Between Virtual Work and Real Play

The scenes of gold farming factories are the best example of the collapse of boundaries between work and play. Although virtual economy and gold farming seem to blur the line between fantasy and reality, or between virtual economy and real economy, what it is really blurring is the boundaries between play and work. One of ludologists, interested in the blurring boundaries between work and play, Nick Yee argues “it is unfortunate that the metaphors of swords and dragon slaying obscure and distract us from the true nature of the work that is being done.”1 At the very moment when the gamer thinks that s/he is ‘enjoying’ the game, the gamer begins to be the worker. It is even the most tragic irony to see that “MMORPG players pay game companies on a monthly basis (between US $10 and US$15) to work and get burned out.”2

How can we understand the success of online games which involves this irony of working and playing? What makes the player the worker without knowing it? I want to call it power of “spectacle” in the sense that Guy Debord elaborated. Visual metaphors which give perceptual pleasure to gamer are nothing but illusion as commodity, i.e. spectacle. “The spectacle erases,” writes Debord, “the dividing line between self and world, in that the self … is eventually overwhelmed.”3 In online game environment, the gamer overwhelmed by spectacle of 3D visual representation and pseudo reality, lost his/her identity between player and worker.

However, is it really possible to play games in order to earn money? In Homo Ludens, Huizinga interestingly makes an etymological study of words related with objects we play or compete for. For example, while the words “prize” and “praise” (derived from the Latin pretium) moves from the economic sphere to the play sphere, the word “wage” (originally means “gage,” a symbol of challenge) moves in the reverse direction and get the meaning of “salary” or “earnings.” For this reason, he concludes that “we do not play for wages, we work for them.”4 According to Huizinga’s analysis, although “wage” has its origin in play, we no longer play for wage. However, this supposition needs to be corrected in the digital game age: some of us do play for wages and some of us do work for prize (e.g., gold coins) in the game. But can we acknowledge this paid online game play as real work, concrete labor?

Immaterial Labor

Italian Autonomists, such as Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Maurizio Lazzarato, have pointed out a change in the quality and nature of labor in postmodernization or informatization process and have described it as “immaterial labor.” According to Lazzarato, the concept of immaterial labor reflects two aspects of labor: “it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes” and to “a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work.’”5 In other words, it means that in post-Fordist information society, “the increasingly extensive use of computers has tended progressively to redefine laboring practices and relations, along with, indeed, all social practices and relations.”6 Contrary to the traditional sense of labor in the industrial society, labor in the informational economy seems to be disappeared during immaterialized process of labor. Due to the immaterial aspect of gamers’ labor, gold farmers never recognize that their work-playing is concrete and living labor and that it is appropriated and exploited by global digital capital. The buyers of virtual goods and items in the rich countries, in the same way, cannot be aware of gold farmers’ flesh-and-blood labor, 12-hour mouse-clicking and screen-gazing under the dim fluorescent light.

Although it is unavoidable to accept the fact that work is play and play is work, what should not be forgotten is asking how capitalist mode of production is breaking the border between work and leisure. In “Manuscripts of 1844,” Marx elaborates a theory of alienation of labor, asking how the workers are alienated from the product of their labor and how their labor is alienated from the act of production. According to the manuscripts, “labor is external to the worker,” who feels “outside himself … in his work” and “at home when he is not working.”7 Because of the external character of labor and the objectification of labor, the worker of Marx’s time felt lost of his/her labor or the product of labor. But, at least in leisure time, s/he could (maybe hope to) feel at home, be free from forced labor, and regain his/her own human life, i.e. happiness.

Play-worker and Work-player

However, what the gold farmers do in their free time? How they enjoy their leisure? Dibbell testifies having seen the gold farmers off the day shift gather around the Internet café (a.k.a. wang ba or net bar) in order to “log into their personal World of Warcraft accounts and spen d these precious free hours right back where they had spent every other hour of the day.”8 As the office workers today bring their day tasks to home, the gamers are playing the same game at their place for refreshment. As Galloway correctly put it, “in contemporary life the tool used for labor, the computer, is exactly the same tool that is used for leisure.”9 If playing games can improve the worker’s productivity and labor efficiency, maybe employers would encourage workers to play games while working. In fact, a group of psychologists at McGill University in Canada carried out a research on this kind of subject, arguing that playing social-intelligence game (clicking smiling face among frowning faces as quickly as possible) reduces stress hormones by 17 percent. The Chinese play-workers and the Canadian work-players, how much are they different?

As a matter of fact, the phenomenon of blurring boundaries is not confined to only MMORPGs. There are several kinds of virtual worlds which have their own economies and governances: the multi-user online world like Second Life and There; the social network services like MySpace, Cyworld and Facebook. The online shops in the social network services are selling items such as avatar’s costume, music, and back-ground image, exclusively created by hired designers. But, in Second Life and There, users are encouraged to create virtual products using 3D modeling tools provided by service and sell them to other inhabitants. Of course, lots of users are working as designers, building engineers, realtors, and the like. In fact, users can have whatever job they can imagine in this world. In these multi-user online worlds, the user-created contents might be motive power of inside economy. Similar to MMORPGs, there are as many virtual currencies as kinds of virtual worlds. Although those currencies are different from each other (Linden Dollars and Therebucks), they are possible to be converted to real money (USD as a standard). What does it mean to have a job in this synthetic world? Virtual economy has gone far to the extent that to say it exerts much influence on real economy is meaningless. In my opinion, virtual economy is already functioning as one of the major fields of economic activities in digital capitalism. Recently, in Second Life, there was a virtual job fair, which attracted thousands visitors and interviewees to a dozen of participating companies’ own virtual booths.

In Simulacra and Simulation, as an allegory of simulation, Baudrillard announces Borges tale where “the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly.”10 Although it is not sure whether this allegory alludes to the excessive expansion of cyber space, the tale does not sound like only a fable at least in this situation. That is because maybe in the near future the day will come when virtual world and cyber social networking space will expand their territory broader than the dimension of the Earth. How far is this reality from the utopian vision that the first digital network (the information superhighway in 1990s) gave to us? How much our living labor will be absorbed and appropriated into the virtual world? How much and how far virtual world will expand its economy and real (virtual?) estate?

1Nick Yee, “The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play,” Games and Culture 1.1 (2006): 68.

2Ibid., 70.

3Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 153.

4Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 51.

5Maurizio Lazzarato, qouted in Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change, Ed. Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills (New York: Alt-X Press, 2003), 106.

6Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 291.

7Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” The Marx-Engels Reader, Ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 74.

8Julian Dibbell, “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer,” The New York Times, 17 Jun. 2007.

9Galloway, “Warcraft and Utopia.”

10Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.