[iDC] Notes Toward a Theory of Ludocapitalism (O Rly?)

[pat kane]

Eloquent, Julian, many thanks for posting. And kudos to you for  
citing the "sporting" run-on from Weber's famous quote - always one  
of my favourite seminar-room parlour tricks...

If it's OK to proceed these arguments on iDC by recycling recent  
productions (and hey! we can do that playfully!), let me post an  
exchange I had in an article called Dialoguing Play, published in  
Ephemera, where I debate my 'play ethic' thesis with some critical  
management theorists at the University of York. ( http:// 
www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-2/7-2kane-etal.pdf ). I think it might  
bring something to the development of what Alexander Galloway calls a  
'play theory of value' (as opposed to a labour theory of value). And  
yes, I did write the Play Ethic with the Weber thesis in mind - but  
only because Manuel Castells brought it to mind in his book, The  
Network Society. IE, if the "Protestant Ethic" was the "spirit of  
capitalism", what ethic might be the "spirit of informationalism"?

But the deep question is, of course, what is the nature of the system  
that a play ethic might legitimate, might make hegemonic and  
acceptable? Or put it another way: is  Castells' 'informationalism'  
different from Weber's 'capitalism'? My beef with Tapscott's  
Wikinomics was that it might indeed be a raid on informationalism (or  
the promise of participatory networks, in Michel Bauwens' vision) by  
capitalism. Your point, Julian, is that a subjective mode of  
playfulness might be exactly what a far-too-fluid, mobile and just-in- 
time networked capitalism needs from us to function properly (and not  
the recalcitrance, or commitment to character and coherent life- 
narrative, that Richard Sennett celebrates in his books).

I would draw you back to your founding insight with the book - gazing  
at the absorption of your little daughter in play. The politics of a  
play ethic would be about constructing the same kind of 'grounds of  
play' for adults that we establish for our children - something  
beyond the Scandinavian model of comprehensive-welfare-supporting- 
meaningful-work, heading towards a social recognition of the sheer  
ubiquitous, irrepressible, symbolic productivity of our lives as  
informational players. This means demands for shorter working week,  
increased sabbatical support, wellbeing allowances. Your child is a  
good measure of a play politics in another way - in that  
informationalism should be about decomposing the morning commute and  
the work-home divide, and about bringing productivity and nurturance  
back into proximity again (well, that's what my freelance life feels  
like anyway). Jeremy Rifkin gets at the kind of policy militancy  
required in his European Dream book  http://emagazine.credit- 
suisse.com/app/article/index.cfm? 
fuseaction=OpenArticle&aoid=197976&coid=120&lang=EN :

"  RIFKIN: We simply need to tell our economists coming out of the  
master of business administration schools how to use fiscal policy to  
stimulate social capital and the civil society organizations so that  
they become the place where there’s increasing employment. In that  
way we balance employment in the market, employment in the public  
sector for public capital, and then employment in the civil society  
for social capital. This is the most immune to computers [not a  
luddite point, he's been talking about the computerisation of jobs],  
because in this sector you need humans; it’s about the metaphysics of  
human engagement with each other - it’s deep play.

"  QUESTION: What do you mean by deep play?
"  RIFKIN: Deep play is where we create deep bonds of participation  
to explore our humanity, our relationships to the human principles of  
life. If you take all of the art, religious, secular, social justice,  
civic, community, and sports activities, all of those are deep play  
as they are an end in themselves. The end result is joy, actual  
revelation. It’s experiencing each other and exploring our humanity.  
People do it because it gives life meaning. It’s what you remember  
about life on your deathbed. "

(Incidentally, how many computer games are driven by such deep-play  
principles? Second Life maybe? Spore maybe?)

Ok, the long-awaited quote from the article: http:// 
www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-2/7-2kane-etal.pdf (there's much else  
in the piece which answers these issues):

SL: Somewhat relatedly to this discussion, a question you yourself  
initiate in the book is
the question of audience, of play as display, and I’d like you to  
expand on that theme a
little if you would. Guy Debord made the situationist position clear  
in arguing that we
live in a society of the spectacle, where Marxist alienation is not  
merely from the
objects of production but from the unfolding of reality itself, from  
which we are largely
unattached and look on. Baudrillard took the point further arguing  
that we don’t just
look on at reality because we cannot know what it is independently of  
our being in it
and acting it out – but such a reality is merely a simulacrum of  
signs, symbols and
information that elicits us to participate in particular ways that  
realise its illusory
aspects. We might be alienated, but we aren’t alienated from anything  
knowable, and
we are engaged in reproducing simulacra. So for Debord spectation is  
important, and
for Baudrillard it is more like spectaction – but the point of both  
is that we perform, that
play is play for, that there are audiences even if they are only  
other players. Perhaps the
sort of reality TV that is Big Brother captures this simultaneity.  
But the question is, if
play is performance, how do we arrive at an ethics of display? If  
play is performative, is
it just another form of work that takes us back to a modified work  
ethic?

PK: I have been focussed in answering this question by a superb essay  
from the
technology critic Alexander Galloway, ‘Warcraft and Utopia’. Let me  
quote from it:

Adorno argues [in Aesthetic Theory] that play activities are forms of  
repetition, and on this many
agree, but he goes further to assert that “in art, play is from the  
outset disciplinary [and] art allies
itself with unfreedom in the specific character of play.” For Adorno,  
play has been co-opted by the
routine of modern life. “The element of repetition in play is the  
afterimage of unfree labour, just as
sports – the dominant extra-aesthetic form of play – is reminiscent  
of practical activities and
continually fulfils the function of habituating people to the demands  
of praxis, above all by the
reactive transformation of physical displeasure into secondary  
pleasure, without their noticing that
the contraband of praxis has slipped into it.” Thus, in the work of  
Adorno, play is not a vacation
from the pressures of production, but rather the form-of-appearance  
(‘afterimage’) of that mode
itself, with repetition, displeasure, and competitive interaction  
being but symptoms for deeper
social processes. [http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=507]

I agree with Adorno and Galloway that sports is an example of a  
culture of display, of
spectation, smuggling in a ‘modified work ethic’ – particularly in  
the spectacle of
football, where all the tendencies of the new capitalism (disloyal,  
hyper-individualised
employees; performativity as a self-subverting cult; results-driven,  
visionary
management; the tensions of living out and up to a ‘brand’ culture)  
are served up as
daily narrative entertainment for the viewing millions. It’s almost  
perfectly ideological
– the ‘repetition, displeasure and competitive interaction’ of  
football as the ideal ‘after-
image of unfree labour’. Galloway makes the salient point that, in  
some multi-user
online synthetic worlds, the dues and routines that means you ‘stay  
in the game’ of
World of Warcraft are almost indistinguishable from the kinds of  
unfree labour that
constitutes an ‘offline’ life. As he puts it, “networks are the  
establishment and play is
work”. Galloway’s other brilliant point is that perhaps we don’t need  
a labour theory of
value, but a play theory of value, given how central play is becoming  
to information
capitalism.

Yet I’d resist the notion – which I think constantly recurs in  
invocation of play in these
kinds of arguments – that play has to be confined to a particular  
combination of
elements in its spectrum. This is how Galloway describes play;

"An irreducible, heterogeneous, unquantifiable, absolutely  
qualitative human endeavour.
Conventionally speaking, play is entirely divorced from any kind of  
productive activity. Play is
defined as a negative force that is often a direct threat to  
production. Play is leisure; play is the
inversion of production. Play is an uncapitalizable segment of time.  
One may return to Friedrich
Schiller on the play-drive: the play-drive is a pure moment, and it  
is a very necessary moment,
Schiller would claim, for man's development, but one that is entirely  
outside the formal, or the
abstract, or all the kinds of human drives that lead to the creation  
of society as a whole."

What’s interesting here is how badly Galloway misrepresents  
Schiller’s play-drive. As
Terry Eagleton adroitly points out in The Ideology of the Aesthetic,  
in the ‘Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man’, Schiller actually interposes the play- 
drive as a hegemonic
term, mediating between the ‘form-drive’ of rationality, and the  
‘sense-drive’ of
irrationality – historicized by Eagleton as Schiller’s horrified  
response, in 1794, to the
unholy alliance of the philosophies and the mob in the spectacle of  
the French
Revolution. And play as display and performance – the active and  
shaping ‘aesthetic
education’ that would provide for an integrated model of citizenship  
and social
involvement – was very much Schiller’s ideal, what he called the  
‘aesthetic state’.

It’s extremely tempting in the age of Big Brother to revive  
Schiller’s notion: could the
concepts of ‘aesthetic’ and ‘state’ ever be brought more  
appropriately together? And it’s
an easy step to identify the hegemonic aspects of Big Brother as a  
form of performative
play. Just as immaterial labour (in the Italian autonomists’ sense)  
becomes aware of
itself as a driving force in the development of society, the  
spectacle moves into to
depoliticize, privatise, and trivialise it. Even more hegemonically,  
we can see Big
Brother as orchestrating movements across the dividing line between  
passive spectation
and active participation with consummate ease – a simulation of the  
opening-up of the
spectacle. Slavoj Žižek (1989) has called this ‘interpassivity’ as  
opposed to interactivity
– a simulation of interaction, guided by existing yet subtle  
commercial scripts for
behaviour.

Is there an irreducibly open, primordial aspect to play, the sheer  
difference celebrated
by Derrida, driven by mammalian adaptive potentiation? Yes. And if  
so, then that
provides the ‘adjacent possible’ within any social system (as the  
complexity theorists
put it) to imagine different forms of display than those which  
currently canalise the
energies of the informational multitude. I’m sure that we’ll  
participate and spectate in
some form of ‘reality TV’ show at some point (Little Brother? Big  
Sister? Average
Activist?) which, as Galloway says, will imagine a life after  
capitalism “through a
utilization of the very essence of capitalism.” I have, like Hardt  
and Negri, a degree of
optimism about the mobility of power-flows across a thoroughly  
networked planet to
think that this expressive possibility will be realised, at some  
point by some group of
activists, and create a different form of display that will ‘pierce  
through’ the spectacle it
participates in.

Best, pk





On 24 Sep 2007, at 13:33, Julian Dibbell wrote:

> Hi, folks. Trebor invited me to post a bit about a cluster of topics
> that has been the focus of my thinking and reporting for the last few
> years: Online games, virtual economies, and the increasingly elusive
> distinction between play and production in the digitally networked
> world.
>
> Some context: In June I published an article in the New York Times
> Magazine called "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer," profiling a few
> of the roughly 100,000 young people in China who work in factory-like
> gaming workshops, playing massively multiplayer online games like
> World of Warcraft 12 hours a day for about US$0.30 an hour. The
> material conditions of these jobs are spartan-to-grim, but their
> product is a thing of fantasy and light:  From the corpses of the
> virtual monsters they spend their work days slaying, the workers
> harvest magic armor, powerful weapons, and above all the coveted coins
> of precious metal that typically serve as currency within MMO games.
> These goods, in turn, can be sold by their employers, for real money,
> to online retailers who in turn sell them, for even more real money,
> to players in the West who use them to get ahead in virtual careers
> that not infrequently take up as much of their time and energy as
> their real-life jobs do.
>
> For people who have never played an MMO, it can be difficult to grasp
> what drives this peculiar economic circuit -- or to believe that it
> supports an annual exchange of well over 1 billion U.S. dollars worth
> of real money for virtual goods (a figure that, in some analyses,
> extrapolates to a total gross domestic product for the world's MMOs of
> about US$28 billion, in the neighborhood of Sri Lanka's or Lebanon's).
> But the Times article does a pretty good job, I think, of ironing out
> any mysteries, and you can read the full text of it here:
>
> http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/goldfarmers.html
>
> Or if you care to dive deeper into the phenomenon, you could read my
> book "Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading
> Virtual Loot," an account of the year I spent attempting to earn a
> living solely from trafficking in the virtual goods of the classic MMO
> Ultima Online. While the attempt met with limited success (my earnings
> reached the millions only as valued in UO's local currency, the
> Britannian gold piece, which trades at about 300,000 to the dollar),
> but it gave me a chance to get to know and write about a rich cast of
> characters who've done much better by themselves with the game.
>
> And it also got me thinking my way toward a larger argument I've had
> sufficient nerve to call a theory of ludocapitalism but not quite
> enough to take altogether seriously. I genuinely think there's
> something to it, though, and so, in hopes that the best and brightest
> among you might confirm me in (or disabuse me of) that belief, I'm
> going to try to lay it out for you now by way of an annotated excerpt
> or two from the book:
>
> The argument first crops up in an early chapter about the first known
> gold farm, a Tijuana operation set up by a U.S. outfit called
> Blacksnow Interactive. "What Blacksnow's story was trying to tell me
> about contemporary economic life," I conclude, "was this: It is
> becoming play. A game."
>
> The thesis proceeds: "This is not an entirely unprecedented
> observation. 'Casino capitalism' is political-economist Susan
> Strange's label for an international economic system in which
> speculative financial dealings—wagers in all but name—have come to
> dwarf in monetary value the global trade in goods and services.  More
> broadly, cultural theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord
> have argued, in various ways, that life under advanced capitalism
> immerses us all in a largely imaginary reality, a media-saturated
> Disneyland-writ-large, drained of the heft and consequence that have
> historically distinguished real life from play. Or, if you like a
> little more kung fu in your critical theory, you can find the same
> argument roughed out in The Matrix, where, in an unsettlingly familiar
> future, the daily grind of economic production turns out to be no more
> than the rules of what is essentially a vast multiplayer computer game
> (and where Baudrillard's critique of postmodernity as 'the desert of
> the real' is quoted 20 minutes into the narrative, just so you don't
> miss the point).
>
> "My point, however, is both narrower and more sweeping. I'm not
> talking about games as a metaphor. I'm talking about games as a
> symptom; about Pac-Man, Asteroids, Mortal Kombat, Counter-Strike,
> Halo, World of Warcraft, and the fast-growing, multibillion-dollar
> computer-game industry in general as the side effect of a far
> profounder development in the history of play: its decisive
> infiltration of that most serious of human pursuits, the creation of
> wealth. I'm suggesting that when the economic system of the world has
> come to such a pass that the labor of online gamers can contribute
> more to the global GDP than 2 out of 3 sovereign nations, then no
> proper account of that system can neglect to account for its
> relationship to play. And I'm arguing, finally, that that relationship
> is one of convergence; that in the strange new world of immateriality
> toward which the engines of production have long been driving us, we
> can now at last make out the contours of a more familiar realm of the
> insubstantial—the realm of games and make-believe. In short, I'm
> saying that Marx had it almost right: Solidity is not melting into
> air. Production is melting into play."
>
> In the subsequent chapters we meet, among many others, Troy Stolle (an
> Indianapolis union carpenter whose nightly efforts toward achieving a
> US$750 castle of his own in Ultima Online eerily paralleled the
> hammer-pounding tedium of his day job) and the ghosts, respectively,
> of Johan Huizinga (whose "Homo Ludens," arguably, inspired Roger
> Caillois, the Situationist International, and others to take up play
> as both a foundational and a historically transformative element of
> culture) and Alan Turing (a man not usually thought of as a social
> theorist but whose seminal theories of computation, to say nothing of
> his famous Turing test, fairly bristle with latent recognitions of the
> ludic mechanisms at the heart of digitally mediated existence). Then,
> after the bumpy ride of my brief career as a ludocapitalist has ended,
> I return to a final stab at summing up the theory, such as it is, as
> follows:
>
> "It was official: Work is play and play is work. The only question now
> was what that possibly could mean.
>
> "Not that I hadn't already given that one some thought. By now I had
> finally read my Huizinga and my Caillois and the Situationists on
> play—and found them bracing in their variously elegiac, analytic, and
> inflamed attempts to salvage play from the margins that modernity had
> cast it into. They were everything I could have hoped for, in fact, in
> that long-ago moment [the moment that had led to my decision to go
> into virtual trading in the first place] when I'd watched my
> [two-year-old] daughter rapt in play and wondered how it was that
> daily life, and work especially, could have fallen so far from that
> state of grace without provoking, somewhere, a critique as eloquent as
> the howls Lola would have loosed if I had snatched her up just then
> from the wonder of her toys.
>
> "Except that this was not that moment any longer, and what I wondered
> now was what exactly those impassioned 20th century ludologists—no
> friends of the modern productive regime, insistent that 'play,
> radically broken from a confined ludic time and space, must invade the
> whole of life' ['Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play,'
> Internationale Situationniste #1 (June 1958)]—would make of the
> invasion that was finally coming to pass. Could the daily grind of a
> Chinese gold farmer possibly be the ludic utopia they'd had in mind?
> Could they find a way to celebrate the nightly drudgery that had built
> Troy Stolle's tower, or make out anything like liberation in the
> strange reshaping of production it seemed to herald?
>
> "Consider this: In an essay on work and play in MMOs, the psychologist
> Nicholas Yee proposes a thought experiment. 'Given that MMORPGs are
> creating environments where complex work is becoming seductively fun,'
> Yee asks, 'how difficult would it be for MMORPG developers to embed
> real work into these environments?' As one possibility, he suggests
> that the screening of diagnostic scans for cancer be outsourced not to
> low-wage technicians in India—as is routinely done now—but to players
> who would actually pay to do the job, so long as it contributed to the
> advancement of their characters. The proposition is at least as
> plausible as the Chinese gold farms, and implemented in a
> science-fiction world like Star Wars: Galaxies, it wouldn't even
> disrupt the players' immersion in that world.
>
> "Nor is Yee's thought experiment entirely hypothetical. The multiuser
> online world There, as Yee points out, started out as a sort of
> semi-covert test-marketing environment, in which companies like Levi's
> and Nike paid There to let its paying customers wear virtual versions
> of the companies' products. When this attempt at extracting value from
> player activity didn't pan out, There, Inc., renamed itself Forterra
> and shifted its focus to a similar exercise in interweaving the
> playful and the productive: supplying the U.S. Armed Forces with vast,
> multisoldier training grounds in cyberspace, virtual Kuwaits,
> Afghanistans, and Baghdads.
>
> "The military, of course—with its rich history of war games dating
> back through the 18th century Prussian Kriegsspiel to the Persian
> origins of chess—has long been ground zero for the confusion of play
> and productivity, but lately it seems to be outdoing itself. Never
> mind the military's collaborations with game producers to create
> marketably playable simulations like Pandemic Studios' Full Spectrum
> Warrior. The rumor these days is that planners at the Pentagon have
> adopted as a kind of Bible Orson Scott Card's science-fiction novel
> Ender's Game—in which a small army of children believe themselves to
> be playing a sophisticated video game when in fact they are
> telematically leading a campaign to annihilate a race of ruthless
> space invaders. (How many of these planners, I wonder, have read the
> sequel, in which the leader of these children spends the rest of his
> life atoning for the richly complicated sin of unknowing genocide?)
>
> "And if all this strikes you still as rather more speculative than
> momentous, consider, then, the increasingly ludic production of that
> most transformative of contemporary commodities: computer software.
> There's a website called TopCoder.com, where programmers compete in
> juried contests to win prizes for the best computer programs for a
> given task, while the site itself sells off the winning programs at a
> profit. It's a quirky little business model, not much imitated and not
> especially well known, yet it illuminates a similar but much more
> talked-about phenomenon: the production of open-source software, in
> which dozens or hundreds or thousands of unpaid programmers join in
> loose collaboration to create a computer program none of them will own
> and anyone can modify. With open-source software running most of the
> Internet's infrastructure and the open-source Linux operating system
> making serious inroads against Microsoft Windows on business and
> government desktops, tremendous effort now goes into figuring out what
>  sustains so much and such high-quality 'amateur' product. But what
> hundreds of analyses of the open-source software movement have failed
> to get a handle on is precisely what TopCoder builds its business on:
> the essentially playful urges behind open-source production.
>
> "Why do they do it, the TopCoders and the open-source programmers and
> the free-software hackers? Not for salaries, obviously, or for the
> cash prizes, really, or even for the high-minded philosophical reasons
> most often and most closely examined—the commitments to open-source
> methodology as a more socially responsible or technically powerful way
> of writing software. No: above all they do it for the agonistic glory
> of having their contributions singled out for inclusion in the final
> product and the ineffably geeky joys of writing the slickest code you
> can. 'Jouissance' is the broad term anthropologist of technology
> Gabriella Coleman applies to this ludic impulse at the heart of
> open-source creation, but Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has put it
> more plainly: 'The computer itself is entertainment,' he declared in
> his foreword to Pekka Himanen's 'The Hacker Ethic,' an elucidation of
> the ideas behind open-source creation.
>
> "Consider it all, then. Look at Troy Stolle's late-night pointing and
> clicking, at Blacksnow's sweatshop, at Nick Yee's cancer-screening
> parable, at the military's dreams of death-dealing games and the
> hackers' play at writing code that works. Each on its own might not
> amount to a historic moment, but looking at them all together I can't
> help sensing the emergence of a curious new industrial revolution,
> driven by play as the first was driven by steam. As steam did then, so
> now play lives among us as a phenomenon long ignored by the machinery
> of production—evanescent, vaporous, unexploited—and inasmuch as
> production abhors a vacuum, it was perhaps just a matter of time
> before it moved to colonize the vacant, vacuous space of play.
>
> "Such were my thoughts, at any rate, in the weeks after the Times
> confirmed the existence of the Chinese gold farms. And like I said, I
> was at a loss to fit them into the frame of reference I had found in
> (and once shared with) Huizinga, Caillois, the Situationists, and
> other high-modern champions of play. For all of them, to one degree or
> another, the modern system of production was so radically unplayful
> that even imagining that system capable of incorporating the energy of
> play would have been a challenge: Any such incorporation, in their
> view, could only subvert the system or destroy the play.
>
> "And yet, if you think about it, the logic of the system isn't really
> so antithetical to play as that. In fact, if you think about it hard
> enough, you might conclude that play is where that logic has been
> headed all along. Max Weber, for instance, who thought about it very
> hard indeed, seems to say exactly that in those final pages of The
> Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism where he denounces the
> 'iron cage' of meaningless hyperefficiency the Puritan economic
> reformation has left us in, in which 'the idea of duty in one's
> calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious
> beliefs.' Those are the oft-quoted words anyway. Just below them in
> the same passage, however, Weber curiously yet much less famously
> suggests that dead religious beliefs don't only survive as ghosts: 'In
> the field of its highest development, in the United States, the
> pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning,
> tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often
> actually give it the character of sport [emphasis added].'
>
> "Weber doesn't elaborate the point, but it makes sense: Drained of the
> religious significance that gave it meaning, the economic system we
> inhabit must either bind us to its pointlessness against our wills—a
> costly proposition, like any prison system—or contrive new meanings
> for our daily grind. And what easier way is there of contriving
> meaningful activity than through the mechanisms of play? Add computers
> to the historical picture, effectively building those mechanisms into
> the technological foundation of the world economy, and the contriving
> gets so easy that it starts to look inevitable. The grind must sooner
> or later become a game."
>
> (Props to Thomas Malaby, Pat Kane, McKenzie Wark, Keith Hart, and
> others on the list who've hit some of these same notes elsewhere.
> Special thanks to David Weinberger, whose 3000 words of excerptage
> emboldened me to forward my 2000, but who can't be blamed if mine fail
> to engage or provoke as effectively as his.)
>
> -- 
> Julian Dibbell
> www.juliandibbell.com
> +1.574.286.7406
> juliandibbell (Skype)
> DibbellJ (AIM)
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