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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."
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 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.
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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.
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