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

Fri Dec 3 23:08:10 EST 2010

Hi Davin,

I agree with your analysis: outsourcing work to players is not only 
economically but also socially unsustainable. However, I am not sure 
people will opt out of this system even if they are aware of its 
exploitative character. If we look at social networking behemoths such 
as facebook, it seems evident that users are engaged in a form of 
affective labour, which is both narcissistically gratifying, and 
self-exploitative. This double bind is characteristic for the forms of 
"free labour" investigated by people like Tiziana Terranova, and seems 
increasingly hard to break in societies which increasingly rely on 
computer-mediated communication.

Does that mean "human culture will have to be altered in such a 
fundamental way that it will become unrecognizable"? Not sure. First of 
all, we are all agents of change, be it willingly or unwillingly, so 
whatever results from these transformations will still be recognizable 
as a form of culture. I think we must recognize that everyone who 
participates in any kind of social discourse (including the members of 
this list) is also involved in the production of subjectivity. In my 
recent research, I have been trying to conceptualize this is in Deleuze 
and Guattari's terms as a form of machinic (or algorithmic) 
subjectivity. Alternatively, this could be seen as a way of 
"reassembling the social" (Latour) which grants non-human actors much 
greater agency.

So what is ultimatey at stake is what David Golumbia calls the cultural 
logic of computation, and the way we deal with it. While quite a few 
people seem to simply accept it as the dominant paradigm of our time, 
others attempt to reject it outright, and insist on the intrinsic 
non-computational core of human subjectivity. However, it stands to 
reason that there is a different mode of subjectification, which 
oscillates between surrender and resistance. I like to think that it is 
a form of play that constitutes this mode, although not in the many 
impoverished forms presented to us as entertainment. I certainly see an 
inkling of this in (sub-cultural) scenes such as alternate reality 
gaming, which has at least the potential to radically challenge our 
preconceptions, and bring people together in new social formations.

Julian.

dr julian raul kuecklich

http://playability.de

Am 01.12.2010 18:24, schrieb 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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>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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