Currently circling around two main questions:
How does our perception of “play” influence how we value artistic labor?
AND
How is labor portrayed through games and play?
“Play” as a term calls to mind the imagination, childhood, and freedom; it carries a certain frivolous quality. Accordingly, play can easily be seen as an inessential and extraneous component of society, one which largely serves to distract our attention from the more pressing functions of the human body within modern society – namely, labor.
Labor permeates our world. And so, when our prevailing view of artistic endeavors is that they are “play” – relegating them to the realm of children – what does that say about how society values art and artistic labor?
Where play does find an “appropriate” place in labor, it’s often where it improves labor efficiency or employee retainage, all to the direct benefit of the employers rather than the workers. Through gamification mechanisms, the structures of games can be readily applied to the workplace as a means of capturing the employee’s attention and engagement and directing it wherever management deems necessary.
And so employee training modules come with corresponding badges and stickers, and reaching certain metrics lets you select from different tiers of gifts in the employee store, and IT will purposefully send phishing emails to test their employees. All of these have taken place in my workplace within the past week, and despite my knowledge of gamification and all its pitfalls, I can’t resist engaging because I want to beat IT at their game, or because I want the cute NYC DEP beanie at a discounted rate. These gentle prods and motivational schemas inherent to game structures certainly carry a more pernicious quality once you’re outside of the magic circle.
How do the fantastical possibilities afforded to game designers by modern technology and computing power, square up to the more mundane renditions of labor within the medium and play’s application to the modern workplace?
Popular early arcade games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Missile Command, all attempted to simulate some form of alien invasion or warfare, slotting the user squarely into fantastical simulations of warfare. However, limitations in technology at this stage meant that users could only ever perform a limited set of tasks and functions in a given game ; so although you could face off against different variants of enemies with their own unique movement patterns, the goal was typically singular – you aim to survive as long as possible within a strict rules-based environment. The structures that motivate this type of repetitive work-like behavior inherent to these games find many analogs in the gamification mechanisms employed in workplaces. In this case “survival” takes on a more tangible, economic form.
Of course, as opposed to actual labor, the stakes are low with these games – typically a few quarters – and the play is completely voluntary. Nonetheless, the narrow scope of these games already lends them some labor-like qualities, particularly in the clear delineations on user behavior and the repetitiveness of the tasks at hand. This would be more common with early game design philosophy, allowing for – I believe – cleaner, clearer readings and interpretations of this older material as opposed to the more sprawling blockbuster games of today.
But with advancements in technology and in the field of game design, games generally grew more complex, engendering a heightened sense of player agency and decision making. These newer games gradually became less labor-like, and more “fun” – but how did depictions of labor develop alongside the evolution of the medium?
I’ll be referring to Huizinga and Caillois’ definitions of play to introduce a general definiton and framework for understanding games, and will draw contrasts between these definitions and the more colloquial uses employed throughout society. Along the way we’ll discuss the distinction between serious/playful play, alongside heavy references to Flanagan’s Critical Play when discussing the redemptive or more radical potentials in the game medium.
I’d also like to refer to some history of sport and play, specifically to the mesoamerican ball sports of the pre-Columbian era and their place within indigenous cultures and rituals (thus rendering them non-voluntary and essential parts of society), alongside the development of organized sports out of their more playful and disorganized beginnings (like soccer in the public schoolyards of 19th century Britain) into an actual world-spanning entertainment industry built on athlete labor.
There’s also room for passing mention to games like Euro Truck Simulator, Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and other various “labor” simulators. I think there’s a strong argument to be made that even the most “innocent” of these idle farming simulator games still carry with them the underlying capitalist logic that your cute little farm still has to constantly grow and expand and produce more cash flow. No matter how cute or how friendly the experience may be, it’s predicated on the same market logics that dominate our not-so-innocent real world. Could these games just be sanitizing our world for us, using play specifically to keep the world as it is?
There’s also room to make an example of a “big” game like Skyrim or Fallout (sorry I dont know any similar games from the past 5 years) by exploring NPC behavior and how labor manifests itself within some alogrithmically defined space.
