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

[Stephanie Donald]

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On 02/12/2010, at 4:24 AM, davin heckman <davinheckman at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
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