[-empyre-] playing vs productivity (and what does it has to do with videogames?)

[Julian Raul Kücklich]

> I fear the issue might concern a political imperative. Playbour is that mode
> of play which has been rendered productive within the market economy. Our
> play is other's profits. Capital has managed to appropriate our down-time.
> Do we want our play to be productive in this context?

Simon, you summed it up concisely. This is precisely what I was trying 
to get at in my writings about "playbour" --- be it in the context of 
modding, massively multiplayer games, or FarmVille. David P. Marshal 
wrote about games being the perfect "intertextual commodity" --- a 
closed loop of gameplay, movie tie-ins, hardware, and advertising that 
seems increasingly hard to escape. What FarmVille does explicitly --- 
i.e. make players spokespersons for the game and spamming their facebook 
friends --- has been implicit in gaming culture for a long time. The 
"always-on(line)" mantra of contemporary PC and console games is another 
example of this worrying trend: you sign on, you are visible to your 
friends, your progress is made public, your purchasing decisions 
transparent, so it is becoming increasingly difficult to engage in 
"non-productive play".

Zynga seems on the verge of becoming a company without employees --- as 
everything that can be outsourced is outsourced to either third-party 
companies (e.g. in Bangalore, India) or directly to the player 
community. I can't really imagine a business model like that being 
sustainable in the long run, but meanwhile some people are making a lot 
of money.

Julian.

dr julian raul kuecklich

http://playability.de


Am 01.12.2010 12:02, schrieb Simon Biggs:
>> From: Georg Russegger<georg.russegger at ufg.ac.at>
>> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space<empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 08:23:36 +0100
>> To: soft_skinned_space<empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] playing vs productivity (and what does it has to do
>> with videogames?)
>>
>> is dualism helpful: playing vs. productivity. (it might be just a catchy
>> title)
>> wouldn't something linke "prdoductive playability" (i guess julian - hi from
>> austria - runs a blog with this title)
>> give the perspective on where play has its productive moments?
> I fear the issue might concern a political imperative. Playbour is that mode
> of play which has been rendered productive within the market economy. Our
> play is other's profits. Capital has managed to appropriate our down-time.
> Do we want our play to be productive in this context?
>
> For those who wish to critique or attack the economic hegemony we inhabit, a
> route to this is to ensure one's play is unproductive or, even better,
> anti-productive (eg: destructive). This is what I understand the Wombles and
> other groups are all about.
>
> Best
>
> Simon
>
>
> Simon Biggs
> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk  simon at littlepig.org.uk
> Skype: simonbiggsuk
> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
>
> Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/
> Creative Interdisciplinary Research in CoLlaborative Environments
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
> Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
> http://www.elmcip.net/
> Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
> http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
>
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