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

[davin heckman]

I think Simon's concern as well as Julian's followup point to
something really significant.  Aside from being economically
unsustainable for a company to produce such games.....  I suspect that
it is socially unsustainable, as well.

My sense (and I guess that I am simply being optimistic here) is that
if such a model continues and becomes dominant, either people will
abandon it wholesale OR human culture will have to be altered in such
a fundamental way that it will become unrecognizable.

The fact remains that in order to make money off "play," such work has
to successfully pass itself off as play.  But work, for its own sake,
always requires some motivation (self-benefit, communal benefit, fear
of discomfort, fear of the lash, etc.).  At the extreme fringes of
coercion, people are always looking to escape such work, to subvert
it, to free themselves from it, etc.

And while there is a great region of slack within which people can
rationalize work for a period of time as play, can play and tell
themselves they are getting work done, or can be fooled into thinking
they are doing one while actually doing the other....  in each case
this requires a misrecognition in order to happen.  In other words,
the perception must be inaccurately cognitized (misrecognized).  From
here, misrecognition is either further rationalized (transformed into
a different type of play) or rejected.  In simpler terms, people like
to play, but not to be played.  Some people even like being "used,"
provided they can conceptualize their "use" as something that they
control, comprehend, rationalize, etc.  Some people can be fooled into
being used.  But people, on the whole, seem unhappy as mere
instruments.  People strive for meaning, even if it is only of the
most stripped-down, existentialist flavor.

The most extreme example of such a totalizing play is money.  People
do get very wrapped up in the accumulation of merit by way of
arbitrary tokens.  But even still, these tokens, like the labor they
represent, are forever being translated into real or imaginary
strategies of gaming the system (winning lotteries, hitting jackpots,
striking it rich, saving money, improving your salary, the all you can
eat buffet, inventing the next paperclip, etc).  Yet, in spite of
this, most people I know seem to work with the understanding that the
system itself is not the purpose of life.  And the fewer strategies
they have for gaining strategic benefit within the system of play and
the greater the awareness they have of the various ways in which the
game is rigged, the less content they are to work within the system,
to ascribe meaning to it, to take pleasure in the sort of games that
exploit the player.

I don't want to pretend that people don't get routinely taken
advantage of....  and that our backdrop of change and innovation is
the source of a great siphoning away of capital.  But I also want to
guard against fatalism.  All these imaginary credits and tokens and
wins and losses are only relative injustices.  The place where they
become immediately urgent are at the fringes of need, where people
starve and thirst, shiver and bleed.  The number of imaginary tokens
generated by the manipulation of imaginary tokens is most significant
when the energy devoted to honoring these tokens conceals or obscures
more basic needs.

And, here, I think, might be the real urgent question about the
various games we play: Where do we place our attention?  How do we
form our notions of what's real and imaginary?

As an aside....  you might get a kick out of Susan Willis' "Playing
the Penny Slots"  Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol
2, No 2 (2007):
http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/viewFile/299/292

Davin

2010/12/1 Julian Raul Kücklich <julian at kuecklich.de>:
>> 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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