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When Work is a Game
Ever willing to explore the hidey-holes of thought, the Terra Nova blog has a discussion up this week talking about play as production. IE: What makes people willing to engage in 'productive play', like the crafting mini-games of Star Wars Galaxies or A Tale in the Desert? They also touch on the more pragmatic 'productive play', gold farming. From the article: "The outsourcing of labor is another interesting trajectory. We know that people outsource, for instance, 'Adena farmers' in Lineage, low-wage workers who farm for game currency to sell on the 'black market.' This creates interesting class and even race tensions, such as the Lineage 2 scenario described at State of Play 2004 by Constance Steinkhueler. Here, Adena farmers typically took the roles of female elf warriors (primarily for farming efficiency reasons); as a result, this race/class in the game began experiencing racial slurs and attacks by players who associated it with Adena farming."
And don't miss the next article in the series, entitled When Gaming is Work...
This guy's the limit!
Quote from that page:
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
It's all about knowing how to play by their rules. When you see it from that perspective, every job is basically a game.
Gold farming. Where people contribute nothing to society. They spend days making gold that consists of ones and zeros when the same thing could be accomplished with a gold += 500000 command. I will never be convinced that gold farming is not completely fucking ridiculous.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
It seems to me like there are plenty of difference between some of the stuff that's lumped together there, as just one big "work = play" pot.
For example, lumping crafters in the same pot as gold farmers strikes me as outright stupid in its over-simplification. One is done for personal fun and achievement (yes, surprise, one of the four player categories identified by Bartle is "achiever"), the other is actual RL work done for no other reason than RL money. One is someone's idea of fun (warped as it may seem to you), the other is just someone's RL "job".
Surprise, some people do stuff for fun that involve investing time and effort. Some people go fishing IRL, others work on their car, others tend their own garden, or take their pet for a walk. Some of those may involve the same activities that other people call work, yet some people do it for fun. E.g., working on tuning your car is the same thing a mechanic calls "work". E.g., taking photos in the park with your cool new digital camera is the same thing a professional photographer calls "work". E.g., taking your pet for a walk, well, some people walk someone else's dog and get paid for it. For them it's "work". For others it's "fun." Maybe I actually enjoy spending some time with my pet. Do you have a problem with that?
It doesn't even stop there. Even if you move away from stuff easily associated with "work", "effort", "time-investment" or "producing something", most things people do for fun and relaxation _still_ are someone else's "work". Watching football? Well, some people get paid for that, you know. E.g., sports journalists. Watching the news? Well, you know, some people are paid to do that. E.g., secretaries and assistants. Reading a novel or watching a movie? Yep, some people would call that their "work" too. Anyone making a living as a critic or reviewer, for a start. Going swimming or dancing? Yep, you guessed, some people get paid for those too. Is there anything that _isn't_ "work" then? Not much left.
Making the mental bridging between virtual worlds and real worlds, "you're doing X in a game, X is a RL profession, ergo you're doing work" is even more shaky. I hate to break it to some people, but that kinda extrapolation makes most game genres be "work sims." Do you enjoy playing a round of Counter-Strike maybe? You know, that's what SWAT employees call "work". Do you enjoy a racing sim? Yep, some people call driving "work". Do you enjoy running around with armour and sword in a medieval game, engaging people in melee? For some millenia that's what mercenaries did. Do you enjoy a WW2 RTS/RTT game in the evening? (E.g., Silent Storm.) Yep, some officers did that as work, not for fun, IRL.
And even comparing it to other activities in the same MMORPG, what's the difference? Player X spent 4 hours grinding swords to level-up their crafting skill. Player Y spent the same 4 hours grinding NPCs to level-up his fighting level or skill. Player Z spent those 4 hours in the battlegrounds, grinding up his PvP rank. What's the fundamental difference there? What makes some of them OK and some of them "work"? From where I stand, all 3 invested the same time and effort.
From where I stand, actually the _only_ question is: did they have fun? That's all. If they did, sure, keep doing it. If they had fun, who has the right to tell them "no, see, _I_ define that as 'work', so you can't possibly have had fun"?
What makes people do all that? (Including the RL and the game stuff.) The simple fact that humans are not made to sit and watch the walls for hours, or not without going completely out of their minds with boredom. So we all find something to do with our time. And each is free to set their own goals, and have their own likes and dislikes when it comes to filling their free time. That's why it's called "free time."
In fact, if anyone really is looking for a line to draw between "fun in your free time" and "work", I'd propose the following definition: if you're free to choose how you spend it, and you do it because you
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The question is...where do you draw the line between Work and Play.
To me, the line becomes drawn when I have deadlines, quotas, expectations, and the very real risk of losing income. This all adds a lot of stress, and I cannot simply walk away from it because it is how I make a living. Play on the otherhand is something I can walk away from at any time for any reason...whether I'm bored, frustrated, found something new, have more important things to do, etc. There is potentially some stress with Play, such as with competitive Play, however it is nowhere near on the same level as with Work.
If anybody on Slashdot disagress with what I've written and can give an example from their own lives of how their work is considered play (based on the terms I've outlined above) please by all means do...as I am continually trying to figure out a way to find out what job I would love to do for the rest of my life and am looking for a way to actually ENJOY coming into work and not be wishing I was doing something else.
Please for the love of god prove me wrong.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Your hour is worth $50 (a nice round number I pulled from thin air). Call it what you get consulting. Or working overtime. Or working at all. Whatever makes it worth that, your time is worth that.
Now, say you don't like... cleaning your house. You can hire a maid service to do it for $75. It takes you 2 hours to clean your house, and you don't enjoy cleaning it for the sake of cleaning it.
Do you pay the maids or not? If so, then you understand gold farming. If not, rerun the thought experiment with $25 to pay the maids. Or $5.
Of course, some people would say, "It is my house I'm going to clean it I don't care about maids no matter how cheap that'd be. This is Mine and I want to do it!" Maybe you're one of them. That's the same as those who don't buy gold. Because for them, for whatever reason (even if they claim to not enjoy cleaning house), they get something out of cleaning their house (farming their own gold).
That doesn't mean everyone does.
"But it is virtual! It doesn't exist." That's where you're wrong. It does exist. The person paying $$ for gold would be happier (overall) if they didn't have the $$ and did have the gold. The transaction created happiness for them. The person getting $$ for the gold (their time) is happier with the $$. It means they get to eat, which makes most people fairly happy.
It doesn't matter if it can be done "more efficently" by code. I could pray to the heavens (presuming the existance of some higher power, or that we're in the matrix) to rain manna down too. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have farmers growing crops. It is one of the "rules of that world": the game doesn't have gold+=500000, and you can't really expect it to rain manna from heaven. It doesn't matter that the rule is arbitrary in the game, only that the rule exists.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I think the distinction from my message still stands:
- If I'm doing it for fun, and I'm free to do it or not, and when to do it, then it's "play"
- If I'm doing it because someone made me do it, and doubly so if it has some deadlines and schedules I must meet, then it's "work"
The same distinction appeared in the lawsuit of the UO volunteers vs EA and Origin. If you give someone schedules and goals they must meet, and X hours per week that they _have_ to do that stuff, then it's no longer "play". It's "work."
I think the same applies here. Whether it's actually resulting in a finished physical product (e.g., my "crafting" potions actually controls some RL lab equipment), or it's game content (e.g., if the game lets you create new content for the other players), or it's "services" (e.g., acting like an unpaid support help-desk for confused newbies), or whatever, is in the end irrelevant. The question is whether I'm doing it for fun, whenever I want to, or not at all if I don't want to. If "yes", then it's "play", if "no", then it's "work".
I don't really see an ethical problem in either case:
- if it's purely kept at "play" level, I have no problem with whatever other benefits they get out of it. But then by definition they can't give me deadlines or goals to meet. This means that they're willing to take the risk that I'll not log on at all in one day, or maybe log on only to chat, or maybe I'll screw up every single crafted product today, e.g., by aborting it in mid-crafting or pressing the wrong buttons. (Which, if there's some actual machinery following my actions, will result in ruined products or materials for the company.) Or maybe I'll quit without notice and move to another game, and they can't give me an NDA or non-compete clause. To still qualify as "play", they're gonna have to accept those risks, and methinks they won't want to.
- if it's "work", then, well, I think the same applies as with any other job. They _can_ give me goals and schedules, but I'll negotiate an adequate salary for my work. Sure, liking my job is an important factor, and it will certainly get factored in my decision whether to take the job or not. (It got factored in taking my current programming job too, after all.) But in the end it's just a job interview. No more, no less.
The only ethical problem arises when a company tries to, well, basically lie to you. I see no need for euphemisms there. If they try to make it sound like "play", but have the expectations associated with "work", then it's simply put a fraud. And as EA and Origin found out, it might even be against the law too. If you expect "work" from someone, then you might have to pay them at least the minimum wage, and accept that they have the same legal rights as any other workers. (E.g., you might not be able to "ban" them without notice, starting immediately, unless you have a damn good legal ground for that.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The thing is, while I did mention the morally wrong area of presenting one thing as the other, I don't consider it easy to do. People tend to recognize work as just that.
If I tell some kid, "hey, kid, you're free to come play with my lawnmower on my lawn", then _if_ they come, the assumption will be implicit that it's _play_. They can do what they want with it, including mow a giant cock outline on my front lawn, when they feel like it, or not come at all. If I start also giving them a schedule ("it's gotta be done by 6 PM when my mother-in-law drops by") and goals to meet ("and you damn better mow it all, uniformly") they _will_ recognize it at work and pipe up with "yeah, right" or "How much are you paying me for that, then?"
It's been tried before, e.g., in Origin's "volunteer" debackle. They gradually piled goals and schedules upon those guys until they sued. But here's the thing: it wasn't that those guys mistook work for play. It was simply that the people Origin was taking advantage of were "Nice Guy" or "Nice Girl" types who didn't jump at the lawsuit option immediately. But they knew it was work.
It won't work again anyway, because the precedent has been set. Anyone pushed into that situation now knows unequivocally that it's work and that they can legally demand adequate payment for it.
So basically that grey area doesn't even actually exist. The confusion between "work" and "play" doesn't exist. Period.
Even the gold farmers mentioned there know that they're working. Whether it's the independent Hong Kong guy making some money at home with gold trade, or some of the more organized companies with employees supervising the farming bots, they _know_ they're doing work and earning a living there. Those employees get paid for it, and they know they're just that: employees. The confusion doesn't exist.
The only place where that supposed confusion appears is in idiots' blogs and posts along the lines of "lol, wtf, those crafting guys are, like, _working_ . I bet they'd also pay to do RL work if someone told them it's a quest, lol." Sometimes phrased more eloquently or literate than that, but that's the gist of it. It's just an insult, just a snotty way to say "well, I'm superior because _my_ fun involves X, unlike those poor idiots doing Y. Can you imagine someone retarded enough to do Y for 4 hours a day? And call it fun? Geeze, those guys so need to get a life." That's all there is to it. It's just a false premise to build an implied insult on, nothing more.
And it's not even a new argument. Anyone who's been on MUD's in the 90's has seen the same argument going on for ever. Everyone who was doing X was busy inventing ways to argue that only confused idiots do Y instead. PKers-vs-Carebears or MachoWarriors-vs-Crafters or Socializers-vs-Explorers-vs-Achievers-vs-Killers or whatever. It's been done before for ages. As soon as someone first made a game with two possible ways to spend your time in it, the category of idiots was born that expound at great lengths in how many ways X is the One True Way, and how anyone doing Y is some poor confused retard.
And such fabricated axioms and circular reasoning, complete with a dose of the armchair-shrink or armchair-philosopher trolling, were flung around every day. Seeing yet another rehash of the same "I bet they'd pay to do real work too" falsehood isn't some deep philosophy, it's just getting tiresome.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Bank account. Where people contribute nothing to society. They spend days making dollars that consists of ones and zeros when the same thing could be accomplished with a savings += 500000 command. I will never be convinced that bank accounting is not completely fucking ridiculous.