Digital Culture & Society (DCS): Vol. 5, Issue 2/2019 - Laborious Play and Playful Work I (Digital Culture & Society) (Digital Culture & Society) - Softcover

Pablo Abend; Sonia Fizek; Mathias Fuchs; Karin Wenz

 
9783837644791: Digital Culture & Society (DCS): Vol. 5, Issue 2/2019 - Laborious Play and Playful Work I (Digital Culture & Society) (Digital Culture & Society)

Synopsis

This double issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the complex thematic field of the dialectics of play and labour. We will take a closer look at the problem of play and work from two overlapping, albeit not mutually exclusive, perspectives: laborious play and playful work. The term laborious play points to practices and processes that turn playful activities into hard work. Laborious play happens whenever playfulness turns into work, and may be observed in such activities such as e-sports, excessive play, "goldfarming", and Twitch gameplay broadcasting, amongst many others. A complementary phenomenon to that of laborious play is the practice and concept of playful work. The promises of a joyful and rewarding working experience have been promoted as "gamification" while critical voices denounce such attempts as ideology, exploitation or simply rubbish.

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About the Author

Pablo Abend (Dr.) is a postdoctoral reseacher in the project 'Modding and Editor-Games. Participatory Practices in Mediatized Worlds' in the DFG Priority Program Mediatized Worlds (1505) at the Institute for Media Studies and Theater, University of Cologne (Germany). Mathias Fuchs (Dr.), artist, musician and media scholar, is Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS) at Leuphana University, Lüneburg (Germany). He is a pioneer in the field of game art and is a leading scholar in game studies. Karin Wenz (Dr.) is assistant professor for Media Culture at Maastricht University (Netherlands) and director of studies of the MA in Media Culture.

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