Playbour

Description

Julian Kucklich:

"If we assume that play is distinct from "ordinary life" (Huizinga), and that it constitutes an "occasion of pure waste" (Caillois), then playbour is the re-entry of ordinary life into play, with a concomitant valorization of play activities. Insofar as life (bios) is always productive, and be it only in the sense that it produces waste, the extraction of value from play can be seen as a form of waste management; and insofar as play can be seen as a waste of time, the logic of playbour demands that time be wasted efficiently. In this sense we could also call playbour the Taylorization of leisure. Like other forms of affective or immaterial labour, playbour is not productive in the sense of resulting in a product, but it is the process itself that generates value. The means of production are the players themselves, but insofar as they only exist within play environments by virtue of their representations, and their representations are usually owned by the providers of these environments, the players cannot be said to be fully in control of these means. Playbour is suffused with an ideology of play, which effectively masks labour as play, and disguises the process of self-expropriation as self-expression. However, exploitation and empowerment, subjectification and objectification, wastefulness and efficiency coexist in the ambiguous "third space" of playbour, where these binary oppositions break down, and thus open up new possibilities of intersubjectification." (idc mailing list June 2009)

More Information

1. Essay: precarious playbour. modders and the digital games industry. fibreculture, 3.5. By julian r. kücklich
2. Conference presentation: precarious playbour. modders and the digital games industry, paper presented at the creative gamers seminar, hypermedia lab, university of tampere.