[iDC] Re: A critique of sociable web media

[Julian Kücklich]

I've been lurking so far, but Trebor's latest post struck fairly close 
to home, so I would like to make a couple of comments, from the 
perspective of a play theorist. In my own work, I am interested in 
conflation of play and labour in new media contexts, particularly the 
digital games industry. I have used the term 'playbour' in the past, but 
I am not sure how far cute neologisms will take us.

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: 
http://particlestream.motime.com/post/235766. Pat responded to this 
critique here: http://particlestream.motime.com/post/237389.

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.

---

Trebor asks: What is to be done? "What would lead us to 'communal 
unshackling'?" And his answer is the same that has been given by all 
progressive thinkers in history: we need to raise awareness. 
Play-labourers need to become aware of the exploitation inherent in the 
technologies and practices of play. But somehow I am not convinced. 
Because we all play along all the same. Although we are aware that we 
are being exploited. We post our work on blogs or we publish in 
scholarly journals. We use Web2.0 apps because it is convenient. We play 
World of Warcraft because that is what everybody does.

I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as that. The idea 
that we just need to raise awareness in order to elicit change betrays 
its roots in Enlightenment thinking. We are theoretically aware that the 
ship of modernity has capsized, even if a couple of splinters still 
float on the surface of the stormy sea. But somehow we refuse to let go 
of the idea that a better world is possible by appealing to reason, by 
explaining the world to people. I don't think this is a feasible way to 
go anymore. And of course this is not even a new argument.

So what is to be done? The simple answer: I don't know. The complicated 
answer: If all the world is a game we need to learn how to cheat. We 
need to deploy this technology in a way that is non-exploitative, 
non-binary (us vs. them, play vs. work, Empire vs. multitude), radically 
anti-modernist. Maybe it's time for a new situationism that targets the 
spectacularisation of the self inherent in 'sociable' media. So it 
becomes a question of identity politics, a question of refusing the 
subject positions offered by YouTube, MeTube or TheirTube.

The name I use for this is deludology. Ludo, I play - deludo, I cheat, I 
delude. It's just a label, but it becomes a powerful way of thinking 
about possibilities for breaking the rules established by the ideology 
of play. If autonomous marxism's solution to the problem of industrial 
labour exploitation was the refusal of work, the solution for the 
problem of post-industrial playbour exploitation might well be a refusal 
to play, to play along, to collude. But as I said before, I don't know. 
In any case, I agree with Trebor: we need to "believe in the possibility 
of societal alternatives to this rotten system."

- Julian.

-- 
julian raul kücklich, ma

http://www.playability.de