Co-creative Culture and labour - "I Play Farmville, and You Should Too!!!!"

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter says in “Immaterial Labor”:

“Immaterial labor is less about the production of things and more about the production of subjectivity, or better, about the way the production of subjectivity and things are in contemporary capitalism deeply intertwined”.

Perhaps one of the ways of unwrapping that is the line “If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.”. 

I started playing Farmville again. I started as part of the Digital Game Theory course back in spring. I then grew tired of the repetitiveness and I had at the same time reached the long term goal I had made – reach max level in my bakery (I produce very nice high level strawberry cakes!).  However, some people in the Game Culture class had me hooked again. I guess I do want to play Farmville with someone other than Linda D and Fredo, who by the way had broken up with me when I returned… He was never a good neighbour anyways. 

Farmville is also very good at putting me to work in ways I barely notice. First of all, it really wants access to everything me, preferably to be allowed to post on Facebook as me and it even succeeded once. It constantly tries to bribe me with extra goodies – “triple parts” - if I would just invite more of my Facebook friends to join. I have been clever though, I have created a separate list for Farmville friends, so that my Farmville shares do not become ever present and spammy messages to everyone I know on Facebook. 

I’ve tried not becoming the ultimate spokesperson and advertisement pillar for Farmville. It’s a constant temptation to give in. I am promised great treasures and upgrades if I recruit more friends.

I have not paid Farmville (Zynga) a dime though, but that’s not the logic of it, as long as the game is ever expanding – someone eventually will. And I have been secretly and silently employed to hire new people into this scheme and make sure to remind the ones already playing of all the nice things they can have. 

Farmville is also a highly commercialized game space. Planting "Dreyer's Fruit Bars crops" in this case. How can we understand this within the intersection of games and labour? Promotional play? (Magic Circle went *poof*)

Here’s the thing though, I am aware of it, and I pay attention to it so I can intersect. I’d argue that Farmville in terms of player labour is not as covert as it could be and the number of fake Facebook accounts specifically made to play Facebook games, I believe, is an attempt to divide the two, the game-network and the general network and avoid becoming this rambling street corner advertisement astroturf Farmville maniac. 

With the many examples of how games that put you to work, I also believe it can go the other way. Games can also teach and train us to become better workers. 

Think about how MMOG raiding produces accountable, competitive and highly achieving individuals. You need to be flexible and available, broad but specialized, always up to date and well educated on the class and spec you play and what encounter you’re about to face. Raid groups are further often hierarchical with raid and guild leaders, divided work tasks (tank, dps, and healer). If you signed to up to work on boss fights for the night and you are not able to make it, you are expected to inform raid leaders. You need to be able to work with others and take criticism – and of course constantly improve. You need good communication skills, a team-oriented attitude and the spirit of a fighter – you never give up until the job is done! And indeed the work ethic expected of you in for example WoW can become very demanding when you raid and prepare for raids at the equivalent to a part time job – in your spare time! I used to do this, three times a week for four hours each time when I raided the most.

 

It certainly fits within the Immaterial Labour definition as in labour that creates “immaterial products”:

“Knowledge, information, communication, a relationship or an emotional response”.

It was very regimented and your performance was constantly under surveillance and evaluation. Perhaps this is also why these laborious games has a tendency to "burn people out". This expression is at least something I've heard several times within WoW circles, especially amongst guild leaders who beyond the listing above, have extra duties on top and perhaps carry one of the biggest work loads, also in terms of organizational work and servicing guild members in their requests that is not directly play, but rather preparation for play.

Performance and Audience - DotA and Guitar Hero

On the topic of audiences and performance, the two case studies we were presented in class were DotA and Guitar Hero.

The first difference that strikes me is that they seem reverted in how they came to be games that supported a player-performance while also attracting an audience.

DotA, a player made mod for Warcraft III, comes across as a very typical computer game. The player sits in front of the screen and uses the keyboard. It's strategic, it's about resource management and it's competetive. Especially the competitive part of the game is easily applied to tournaments, but as we discussed in class, the audience needs to have some knowledge about DotA, they need to be initiated and most likely DotA players themselves to be able to make sense of the performance.

Picture from a DotA tournament (2008). The audience is able to get close to most of the player-performers, but the focus performances are on the stage where the fight is displayed on the large screens above the teams. Photo by Multiplay @ Lowyat.NET

With so many games of the same ilk, it's interesting that DotA and also Starcraft made it as popular tournament games and I wonder if a widespread popularity is so crucial that without a knowledgable and dedicated community around them, they would have ventured no further than your typical LAN party - no show without an audience.

Note the tagline saying "a computer controlled game"

Guitar Hero looks to me as it has come from the opposite direction. Instead of being a game whose performance was able to attract engaged onlookers, it is rather a performance (real guitar or "air guitar") which has been gamified.

We discussed in class how the challenge of the game was akin to Simon the memory game, although tied to rhythm and accuracy. So what is Guitar Hero about, is it really just a button pushing game, "Simon Advanced"? Or are we looking at a golden mix of music, party atmosphere and the sheer opportunity to steal some limelight, even if the complexity of the game only involves pushing buttons in quick sequence. Guitar Hero is not about showing clever thinking, but rather pure Simon mastery preferably while looking cool.

I think the key ingredient here is music and the opportunity to engage with it, regardless of your prowess with an instrument, while the audience can bob along on the sideline without even needing to know what the game is about.

Guitar Hero artwork displaying a concert setting.

I think there's something interesting in how the performances are staged and shaped around also suiting an audience. The ways these performances are presented will say something about what the organizer expects the audience wants to see.

The picture below shows the DotA players on a stage, but almost hidden behing their monitors. Putting focus on a player will have to involve switching to show his/her screen display on the big on-stage screens (I assume). I would be interested to know if these screens also show the DotA players themselves, or if they just bounce between the various interfaces showing the highlights.

A DotA match on the stage. The two teams have been moved so far back on the stage that the distance to the audience looks quite large? Photo by Multiplay @ Lowyat.NET

The biggest Guitar Hero events I could find, that had videos and photos available, also placed the player-performer facing the audience in what looks to be a more traditional stage setting. Because of the dependency on a screen, I get the impression there's a small monitor (maybe several) for the Guitar Hero Player to refer to without having to turn around, giving them much more freedom of movement than a player forced to sit down/face a certain direction.

The Guitar Hero player-performer is on stage and is even facing his audience. Screencap from the video "Riff-Wars Guitar Hero competition"

Despite the concentration being written all over the faces of these players (from the video linked in the picture caption above), they all move away from gamer-with-controller towards guitar-player through their performances - the mimicry part of it.

Screencap from the video "Riff-Wars Guitar Hero competition"

However, even though the performance of the DotA player has taken precedence over the player in the act of performing, the video we were shown in class, a direct streaming of a DotA/Starcraft player practicing (as I remember it), had two embedded video windows showing his hands moving over the keyboard in one, but also his face in the other, besides the actual progress of the game. Even though I've not been able to find an example of this, I'm not surprised there is still some fascination with the DotA players' facial expressions and how they skillfully operate their keyboards in the same way as the camera will zoom in on the Guitar Hero player tapping at the guitar controller buttons.