We have already reported on the interesting ideas of our friend Pat Kane on The Play Ethic and want to share a recent controversy on the ever interesting mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity.

The contribution is from Julian Kücklich who wonders if the ideology of play, as put forward by Pat Kane and others, is not a front, not just for the continued exploitation of bodies all over the world, but also for the self-exploitation of the minds of the cognitive elite in the West. The exchange can be followed at the IDC mailing list, where Pat Kane has already produced a reply. In any case, much food for thought.

A Critique of the Ideology of Play

The core of the problem, as I see it, is an ‘ideology of play’ that underpins many phenomena of virtual capitalism, or whatever you want to call it. I’ll come right out and say that I think Pat Kane is one of the people propagating this ideology, even if he means no harm. I’ve outlined my reasons for this on my blog a while back, here and Pat responded to this critique here .

What is the ideology of play? I could say much about this, but I’ll restrict myself to a brief outline. I think it has its roots in hacker
culture, and became widespread for the first time during the dotcom bubble. So, first of all, it means that the lines between leisure and labour begin to blur. You don’t actually differentiate between your private life and your working life, because most of your friends work where you work, or in a similar area.

Because more and more work is becoming ‘creative’ a lot of your actual work will take place not in a work setting but during a meal, while watching TV, in the shower. All of a sudden an idea will pop into your head and you will grab a pen and paper and jot it down. This also means that you will feel justified to play solitaire or World of Warcraft while you are actually at work, i.e. in your office. Because you just saved the company a couple of thousand dollars with an idea you had last night just before you fell asleep.

But then of course what you do in World of Warcraft is not so different from what you do at work. You do a lot of boring repetitive stuff in order to ‘level up’. You join a guild in order to meet the right people. You buy low and sell high. So the world of work and the world of play become increasingly blurred. The fact that you can actually make money playing WoW or Second Life is secondary to the fact that work becomes ever more similar to play, and play is becoming ever more similar to work. Both work and play, however, are becoming increasingly effective, performance-oriented, self-managed.

And both work and play take place on the same machine – the digital computer. This might seem trivial but it isn’t. The fact that we use the same technology to fill out spreadsheets, and to play World of Warcraft, and that we can easily Alt-tab between the two apps merges the spheres of work and play even more solidly. And once you have played WoW for a while, you will actually start filling out spreadsheets to track your progress. And you will start thinking about business strategies in terms of raids, loot, and mobs.

Now along come Web2.0 apps like YouTube, Flickr, and del.icio.us. And you will start playing with them. It will seem like a game, because these sites are actually structured like games. You earn symbolic capital in the form of friends, favourites, diggs, kudos, whatever. And you devise strategies for getting more of that stuff. In Flickr, you join a couple of groups in order to increase exposure for your holiday snaps. You put a risqué video of yourself on your MySpace page in order to get more friends. You publish your del.icio.us links on your blog.

All the while, you don’t think about the fact that you are doing the work of people that other people used to do – journalists,
photographers, programmers, and most importantly: marketers. And why should you? It’s all just a game, isn’t it? It’s like Trebor said: it’s like having a job, “while at the same time getting lots of dates, making friends, establishing some micro-fame, and becoming creative.”

This sums up what we do in our jobs as well as what we do in our leisure time.

And it’s exactly what we do when we play World of Warcraft – or any other game for that matter. Because it is in computer games that our performance is constantly assessed and measured, until it feels like a natural part of play. It’s one of those ‘rhetorics of play’ which Brian Sutton-Smith identifies in his book, “The Ambiguity of Play”. And it takes root in our brains, and our hearts, and our souls, and it connects us to the great production machine through play technology.

More context about this debate at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Gaming