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

[Keith Hart]

Quite right, Julian. Or, as David Graeber writes in Lost People, his 
wonderful Madagascar ethnography,

"People don't live their lives to prove some academic's point."

It's not just that life's a muddle, but rather that opening ourselves up 
to what people really do and think is the most reliable way of 
discovering something new in society.

What blew me away in your second picture, after all that harrowing stuff 
about 12-hour working days at 30 cents an hour, was the guy with his 
feet up reading a book or more likely playing Sudoko. Hard to imagine 
that in a Manchester factory in 1844.

The day that we substitute dead texts for life, we might as well pack up.

Keith


Julian Dibbell wrote:
> Rich responses, all, with lots to respond to in turn. Rather than do
> the point-by-point, though, I thought I might try to focus things
> through the lens of an image I brought back from China with me.
>
> I brought back hundreds, actually, and if you're curious, you can see
> a lightly filtered subset of them here:
>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/juliandibbell/sets/72157594279649151/
>
> Most of these are shots of gold farmers working at their 12-hour
> shifts, but the scene that most arrested me was one I saw during the
> workers' off hours. It's captured here:
>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/juliandibbell/237399844/in/set-72157594279649151/
>
> This is a picture of gold farmers spending some of the very little
> free time that they have in an Internet cafe two floors down from the
> workplace that they spend 80 hours of every week in grinding their way
> through the repetitive challenges of World of Warcraft, and what they
> are choosing to do in this Internet cafe -- on their own time, for
> their own amusement, at their own expense -- is to continue grinding
> their way through the repetitive challenges of World of Warcraft.
> Seriously. And this, as far as I could tell, was not at all an unusual
> sight to see in and around the gold farms of China.
>
> Now, speaking of parlor tricks, another good one is to pull out your
> copy of "The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844" at this
> point and challenge your grad students to reconcile that scene in the
> Internet cafe with Marx's point about how capitalist production,
> almost as a defining characteristic, enforces a hardening of the line
> between work and leisure -- i.e., the bit in his essay on "The
> Alienation of Labor" where he writes that the "estranged character" of
> modern work "becomes obvious when one sees that as soon as there is no
> physical or other coercion, labor is avoided like the plague."
>
> My intuition, personally, is that this is not so cheap a trick as it
> might seem. It hardly evades Marx's terms, of course, to observe (as
> Alex Galloway does) how thoroughly confused the tools of work and play
> are in the computer. And you can object, certainly, that there remains
> a meaningful difference between the gold farmers' interaction with
> World of Warcraft on the job and how they play it after hours. On
> their own time they are playing their own characters, picking their
> own battles, whereas when working they are playing characters
> belonging either to their employers or to Western players who are
> paying to have their characters "leveled up" for them. Indeed, the
> filmmaker and media scholar Ge Jin (director of a forthcoming
> documentary on China's gold farms) has cited the same passage from
> Marx to describe gold farmers' work as "alienated play"—"in which," to
> quote Jin's adaptation of Marx's almost hyperliterally apt description
> of the alienated worker, "the activity of the [player] is not his own
> activity. It belongs to someone else, it is the loss of his self."
>
> All the same, I would insist that the curious case of the WoW-obsessed
> gold farmers really is a curious one, and really does suggest that we
> are treading on new territory here. For one thing, look at this
> picture:
>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/juliandibbell/237401135/in/set-72157594279649151/
>
> This is an image of gold farmers *on the job*, and if it looks a lot
> like the image of gold farmers at their leisure, that again is not
> only because the technology is the same in both cases. You can see
> that these guys are not exactly grinding out tool parts on an assembly
> line here; they're looking over each other's shoulders, trading tips
> on how best to fight their in-game enemies, cheering each other when
> they win and laughing when they die. I spent three days on the shop
> floor of this gold farm (one of them pulling a 12-hour shift myself),
> and I saw scenes like this popping up all the time.
>
> Nor, I have to say, did they appear to me to be anything like
> irruptions of counterhegemonic ludicity, or whatever, into an
> otherwise repressive work space. These workers weren't stealing
> moments of pleasure from a routine exclusively oriented toward
> production. On the contrary, such is the complexity of a game like
> World of Warcraft that the owners of the gold farms really do depend
> on their workers to actively seek out and share with their colleagues
> the most effective ways to get ahead in the game and even to identify
> potential new revenue streams the owners might otherwise not be aware
> of. They depend on their workers, that is to say, to be players. So
> that even their after-hours play becomes not just an escape from the
> constraints of on-the-job play but a kind of R&D lab for the industry.
>
> Now, you could argue here that this is not so much an ultimate
> blurring of the line between work and play as an intensification of
> what we've seen Adorno describe as play's "function of habituating
> people to the demands of [productive] praxis." But let me finally
> clarify that I don't see the ludocapitalist turn in quite such dark
> totalitarian terms as that.
>
> I'm inclined to say I see it, rather, as a bit of a muddle. The modern
> productive regime has always defined itself in opposition to play, yet
> by its nature it has always been moving toward a moment when that
> opposition becomes unsustainable and production and play are obliged
> to come to terms. And I think we can already see in such phenomena as
> the gold farm that this mutual accommodation is going to be messy,
> full of moments both utopian and otherwise, both promising and
> dispiriting.
>
> (And for what it's worth I'm not even sure it will help to invent new
> ethical categories of play -- "deep" versus "shallow," or whatever the
> terms might be. I mean, are Second Life and Spore more socially
> redemptive games than WoW? I'll entertain the argument, but if you
> have any idea how long it took me to level my shaman up to 70, you'll
> know it had better be a damn good one.)
>
>