550 Platform Gamification

⁰ This essay and its data visualizations were originally written and coded for Jay Cephas' ARC 550: Space and Subjectivity at Princeton University. It has been reformatted for MALarch, and the text has been slightly revised to incorporate feedback from the professor.

The once unbridgeable gap between play and labor has all but disappeared. While formerly the two could be understood as the poles on a spectrum of human activity, any attempt to define their ranges today quickly reveals the collapse of this dichotomy in contemporary business and leisure practices. People play video games for a living, and people make video games for fun. Play and labor have become intertwined through the proliferation of the platform business model, the increasing number of leisure hours afforded to individuals in post-industrial societies, and the gamification of what labor still needs to be performed. The space created by this amphibolous "playbor," as coined by German visualization expert Julian Kücklich,¹ suggests an imminent alternative expression of subjectivity, and a departure from the stagnant, neoliberal diagnosis that has pervaded visions of the future since the late 20th century. Conflating labor with play promises a future where humans can labor for longer because they do so of their own volition, and because they never consciously feel as though they are laboring because they are at play.² As society in post-industrial, predominantly Western nations moves beyond manual labor-based economies, it finds itself in a post-anthropocentric moment where the need to conquer nature has subsided. Humans have redefined the planet around themselves, and the era that playbor foretells is one where humans, to varying degrees, can reap the rewards of the millennia-long project of civilization by doing as they please.

¹ Julian Kücklich, "Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry," The Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005)

² The focus of this essay is in the proliferation in labor-hours by the will of the laborers; however, there are numerous closely related lines of research that establish how late capitalism has developed other methods by which to increase the number of hours laborers can productively labor. This includes the aspiration toward an actually indefinite workday through the mitigation of sleep. For more, see Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 2013).

Centuries before humans arrived at the decisive turn, German theorist Karl Marx defined labor as the process by which man overcame nature whether through manipulation or perseverance.³ With this definition, he went on to outline how capitalism operates by separating labor from the means of production, creating profit from the gap between the value of a day's labor and the requisite day's salary for that labor.⁴ In purchasing labor, the capitalist could prosper off ownership of land, materials, or equipment alone. Today, however, the most successful companies of the 21st century have taken this concept a step farther.^A While large technological conglomerates do employ an ever-fluctuating number of laborers to develop and maintain their products, neither the capitalist nor their hired labor produce the content of their product. Though absent in Marx's analysis, content has a long history in art criticism as a counterpart to form. In this context, and in simple terms, form encompasses what the artwork is, and content encompasses what the art means. Loosely speaking, form and content are the medium and the message. By maintaining a separation between these two aspects in their products, tech companies are able to produce a form (or rather a platform designed for a particular form, be it short-form videos on TikTok, images on Instagram, et cetera) that their users fill with content they themselves have created as an externalized labor cost to the technology companies. Platforms minimize their overhead and maximize their profit because they cater to users who produce and consume their own content. Beyond some technical initial labor to develop the backend and interface, platforms rely on their users to labor of their own volition, and ensure users do so by turning labor into a form of play.

³ Karl Marx, "The Labor Process and the Valorization Process" in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1990 [1867]), 283.

⁴ Marx, "The Labor Process and the Valorization Process," 301.

^A Click and drag platforms! Their sizes are determined by monthly web traffic figures. Silicon Valley based companies (pink) are unscaled, San Francisco based platforms (teal) are scaled up by a factor of 10, and New York based platforms (dawn) are scaled up by a factor of 100. Visualization by author.

The platform model changes how labor operates within a market because it fundamentally alters how the market operates. As early as 1980, American futurist Alvin Toffler foresaw the platform changes of today brought about by what he termed the "Third Wave." Viewing history as waves that continually lap against a shore, each starting before its predecessor recedes, rather than as a linear, Hegelian construct that inevitably leads to "end of" discourses⁵ and the perpetuation of an ever-industrializing, neoliberal status quo,⁶ Toffler lays out what he sees as the three largest waves of human civilization: the ancient agricultural revolution, the early modern industrial revolution, and now the technological revolution.⁷ In the first, humans produced for their own consumption. In the second, they produced for exchange, creating a market system that would dominate advancing forms of global economics from simple bartering systems to capitalism to socialism.⁸ In all these systems, the producer is separated from the consumer regardless of their distance from the means of production. Indeed, these elaborate systems only function because they separate production and consumption.⁹ Mass production functions explicitly through this separation, requiring the existence (and thus the invention) of mass consumers in order to make its economic model viable. By turning people into laborers on the assembly line, they were in turn transformed into customers in the crowded aisles that their labor filled. Since Henry Ford employed Americans to mass produce cars, Americans had to mass consume cars in order to keep their jobs.

⁵ Frances Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

⁶ Alvin Toffler, The Third WaveT (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1980), 27–29.

⁷ Toffler, The Third Wave, 25.

⁸ Toffler, The Third Wave, 305.

⁹ Toffler, The Third Wave, 292.

The Third Wave "begins to heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the 'prosumer' economics of tomorrow."¹⁰ The Third Wave enables humans to return to producing primarily for their own consumption—what Toffler terms "prosumption." Prosumers both produce and consume, negating the close-looped, exchange-based economy of the industrial Second Wave. In the Third Wave, market maintenance has replaced market growth as the primary focus of human civilization shifts away from expanding its economic impact.¹¹ To return to Henry Ford's example, once every American owned a car, the company shifted its focus from turning every American into a consumer to keeping every American a consumer. While the Model T was famously available in black only, Ford began offering multiple colors and styles of automobiles, changing them every year or so. This manufacturing of demand through the planned obsolescence of fashionability ensured that consumers would continue to consume after they had already consumed. With consumption as the standard mode of living for humans, the Second Wave crested, and from its depths the Third Wave emerged.

¹⁰ Toffler, The Third Wave, 27.

¹¹ Toffler, The Third Wave, 304.

One of Toffler's 20th-century examples of prosumption is the ATM, which disembodied the teller in a self-operated, bank-owned machine.¹² Today, platforms like PayPal or Venmo transfer money between users without ever holding it as a bank would, disembodying monetary transfers a step beyond the automated teller machine. Consumers are not only able to do the work themselves (instead of having a teller do it), but can do the work through a third-party of their choice. They not only can transfer money outside banking hours, but wholly outside banks. In their 2016 book Platform Revolution, MIT researchers outline how platform models oppose pipeline models—the traditional "business that employs a step-by-step arrangement for creating and transferring value, with producers at one end and consumers at the other."¹³ In democratizing and opening their operations through a platform model, businesses subvert Marx's process of labor valorization. The value generated by their work stems not from the transformation of nature, but from the cultivation of a user base.¹⁴ The value generated through labor, while needed to create the software architecture of the platform, is no longer the primary valorization method. Marx's framework is subverted: the value of a platform is not determined by the materials and labor that transformed those materials, but by the potential content that it can generate through user input after the commodity is made available to consumers. Viewers flock to YouTube not necessarily because it is the best, highest quality, or most economical video streaming platform on the internet, but rather because it has the most users, the most uploaders, and thus the most content.¹⁵ In fact, on the rare occasions YouTube does produce its own content—such as in the infamous YouTube Rewind 2018—users often respond negatively, or ignore the content entirely.

¹² Toffler, The Third Wave, 287.

¹³ Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Choudary, Platform Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), 11.

¹⁴ Parker, Van Alstyne, and Choudary, Platform Revolution, 14.

¹⁵ YouTube reports that it provides remuneration to creators equivalent to over 390,000 full-time job, and hosts over 55,000 channels with over 100,000 subscribers in the US alone. While these numbers are large, they pale in comparison to YouTube's overall userbase. As the second most-trafficked site on the internet (second only to its parent, Google), YouTube receives over 30 billion visits a month. Many of these are return visitors as the reported number of monthly active users is 2.6 billion. From these numbers, we can calculate that only 0.002% of active YouTube users are content creators. This number is certainly smaller than the true percentage as it excludes any content creator outside the United States or with fewer than 100,000 subscribers. Oxford Economics, "The State of the Creator Economy: Assessing the Economic, Cultural, and Societal Impact of YouTube in the US in 2022."

Through platforms like YouTube and Twitch, play has become an increasingly accessible employment opportunity. While professional athletics have long allowed people to play as their job, the rise of streaming and professional gaming has democratized and expanded the realm of professional playing. In these cases, play is the literal labor being done, which in turn transforms the relationship the player has with their playing from one of having fun into one of performing. This functions similarly to how actors and musicians operate. Many start in the field as hobbyists who enjoy the creative outlet. Those who continue with it and become professional, however, must deal with the pressures of making a living through what was once solely an avocational activity. They cannot simply enjoy acting or playing their instrument; they must do so at a high enough level to secure future opportunities to perform, and must compete with those who still perform avocationally (i.e. for free) in order to earn a living. Before the professional turn, an actor may act solely for themselves. After going pro, they lose that privilege, and must consider how others will perceive them so that they can endear themselves to their audiences. The role of performance—both in terms of efficiency and entertainment—serves as a spectral link between play and labor. Toffler debunks the trite, perennial notion that no one wants to work anymore by identifying that this is only true when viewing the market from a Second Wave mindset that limits what "work" can be.¹⁶ Labor no longer exists entirely within a factory or office, but often becomes a hobby or other self-directed endeavor. People in post-industrial societies can afford to labor for themselves on things they enjoy, and often choose to do so instead of taking on additional jobs to earn more capital.¹⁷ Toffler claims that between 1970 and 1980 a major shift occurred in how laborers used their downtime. In 1970, the sale of power tools was split: 70% were purchased by professionals, and 30% by hobbyists. By 1980, these figures had reversed.¹⁸ Leisure and play have increasingly become intrinsically motivated labor.

¹⁶ Toffler, The Third Wave, 296.

¹⁷ Toffler, The Third Wave, 298.

¹⁸ Toffler, The Third Wave, 289.

In research on MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), American researcher Nick Yee found that "many players in fact characterize their game play as a second job."¹⁹ While this could be taken solely as the number of hours committed to playing in virtual worlds, Yee identifies multiple cases where capital has been generated through the labor of online play.²⁰ In these cases, the act of play is indistinguishable from that of labor save for the fact that the player has chosen to play while the laborer must labor. This is a form of play that not only requires effort and exertion, but that alters nature (albeit a virtual one) to the will of the player. Such behaviors include 'farming' and 'grinding,' which involve arduously accumulating in-game value for the purpose of changing the course of the rest of the game. By definition, Marx would call such play labor as it alters nature, albeit the nature of a game. Laboring while playing has direct impacts on the labor market outside platform industries. "Video games are changing the nature of both work and play. It is not so much that businesses will need to adapt to gamers as much as that work and play are starting to become indistinguishable from each other."²¹ American game designer Celia Pearce agrees with this sentiment, recounting how players of the MMORPG Myst painstakingly rebuilt the game in Second Life, another MMORPG, after Myst's servers shut down. Not only did they perform all the digital design labor needed to rebuild the original game world, they designed and built a sequel in the spirit of the original.²² The desire to labor as a form of play has led to a "new hybrid entertainment form in which players [pay] to produce their own entertainment media. … Enabling people to [sic] their own entertainment experience has become a viable business model."²³ Pearce goes on to outline how this "dynamic, two-way medium in which the 'audience' has just as much power to create content as the 'producer' threatens to upend" the global hegemonic order that persists from Toffler's Second Wave.²⁴

¹⁹ Nick Yee, "The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play," Games and Culture 1, no. 1 (January 2006): 69.

²⁰ Yee, "The Labor of Fun:" 70.

²¹ Yee, "The Labor of Fun:" 70.

²² Celia Pearce, "Productive Play: Game Culture from the Bottom Up," Games and Culture 1, no. 1 (2006): 22.

²³ Pearce, "Productive Play:" 18

²⁴ Pearce, "Productive Play:" 18

Both published in 2006, Yee and Pearce's pieces build directly upon Kücklich's 2005 essay on video game mods—player-made modifications to published titles. Kücklich outlines how the mod community creates value for video game companies through the generation of new content that extends the game's shelf life without any compensation.²⁵ Furthermore, modders lack any claim to the intellectual property rights of their labor as they build off existing and typically proprietary software. Kücklich traces the history of the poster child of mods: Counter-Strike. Starting as a modded version of Valve's Half-Life (itself built off id Software's Quake), Counter-Strike was purchased by Valve and released as its own title.²⁶ Multiple sequels have since been released, including an upcoming title expected this summer.²⁷ In this case, a personal project done in one's free time, of one's own volition, and for one's own enjoyment has been wholly translated into a commercially successful product. This merging of play and labor into playbor works in tandem with the merging of production and consumption into prosumption to build an alternative framework for how humans operate. Through playbor and prosumption, humans can transition from Homo faber (man who makes) to Homo ludens (man who plays) without losing what is made. The act of making simply changes from that which occurs in a factory to that which occurs in a makerspace: namely, it is made because the maker wants to make it, not because they have been instructed to make it.

²⁵ Kücklich, "Precarious Playbour."

²⁶ Kücklich, "Precarious Playbour."

²⁷ Alex Steadman, "Counter-Strike 2 Revealed Out of Nowhere, Release Window Confirmed," IGN.

While labor by any definition requires a level of toil that likely brings more stress and misery than joy, play is inherently less definitive. New Zealand theorist Brian Sutton-Smith committed his career to exploring ideas around play, and even he had to title his canonical text The Ambiguity of Play. Scholars can debate over the nuances of the term labor, but play invites debate over its broader definition. Borrowing a page from English literary critic William Empson's book Seven Types of Ambiguity, Sutton-Smith identifies seven rhetorics of play: 1) as progress, such as the social and physical play central to a child's development; 2) as fate, such as gambling, which pits the notion that play is self-directed and of a free will against powers beyond the player's control; 3) as power, such as in athletic matches that represent conflict; 4) as identity, such as in communal celebrations and activities that form a cultural identity; 5) as the imaginary, such as in improvisation and creation; 6) as the self, such as hobbies and activities taken on simply because the player enjoys doing them; and 7) as frivolous, such as any activity that produces nothing but wasted time.²⁸ The breadth of these seven modes of playing, all of which certainly are forms of play, demonstrate the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of play. Furthermore, all but types 2 and 7 can readily include forms of what would otherwise be considered labor within them. In strictly Marxist analyses, considering play in these terms does not compute. Indian professor Tithi Bhattacharya proposes the lens of social reproduction to account for the time laborers must spend to recuperate in order to continue to labor,²⁹ which allows for play to factor into the labor process, but it does not allow play and labor to coincide. For social reproduction, play supports labor, recharging laborers so they might continue to labor.

²⁸ Brian Sutton-Smith,The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 9–11.

²⁹ Tithi Bhattacharya, "What Is Social Reproduction Theory?"

In a 2020 study, South African researchers found that organizations that incorporated playtime during work breaks tended to have higher team performances.³⁰ Similarly, Finnish professors found that gamification was an effective method "to increase the motivation of (crowd)workers and influence their behaviors, such as the quantitative crowdsourcing participation, the contribution quality and even the long-term engagement."³¹ Based on these studies, play clearly excels as a form of social reproduction that engenders more labor. However, the Finnish study also found that gamification was not always necessary, and sometimes could even hurt performance depending on the factors that brought workers to the job.³² They found that intrinsic motivation, self-direction, and personal desire have a greater impact than simply converting labor into a game. French anthropologist Emmanuelle Savignac also found this to be the case in her study of the gamification of work. In her analyses, she distinguishes between gamification, ludification, and ludicization. Gamification requires the introduction of gameplay mechanics into non-gameplay environments. Meanwhile ludification simply entails making activities fun. Ludicization combines the two, reframing an activity as a game and in turn changing the player's understanding of what makes a game a game.³³ The combining of play and labor is precisely ludicization: as labor becomes play, the definition of play expands to include more and more laborious tasks.

³⁰ Liana Fourie, Crizelle Els, and Leon T. de Beer, “A Play-at-Work Intervention: What are the Benefits?” South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences 23, no. 1 (2020): 1.

³¹ Benedikt Morschheuser and Juho Hamari, “The Gamification of Work: Lessons from Crowdsourcing,” Journal of Management Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2019): 146.

³² Morschheuser and Hamari, “The Gamification of Work:" 147.

³³ Emmanuelle Savignac, The Gamification of Work: The Uses of Games in the Workplace (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), xiv–xvi.

On one hand, large digital platforms have found an exploitative way to gamify labor behind dopamine-delivering 'like' systems in order to generate a profit for themselves from the voluntary labor of their users. On the other hand, the rapid spread of play as labor (and labor as play) serves to deconstruct the exploitative capitalist system in favor of a system where humans are able to do what they enjoy and still make a living. As the platform market continues to grow and digital democracies become more prevalent around the globe, the future of labor seems increasingly fun for those who can afford to playbor and prosume.^B Even for those who cannot afford to do so, the massive amount of content generated by post-industrial prosumers remains accessible, providing entertainment and perhaps even a beacon of what it to come as industry continues to trickle down through the globe and into automated systems. Where the capitalist purchased labor in the 19th and 20th centuries, the 21st century promises that, through the ludicization of labor, the capitalist will eventually create such a distance between themselves and the labor they require that even their hired laborers will have nowhere near the level of arduous labor asked for in previous eras.

^B Ludic maps. Click inside the frame to launch the teal 'influencer' ball. Try to ricochet it off as many platform corporate headquarters as possible with as few clicks as possible to maximize your engagement score. Platform points have gravity fields based off their online web traffic statistics. Hover over them for more information. If you can hit them all with one click (their labels will turn teal), you've got what it takes to be the next big platform influencer! Visualizations by author.