-time marketing done right means a focus on the customer | Technology | theguardian.com . Accessed 29 March 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52CqKIR0rVM

If you don't pay the product, you are the product.

Davide Bevilacqua Considered texts: Schumpeter's Down with the fun. http://www.economist.com/node/17035923

Kücklich's article about the modder's culture. http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-025-precarious-playbour-modders-and-the-digital-games-industry/

A definition of Playbour from http://p2pfoundation.net/Playbour that refers to Kücklich and Christian Fuchs.

The topic is playbour, a new kind of relation between play and work, the first two articles deal in two opposite directions. Schumpeter writes about the fun at work, a tendency that became usual in the creative industry, in which workers are somehow stimulated and forced to have fun at work through really strict or structured activities. This can be considered as a way of providing a pleasant working environment, but on the other way tries to involve the worker continuously in a kind of feature of the brand.

The critical point stays where the fun is that much regulated that the freedom of play is completely denied. Still the topic relays on a layer of fun, happiness and lust added to a working environment.

From the opposite front, playbour is also related to a specific productive situation that is voluntary-based and has a special relation with the industry. Kücklich refers to the very particular sub-culture of the videogame modders. They deal with an hobby that produces actually an outcome that is not directly quantifiable, but is nonetheless related to the economy of the videogame industry. Here the point lays in the intellectual property of the products and the exploitation that the industry practices on those mods. Compared to openSource as an opposition to the industry, it is still very much related to the main market, even if collective voluntary work. In this case the relation among producers, contributors and simple consumers are changing but often is just a matter of consciousness about the various statuses and attributions. The last text is actually much more abstract and deals more with the concepts of work and leisure in the contemporary culture, which, as we see, are converging and confused. Playbour is in effect the coming back of the ordinary life in a moment, the play, that is actually separated from it due to its particular essence.