Playing, Gaming, Working and Labouring: Framing the Con-cepts and Relations

Abstract

Abstract: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.

The Digital Spatial Fix

“…For example, Vincent Mosco's analysis of the disjoint between the ideology of technological utopianism and the material economic effects is the core of his work both on the early dot-com boom (2005) and his recent work on the realities of cloud computing (2014). Studies of audience labour online (Nixon 2014), intellectual property and rent extraction (Rigi 2014), and the relationship between games and labour (Lund 2014) have all utilized Smythe's typology. In a similar vein, but not necessarily engaged with Smythe's work specifi-cally, Dyer-Witheford (1999; and Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) have contextualized communication and cultural industries with theories of autonomist Marxism, communisation theory, game studies and Deleuze's (1992) later work.…”

“…More often, however, commodities are created by fiat of the company that operates and owns the game. The object is bought directly from the developer, or created through an act labour and play, sometimes called "playbour" or play-labour (Kücklich 2005;Lund 2014), that is required by the developer.…”

Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism

“…In this age of digital abundance, it seemed to be enough in the new economy for everybody, without there being any conflicts (Barbrook & Cameron, 1995;Barbrook & Cameron, 1996;Kelly, 1998). The autonomist Marxists' notion of a post-Fordist social worker, created by the cycle of struggle which they see as the driving force behind capitalism's evolution (Negri, 1988), and Paolo Virno's development of Marx's notion of an era of general intellect, which includes knowledge and social interaction as productive living labour (Virno, 1996: 266, 270-1), open up our thinking to a different society than the vitalized and abundant capitalism propagated by the apologetics of the Californian Ideology who do not see any difference in principle between commercially managed crowdsourcing and peer production 1 Lund, 2014;Tapscott & Williams, 2010).…”

Introduction: From the Notion of Spectacle to Spectacle 2.0: The Dialectic of Capitalist Mediations

“…Such a condition may be considered as an amplification of the original Debordian Spectacle, as it seems to have generated a kind of media driven labour that colonizes almost all spheres of social life and it appears to be one of the most powerful exemplifications of the mediating power of the Spectacle. In fact, from the point of view of the entertainment economy, the saturation of social life by mediated images and the fact the same media metaphors are used for labour and leisure (Lund 2014) could be taken as evidence of the pervasive power of the Spectacle to provide reciprocal conceptual and linguistic translation from disparate phenomena. From this perspective, the logic of Spectacle 2.0 can be seen as so pervasive to collapse and blur the traditional Marxist distinction between work and labour, between genuine creative tendencies and their alienated alter.…”