Playbour

Work Hard, Play Harder. Labour, Playbour and the Ideology of Play

Julian Kücklich, MD.H Berlin

Modding as Playbour

Modding as Playbour

• Textual poaching?• Free labour? • Crowdsourcing? • Exploitation?• Productive play? • A waste of time? • Playbour?

What is Playbour?

• Playbour is not work but it is also not not work• Like play, playbour is usually voluntary and it

is engaged in for its own sake• However, it is also a productive activity,

although its products are usually immaterial (intellectual property, community, etc.)

• This makes it hard to reconcile with traditional conceptualizations of work and play

The Ideology of Play

• In settings such as massively multiplayer games, playbour is often masked by an ideology of play

• While the laborious character of these games is all too obvious, the generation of value is put under erasure

• In these settings, the value of playbour resides mainly in its creation of social ties

The Ideology of Play

• In a similar way, the affective labour of members of social networking sites (Facebook, Flickr, etc.) is cloaked by an ideology of play

• Additionally, collusion between providers and users blurs the line between paid and unpaid workers

• Alienation is the result of disowning (entäussern) of personal information

Playbour and Exploitation

• This allows us to see that exploitation is underwritten not only by processes of objectification but also of subjectification

• Subjectification and objectification are intertwined and embedded in a form of multitudinous intersubjectivity

• Exploitation is then not simply the reduction of a human being to a commodity but a complex process of alienation and liberation

The Mechanical Turk

The Mechanical Turk

• The Mechanical Turk is a machine within which a human pretends to be a machine

• It is a metaphor of the plight of immaterial labourers on the internet, who are hidden, yet exposed, and who have to perform with virtuosity

• The Mechanical Turk can represent both the playbourers of digital games production and the virtuosos of social networking

The Mechanical Turk

• It is also evident that the Mechanical Turk is a “deludic” device, which is intended to trick players into thinking they are playing against a machine

• This draws attention to the possibilities of deludic strategies of resistance and refusal, such as disinformation or “grief play”