Workification

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games IV

Eron Rauch — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 08:09:52 +0000

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games IV

Eron Rauch Di. 19 Apr 2016 - 10:09

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the final part of a his long-form essay on workification.

Part 4: The Garden Of Digital Delights

In past installments of Workified Games I’ve looked at ways that video games, their fans, and their creators have been inundated by workaholic tendencies. In part three, I proposed that leisure could be a new ideal that could help inspire us escape the mire of workification. But lest this sound like an outsider being preachy and this series get pegged as some sort of partisan argument, I want to acknowledge that much of what I’ve been saying has been and remains part of video game fan folk wisdom across genres and communities. After all, what Animal Crossing player hasn’t cursed out Tom Nook at some point for being a loan shark/raccoon? What WoW player hasn’t grumbled about doing endless dailies to earn reputation? What Final Fantasy 8 player didn’t grumble about the bullshit way dungeon speed equates to gold earned? What young Minecraft player hasn’t been frustrated by having to burn a huge amount of time searching ever deeper for a rare material to build their whimsical castle? What Destiny player hasn’t griped about the other people on repetitious runs being like abusive coworkers?

Even more importantly, I would also argue that the reason many of the video games I’ve been using as examples of workaholic tendencies are also beloved by fans is because they also contain vast swathes of leisure-oriented time. World of Warcraft is an excellent example of this dichotomy. Despite WoW’s attempt to reduce the grind, there are still many mindless repetitious tasks to do as play, from trying to earn reputation, to levelling alts, to waiting for item drops, to completing ubiquitous achievements. But a significant portion of what has kept so many of my friends engaged with WoW over the years is the large amount of time left for hanging out with friends, both real and virtual, in weird and wonderful fantasy towns; playing dress up and dancing; racing dragons over the desert; taking curious screenshots of beautiful vistas; and visiting old haunts (figuratively and also literally beating up ghosts). Even in high-end raiding, there are huge swaths of down time spent chatting, sightseeing, and playing pranks, not to mention the after-raid beers and story sessions.

Through past instalments, I’ve made it clear that a large part of this obsession with work and efficiency in video games is a seepage of the ferocious rise of workaholism and efficiency culture of American life and the tech industry. But it also should be observed that part of the fans’ and designers’ obsession with rationalist work systems is very likely a conscious defensive measure to prove the worth of video games to a skeptical public. After all, for how many decades have video games been harangued and belabored by politicians and morally judgmental do-gooders as a vast “waste of time?” What better way than to dodge that massive, culturally loaded, criticism than to highlight the aspects of gaming that are measurable and work-like? Though my argument might, like leisure itself, be dismissed as frivolous, to rephrase it in a way that might interest investors, creators, fans, and advertisers alike: what I’m suggesting is that pre-restricting the market to only people who want to be part of a workaholic system, both as creators and players, is vastly limiting the potential size of both fandom and the industry.

Restricting the market to only people who want to be part of a workaholic system, both as creators and players, is vastly limiting the potential size of both fandom and the industry.

To take a fresh spin on the insightful article “In Praise of Lando” by Julian Murdoch, part of my interest in workification’s limited narratives is rooted in the way that as we grow older our values and priorities invariably shift. Like a large portion of players, such as my gaming group, who still want to play but invariably buy fewer video games than we did when we were younger, a sizable portion of this decline might very well be attributed to our disinterest in games that replicate what we do in the rest of our time. That is, the kinds of games we find valuable and interesting have changed as our careers, relationships, hobbies, and even children have grown to prominence in our lives.

Simply put, many of my friends won’t play, meaning buy, games that have any grind or that feel in any significant way like the very work that keeps them away from their passions and families. Increasingly those whimsical, magical, and breathtaking experiences we found in video games are being reduced to one more cubicle desk, retail floor, or factory line. As such, this essay is a call for fans, marketers, investors, and developers to remember that leisure spaces, leisure systems, and leisure goals are as equally real to the experience of work in video games and are also equally part of the history of the games we loved. While efficiency experts want to “gamify work” to get their companies to be more profitable, we as fans and creators are working against the very thing we love, against the very moments that made us fans of video games, if we continue to “workify games.”

A counter argument for my observations about workified games might be that common leisure pastimes such as gardening or cooking a meal for friends could also be mistakenly viewed as “work-like” under my paradigm. In fact, thinkers like Kucklich have developed ideas such as “playbour” to talk about the kinds of work-like activities we increasingly do for fun. But, as the very need to generate a new term to separate playbour from labour implies, while there certainly is some work involved in planting some tomatoes in a garden or cooking pasta for friends those ideas are radically different in intent than the notions of monetized labor practiced by a field hand picking many tons of tomatoes or by the line cook making hundreds of plates of pasta at Applebee’s.

To reintegrate the term “play,” a word so critical to many theories of video games that I have danced around for more of the essay, philosopher David Steindl-Rast suggests, “Are the two poles of activity really work and leisure? If this were so, how could we speak of leisurely work? It would be a blatant contradiction. We know, however, that working leisurely is no contradiction at all. In fact, work ought to be done with leisure, if it is to be done well. What then is the opposite of work? It is play. These are the two poles of activity: work and play.” Because we’re paying attention and spending the exact amount of time needed to accomplish the work, most of us actually do our best work when we are doing it with a leisurely attitude.

It is not work and leisure that are opposites, it is workaholism and leisure that are opposed.

Indeed, it is not work and leisure that are opposites, it is workaholism and leisure that are opposed. Indeed, as anyone who has ever gardened or cooked can attest to, one can assuredly work in a leisurely way. In fact, even though I’ve named Animal Crossing as a game that can feel workified, there are also many moments, such as fishing in the rain in the early evening, that evoke an idyllic beauty born of the small poetry of daily work. Albeit, crutching on some similar pastoral tropes, Stardew Valley’s pacing also shows how experiencing work can also be leisurely when presented in a way that has freedom from efficiency mandated grind.

The example of cooking can be used to clarify just how different feeling the same task can be when executed as a workaholic enmeshed in a system of exploitive labor or approached as leisure work. In a workaholic video game mode, your cooking experience might be hunting and killing hundreds of deer in World of Warcraft hoping to get the drops to make dozens and dozens of the same pots of deer stew so that one can level-up cooking to get an achievement or be high enough level to be allowed to make the food correct buff for a raid. In this way, WoW is much like working the line in a restaurant, where cooking is about completing task-oriented goals, set by a boss who represents a corporation, in the most efficient way possible so that something specific can be received for the time and labor loaned to the system.

Contrast that to leisurely cooking for your friends. Here the goal and the reward are the same, with the specific way you spend your time being set based on your own parameters (I’m making dinner; come at 8PM and bring wine). Sure, you might not have complete control since a friend might be like me and allergic to avocado, or you might get stuck at work later and need to have your friends help you make the food. Hell, you might burn the roast and have to order take-out. But like the combination of pathos and hilarity at watching a colony in Dwarf Fortress go up in flames because of a mad god running rampage, that very embrace of the fun and folly of human-ness is why leisure is such critical ideal to helping us understand our friends and our community in a more complete, intimate, and present way.

To return to David Steindl-Rast’s assertion that, “These are the two poles of activity: work and play,” this close relationship is also why video games that use play to consciously examine work can be so potent. Precisely by directly engaging in our dysfunctional obsession with work and progress, games like Cart Life, Office Simulator 95, or Papers Please, all of which are certainly not exactly “fun” in a traditional way, are so brutally effective as art because they lay bare the way work can dehumanize us. They also ask us as players to be aware of how easily we can become complicit in our own obsession with work as a marker of success. This should be a reminder, like the often dark hints in children’s playground games and fairy tales, that leisure is not always unbridled optimism, but an opening to a broader vision of the world.

Crucially the “busywork” and “grind” in games like Papers, Please is radically different than leveling a crafting profession in an MMO because it overtly teaches us how we can easily fall prey to the work-systems that exploit us. When you get a commendation from the central government in Papers, Please it is always fraught with meta-critical irony and criticism about what these awards for doing good work might actually mean. These types of games about the fetishization of work are also different in their expectation and respect for players’ time since they also do not demand nor congratulate us for spending vast swaths of our time with them. Most can be fully played and understood in a matter of hours, if not significantly less. They are work laid bare. Papers, Please and so many other DIY, alternative, and art games, encourage us toward a more complicated and interconnected understanding of how we exist in the world. They encourage us to be more present, which is to say, to break apart the linkage between busywork and status, which is precisely to be more leisure-oriented.

Indeed, two of the most effective indictments of the linkage of video gaming and work come from games themselves. In Unmanned, there is this intense moment of existential unease the first time a player comes home from piloting a drone and unwinds by playing a military themed video game. In a similar but broader way, it is crucial to understand that one of the overarching structural conceits of The Stanley Parable is that it is mis-applying First Person Shooter systems, controls, and exceptions, to an office environment. These video games are not without their legions of detractors, so it is critical to understand that, like telling a workaholic that “work isn’t everything,” merely by advocating for art and alt games that are oriented around leisure, presence, and criticizing achievements as progress, these works can be easily misconstrued as an assault on their values.

With workification comes all of the stress, anger, disregard for personal relationships, lack of paying attention, and xenophobia that is entailed by any sort of stress state.

In Austin C Howe’s fantastic article reassessing the much-maligned Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, he pinpoints the communities longstanding hatred of the game as coming from the ways it constructs a world of powerlessness, poverty, and replicating the conditions of shift work. “It is consciously built to work against gamers’ expectations of the genre, and most of its design decisions prevent gamers from playing D1/4 (Dragon Quarter) the way they play any other JRPG.” This is not to equivocate, or to say that we should ever tolerate abusive or harassing behavior, but rather that from within the oft-progressively skewed community of artists and critics, it can be easy to forget just how radical and disruptive proposing such a de-linkage of work-progress and value can be. Hell, even within the more progressive elements of art and cultural work workaholism runs rife. Ask any artist or grad student when the last time they got more than 5 or 6 hours of sleep was! So it is always important to remind all audiences what Nabokov said, which should ring equally true for any fan cultural theory or of Final Fantasy VII, that “Texts we care about will both resist and reward us; not necessarily in that order.”

In ending, to borrow a phrase from Maria Popova, curator at of the philosophy blog Brain Pickings, right now it feels as though many mainstream video games are on a “productivity-guised flight from presence.” The combination of a focus on grinding productivity, flow, the value of efficiency, granular task-oriented structures, the constant inhabitation of job roles, and the hyper-focus on external achievements basically positions video game players as workaholics. With this workification comes all of the stress, anger, disregard for personal relationships, lack of paying attention, and xenophobia that is entailed by any sort of stress state. The work-obsessed mentality at the heart of so many video games is constraining our imagination for the kinds of games we make, the communities around them, the characters we imagine to inhabit the worlds, and even our ability to enjoy the games we play, because workaholism insidiously flattens everything to an endless loop of work and progress.

Workaholism insidiously flattens everything to an endless loop of work and progress.

If we, as creators, investors, and fans, continue down the road we are on, video games will be just one more increasingly limited part of an economically focused system that wants to turn us all in to mechanical turks that pay to work our jobs. But if we can find a way to infuse leisure into our video game experiences, to remember to leave space to be present, we will be able pay better attention to the video games we play and to more completely cherish our experiences with them, both good and bad, both work and play. It is only through leisure and play that video games are able fully inhabit their role as a core part of what makes us human, of what inspires us, and of what teaches us about ourselves. Through leisure, video games can let go of the cycle of endless grinding achievement and be a force to help us appreciate each other more, help us understand ourselves more completely, and of what lets us see the world as a richer and more interesting place. After all, as Kierkegaard said so simply, “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy.”

Extra special thanks to Zoya Street for the prompt to put my thoughts together on this series. Thanks as always to Rainer for being a home for my weird thoughts on video games and culture. Callie is once again a brilliant copy editor and makes sure you all can make sense of my ideas. Thanks to Alec, Sam, and Jason for informally talking through this with me, even if you don’t at all agree with me. Thanks to Han and Travis for helping out gathering screenshots to illustrate the series.

Links to the previous installments of "Workified Games":
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games III

Eron Rauch — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 08:10:42 +0000

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games III

Eron Rauch Mo. 18 Apr 2016 - 10:10

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is part three of four of a long-form essay on workification.

Part 3: A Celebrating Spirit

The last installment of Workified Games explored how the tendencies to fetishize work in video games overlap deeply with definitions of workaholism. I also talked about how the moral mandate to be constantly productive permeates contemporary Western society, especially the technology sector. But what then precisely is the problem with video games’ focus on work? What is lost because of this obsession with accomplishment? After all, unless you’re of the radical anarchist mindset of Bob Black’s infamous call for “full unemployment,” most people, myself included, find doing a good job at work deeply fulfilling.

The increasingly common task-driven, perma-grind structures in video games are different though because they are not interested in any notion of “end” or “fulfillment”. Embedded in these workaholic strictures is an insidious way of thinking that implies that since doing a good job is fulfilling, then ever-more work is ever-more fulfilling. Instead of work as a part of our life, workification colonizes and distorts every other aspect of life to its limited palate. For a common example, many of us have been on vacation with someone fixated on trying to see everything listed in a travel guide checklist for that destination. In the frantic rush to earn 100% completion on the vacation achievement, that person makes it so that by the time the flight home lands everyone on the trip feels like they need a vacation from the supposed vacation!

Though free time is constituted as wasteful in the American workaholic mindset, and work is conversely lauded, the great philosopher Camus sharply observed, “Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time… But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself.” The increasingly workaholic formulation of video games and flow is exactly this sort of “active wasting.” That is, as both creators and players grow more acclimated to this cycle of workification, it has begun to limit the other ways we can imagine interacting with games. Gaming comes to be synonymous with tuning out through doing efficient, mindless, work. Gaming is grinding. Play is confused with achievement.

While my initial observation about being burnt out on working in games was focused on my small group of dedicated video gaming friends, this creeping association with gaming as work matters so much because of just how much of society now plays video games. According to a number of new surveys, about 20% of Americans identify as game fans, but over 50% of Americans now regularly play games (with this number rising quickly with the explosion of smart phones and tablets). As artist Arjuna Newman pointed out, “The culture of today instructs the experience of tomorrow.” Which, in the simplest terms, means that a majority of Americans are being conditioned to inhabit and even desire workaholic video game design and play values.

Having devised a somewhat dark theory of the self-replicating workaholic system in video games, is there any alternative path forward? Is there anything we can strive for against this rising tide of workification? From the midst of this digitally-rendered vortex, if you are anything like me, it can be difficult to even imagine an alternative. Perhaps a good place to start would be looking for a word that we could put forward as a counter-ideal to “workaholic.” A word that, looking at all of the negative attributes of workaholism that I have previously listed, would mean: presence, involvement, tuning-in, beauty, an appreciation of play, openness, compassion, and a simple capacity for paying attention to what is immediately all around. We are looking for a term that suggests a refusal to mistakenly identify one’s self with the products of mindless activity. The term would need to also embrace the myriad of diverse ways that people can exist in, experience, and value the world. In a way, we’re searching for a word that is also the opposite of “efficiency.”

To digress for one moment, it is critical to note that while what I’m saying might seem purely like an attack, I am actually very concerned for what workification is doing to our collective capacity to appreciate the very things our hobby is built around: the video games themselves. Treating all video games as efficient work disrespects and drains ourselves, which I’ve shown at length, but it also leads to an idealization of ways of interacting with games that is very limited. A great example of this disrespect happened when I first started playing Guild Wars 2. I came to the game rather late, but it was with friends who had extensively played the original game and the sequel since beta testing. Muddling through the first zone after the tutorial, I was confused when I saw a large mass of players, including obviously high level characters in typical MMO glowing-spiked-winged-giant-sword-end-game regalia, looping again and again through the same five mini-boss events. My friends told me that repeating this circle was by far the most efficient way to level up and gather resources. Even for the most powerful players, any other way would double or triple the time needed to gain resources.

Treating all video games as efficient work disrespects and drains ourselves, but it also leads to an idealization of very limited ways of interacting with games.

My friends quite practically suggested the best way to do these loops in Guild Wars 2 was watching TV in a second monitor, pausing the TV only to dump the various bits of loot dropped on the auction house. I was appalled since all around us I could see endless magnificent vistas, sprawling towns, and shimmering NPCs loaded with floral language to explore. This was basically the starting zone, after all. But while all around there was a painstakingly created world, it was completely ignored by even its most dedicated fans. This would be like if the hobbits spent the second two Lord of The Rings books back in the Shire just avoiding the black riders and going to Bilbo’s party every night!

In a long interview about the struggle of making art in contemporary American society, Ann Hamilton insightfully commented on workaholic mindsets in an interview on the podcast On Being, “it seems like this whole efficiency thing… doesn’t work very well, because in fact, there’s this thinking that’s always going on inside the thing that you’re engaged with and, you’re not really having the experience if you’re rushing off to the next thing, right? So, even when you’re really, really compressed for time, how do you cultivate just being in the time you have at that moment?” We need to play and appreciate games for what they are, not just what comes next.

To return to my initial question of what word, what value, we might be able to propose as a new ideal to replace work, Josef Pieper, a German sociologist, wrote a book that seems to suggest an elegant word for the opposite of these workaholic game tendencies: leisure. This book is titled Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and came to my attention through the Brain Pickings blog. To quote at length,

“Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as effort, leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. The inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure… Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself … but also he is in agreement with the world and its meaning. Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.”

What better mindset could a fan of any art form have toward their passion than “considering things in a celebrating spirit”? Yet my gaming group could not have been further from this noble ideal then when we were completely exhausted, but still grinding away to complete tasks we hated late in to the night.

Though, or rather precisely because, work is so lauded in American life, leisure is conversely derided and dismissed as wasteful or for those without ambition. But David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who has dedicated his writing to exploring interfaith dialog and science, points out that “Leisure … is not the privilege of those who can afford to take time; it is the virtue of those who give to everything they do the time it deserves to take.” Leisure is about reclaiming the individual ability and agency to determine priorities and values. Rather than being rushed to finish one assigned task as fast as possible and then rushing to another task as quickly as possible, leisure differs from workaholism because it revels in the journey. It revels in the value of a simultaneous multitude of options for doing, not doing, watching, participating, resting, or exerting. Workaholism is an attempt to artificially attach our sense of self worth with some external structure of achievements. Leisure is an attempt to remember and discover who we are and how we connect in to the vastness of the world.

Maybe it is the workaholic video game structures that are helping encourage the behaviors of abusiveness that underlie so many video games communities.

If developing a leisure oriented-outlook on video games seems frivolous, perhaps it would be practical to consider how workaholism might well be impacting one of the biggest issues in video game design and fandom: how to deal with the rash of antisocial misbehavior and abuse by (mostly male) community members and players that drive vast amounts of potential new players (and hence purchasers) away from video games. As an example, Riot Games, maker of League of Legends, like every other major company producing multiplayer online games has spent countless millions of dollars and tens of thousands of work-hours trying to solve this issue. But what if it is the workaholic video game structures that the companies themselves are enacting and designing that are helping encourage the behaviors of abusiveness and constant simmering anger that underlies so many video games communities?

This linkage between workified games and antisocial behavior might seem odd at first, but as Klinger points out, to a workaholic, “Eventually, nothing or no one else really matters,” once the workaholism takes over. To reiterate Evenden’s observation about the ways games affect their life-long players, “habituation to play actually changes you.“ So if workaholic behavior usually leads to what Klinger describes as, “growing internal chaos [which] causes them [the workaholic] to try to control every action, and everyone around them,” it is a small jump to start to see these abusive antisocial selfish behaviors as a product of the video games’ values themselves. These domineering and antisocial attitudes are then compounded by the fact that workaholic behaviors are associated as positive traits in traditional definitions of masculinity.

Additionally, as researcher Robert M Sapolsky notes, stress is an inevitable product of mindlessness, overwork, sleep deprivation, and being in the midst of constant aggression. Workaholic behaviors, and their idealization, then contributes to rising stress, which itself has also been clearly linked to a reduction in empathy. “Stress literally and metaphorically narrows our field of vision; it tends to makes us less generous and cooperative in economic games, more xenophobic, more likely to interpret ambiguous expressions as hostile ones, and more likely to displace frustration and aggression onto those around us. As this new study on the biology of stress found, it also makes us less likely to feel someone else’s pain.”

It is quite possible to see this emotional desolation and limited empathy not just amongst community members, harried and tasked to their limit, but in the end-products of the infinite crunch and ruthless focus on metrics enshrouded in the video game production companies themselves. Lana Polansky links ideals and end-product in “Against Flow” since, “Flow works both as the desired affective experience for most games, as well as an aesthetic container.“ Is it anything but unsurprising that the most important aspects of life, friendship, love, connection to community, and authentically realized diversity (both of points of view and representation) are so barren when video game fans and creators have become subsumed by equating work as progress, measurable metrics as success, and an infinite achievement loop as the end goal?

One only has to look at the reputation systems in Mass Effect, Dragon Age, or Final Fantasy, to see how poorly the achievement- and efficiency-focused ways of interacting with the world are able to explore one of the biggest, most important, issues in human life. The stories themselves often glorify friendship, wax poetic about romance, and extol the bond of communities. But then immediately reduce them to rationalist systematic interaction with outcomes that have success guaranteed for work done. Especially in the recent trend to add “dating systems,” workified games can make relationships resemble most closely the actions of pickup artists, itself another group which has insidiously valorized efficiency and achievement as end-goals to be celebrated above all else (and eerily they call their actions “the game.”)

The ways that stress and workaholism reduce anyone’s capacity to view the world through the eyes of others might also at least partially explain the lack of video games which feature people of different genders, ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, body types, and other artistic and narrative richness. By being immersed in a constant state of workaholism and stress, then idealizing it, both video game fans and creators are accidentally building “video games” as a social space that is every-more battered from a maelstrom of an all pervasive “status anxiety” (to use Allan Debertuos’ wonderful formulation). Without leisure as a core value in video games, without understanding there is value outside of the grind of dealing with constant stress, and without freedom from demands from constant efficiency, video games workify, and become precariously close to embracing the very xenophobia born of this unhealthy obsession with work as status. Advocating for leisure as a core value becomes a way to combat these tendencies, to open up the possibility to have and appreciate more nuanced and diverse conversations.

This is precisely why games which seem to relish in leisure can seem so radical and controversial to some of the core fans who currently make up the target (workified) demographic for AAA video game marketers. Just think about how many complaints are leveled against games like Proteus, The Gathering Sky, and Gone Home for having no point. Personally, I always thought that I didn’t understand this knee-jerk reaction against leisure in art, against space, against the pastoral, and against the ambient. In fact, I’ve been publicly deeply dismissive of such criticisms. But in writing this article, I realized I do have a very concrete way to comprehend this phenomenon. At a very personal level, while it is embarrassing to admit, I almost always have a panic attack the first night I go on vacation. Living in a near-workaholic mode, in a workaholic city, suddenly being unplugged, unstructured, and so-called unproductive, those first moments I am left with just myself, standing in the midst of a world without any metrics, I freak out.

Alt games, indie games, art games, walking simulators, digital toys, interactive stories, and the whole spectrum of other sorts of video games, often seem combative and disorienting to people trained on workaholic games because they are spaces that, however briefly, arrest the workaholic structures that artificially or not, have given players a clear armature for their sense of self-worth. But while these positions come from a knee-jerk reaction, it is instructive to note that after my first day of panic on vacation, the world does not end. In fact, I not only calm down, but in fact come to feel more like myself, more in control of my thoughts, desires, and body.

Leisure reminds us that self-worth, and our love of video games, shouldn’t be built on getting a gold border for accomplishing some task 15 times.

Similarly, an orientation around leisure in video games, even if challenging or unfriendly at first, is so valuable because it reminds us the very things which makes life interesting, meaningful, beautiful, poignant, and strange are almost never able to be entered in a spreadsheet or compartmentalized into a series of five minute tasks. Leisure reminds us that self-worth, and our love of video games, shouldn’t be built on getting a gold border for accomplishing some task 15 times. To end by returning to Josef Pieper, what better mindset could video game creators and fans try to encourage to combat the hostility and selfishness which has plagued the scene in recent years than a new focus on leisure which is, “…not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go.”

For the final installment of Workified Games, the series will examine some of the complex, and surprisingly friendly, relationships between work and play.

Kommentare

himbeerschlund Di. 19 Apr 2016 - 20:16 Permalink

Der Text fährt zwischen 4.

Der Text fährt zwischen 4. und 5. Absatz eine copy-/paste- Schleife.

"While my initial observation... design and play values."

Christof Zurschmitten Mi. 20 Apr 2016 - 06:50 Permalink

Danke für den Hinweis, ist

Danke für den Hinweis, ist korrigiert.

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games II

Eron Rauch — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 11:32:44 +0000

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games II

Eron Rauch Do. 14 Apr 2016 - 13:32

Part 2: The Grind Has Become The Feature

In the previous installment of this series I charted how video games have become entangled and infatuated with work. It might be easy to explain these predilections simply because work is a major part of many peoples’ lives. Or inversely this work-obsession could be video games striving to provide rational rewards as an antidote for lack of control at our day jobs. Similarly, not all games break when you try to approach them with exceptional or novel ways of playing (the now-infamous solo eggplant run in Spelunky being a fantastic example ). Still it remains the case that a large majority of games are obsessed with replicating work roles, structures, and attitudes.

Games’ obsession with work matters a great deal because as Michael Evenden pointed out so eloquently in his recent essay about what he has learned by coming to video games later in life: “if playing these games feels natural, it’s an acquired nature… because habituation to play actually changes you. In particular, you become desensitized to some elements of the game fictions and highly sensitive to others, including the rewards and energetic stimulations of play. You become crafty at the kinds of problems games put forward; it comes to affect your rhythms, your imagination, your way of processing things.“ (Emphasis mine.)

In returning to Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies, he takes things even further and suggests that, “A fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desire.’” As video game players, many of us spend all day at work (or school, which trains us for work) then come home to spend the evenings exploring sophisticated worlds that are obsessed with replicating work structures and goals. With the collective fantasies of video game fans so populated with work, what are we players being taught to desire?

Before we continue, it is important to note that this habituation and desire for the trappings of work, grind, and efficiency is not an abstract force. Even in the biggest markets, this desire produces very real effects. Overwatch, possibly one of the most anticipated games of 2016, which is produced by one of the most successful video game companies in the world, Activision Blizzard, recently shut down their beta test for extensive revisions. Alongside the typical polishing that happens before publicly launching a game, a large part of the stated reason for the hiatus was because the beta testers overwhelmingly clamored for some sort of “progression” system that gave rewards for playing more. Blizzard had already firmly stated that the game would never have purchasable characters or in-game items like traditional MOBAs, so this added “progression” element will not affect the actual gameplay in any way. That is, the dedicated video game fans that inevitably make up a beta test audience demanded to have a system added that gave them superficial achievements based directly on spending more time in the game and completing more arbitrary metrics! The grind has become the desired feature.

Is there a word for the obsession with the grind? Is there a term that describes manically moving from task to task, with an unending desire for measurable status achievements through work? As I said in the first part of the series, I definitely work too much. In fact, if I’m not careful I don’t just do too much work, but I also talk about work too much, I orient my life around work, and even think about work while I’m not doing work. Lately I’ve doing some reading trying to parse some of my own bad work habits. Reading about how to have a healthier relationship to work and play is one way I try to keep these tendencies under control. One day, I came across a passage which not only seemed to perfectly describe that moment of exhaustion my gaming group felt at being asked to spend increasingly more time grinding for slightly better magic boots, but also many of the other work-like ways fans now interact with video games:

“These driven men and women live a Gerbil-wheel, adrenalin-pumping existence rushing from plan A to B, narrowly-fixated on some ambitious goal or accomplishment. Eventually, nothing or no one else really matters. They are obsessed with their work performance and hooked on an adrenalin-high. Bent on self-aggrandizement, these ego-driven folks reach one goal, and immediately set another more ambitious one. Staying at the same level of accomplishment is considered a failure.”

Workaholism is not an obsession with money, or even the sheer number of hours worked, but it is a fixation on the direct relationship between work and achievement.

This was not some article I stumbled across on some philosophically oriented video game theory site such as Critical Distance or Offworld, but a summation of work written in the popular magazine Psychology Today by Barbara Klinger, PhD, describing her seminal research on workaholics. Her research shows that workaholism is not an obsession with money, or even the sheer number of hours worked, but it is a fixation on the direct relationship between work and achievement. A desire for one to directly leads to more of the other. It was eerie to see the grind, achievements, stickiness, freemium, and the whole complex of work-obsessed games summed up so succinctly in the description of a common psychological problem.

But where might these workaholic tendencies embedded deep in video games and the surrounding fandom have come from? When pressured, most commercial game companies fall back to claiming they merely produce what video game purchasers want and the previous example from Overwatch is certainly one of those cases. But it isn’t fair to blame all of this on the vagrancies of video game fans. In the essay “The Eroticism of Uselessness” Lana Polansky points out that this facet of gaming culture is part of a much broader trend in Western culture. “We’re conditioned to valorize unnecessary labour in real life and that comes back to bite us in games, which are often plagued by what feel like needless, often boring, make-work tasks that artificially lengthen time spent playing.”

In this way, the video game industry is part of the much larger tech industry, which is notorious for putting their workers through permanent “crunch,” which is work weeks of 50, 60, or more hours. The video game and tech industries are notoriously for companies asking their employees to work for free at the behest of the investors. Even “good” companies have mandatory crunch during the last months of a game release, and they are considered “better” because they often have couches and break rooms for employees to sleep in at work that rather than employees sleeping on a jacket under a desk. Video game companies and the tech industry as a whole are so fixated on work that they have brought us the phenomenon of the EA spouse, which is a term for marriages that break up due to company cultures built on workaholism.

Moving up the chain of command, industry leaders, people who own many companies in many different markets, brag about how little they sleep and how much they work. The major investors that fund these leaders demand ten-times returns. They demand absolute accounted efficiency with how their money is being spent, as well as continuous growth from their investment. Even a company making good percentage increases in profits and sales year to year can have their stock prices punished by missing expectations by a few tenths of a percent in a quarter. Company leaders and advertisers demand ever more concrete metrics for every tiny advertising choice. Ultra-targeted ads on social media are increasingly the norm. Focus groups are utilized at every step of making decisions about what product to ship.

An industry which thrives in a permanent state of workaholism tends to make products that resemble their workaholic values and their work-focused lives.

Even in the seemingly creative side of the field of video game production, rational, functional, efficient tools are the norm. That is, much of “Game Design” (now often pushed to the more bureaucratic sounding desk of “Systems Designers”), which includes all the data for how items perform, how much enemies attack for, how much gold is given, etc. is done in spreadsheet systems not dissimilar from the same Microsoft Excel that any company’s accounting department uses. If the old adage “write what you know” has any credibility, is it any surprise then that an industry which thrives in a permanent state of workaholism and quantifiable achievement tends to make products that resemble their workaholic values and their work-focused lives?

Returning to Barbara Klinger’s research on workaholics, this merging of player behaviors that approach workaholism and game structures that are designed to reward workaholic tendencies leads to a very curious, and possibly troubling place. What does it mean that “crunch” is defined as working more than 50 hours a week, and an average video game fan has no trouble working 40 hours a week and then (easily, if they are anything like me) spending 10-30 additional hours playing video games that replicate work? It means that video game fans are being run through permanent crunch; that fans are basically working a part time job on top of their regular work.

Returning to the hallowed halls of video game creation, one of the most wildly popular design philosophies is called “flow.” This philosophy idealizes game creation choices which are structured so a player loses themselves into the regular rhythms of the game. This is accomplished by assigning work that is sufficiently challenging to be engaging but not so challenging as to be frustrating, in discreet small chunks, then rewarding the player for finishing each of those chunks. This pattern of accomplishment and reward triggers a biological response of dopamine. Games with good “flow” are considered ideal within the industry because those quick dopamine hits are, at least in the estimation of game publishers and marketers, what keeps players playing.

Lest you think I’m merely implying the old boogie man of “video game addiction,” it is critical to understand that video game production and gaming culture are but an intense example of work obsession. These observations reflect a broader tendency toward workaholic behaviors and their effects in American society. To reiterate, work invading imagination and free time is hardly unique to video games, but it is particularly intense in video gaming because of certain values within both production companies and the kind of media fans have come to desire.

So in a self-selecting manner the video games the industry tends to prefer are those with the most regularized ways to give targeted dopamine hits; that is, they try to make games with an obsessively direct link between work and achievement. Which, to remember, is the very complex that Klinger identified as underpinning workaholic behavior. This linkage makes sense given that the dark origins “flow” was as a way for factory managers trying to figure out what is the ideal amount and skill level of work that a worker can do during industrialization. So flow, or at least its popular use in video game design, is simply a chemical doubling-down on workaholic structures of imagination where anything but granular, regularly rewarded progress is treated as failure.

Video games can look like companies that we as fans pay to work for in some sort of convoluted pyramid scheme.

From this angle, is it any wonder that many outside of video game fandom see this world as strange and a bit brutal (or at least highly demanding)? To riff on the old World of Warcraft meme, yup, I pay $20 a month to make boots for virtual elves in my free time to get away from taking photos of shoes to sell them in my day job. Indeed, from a casual glance, or in a moment of self-aware punctuation born of exhaustion, video games can look like companies that we as fans pay to work for in some sort of convoluted pyramid scheme.

The seemingly inevitable and unlimited gain from more and more work (and more work), pervades mainstream American life. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Easy, and Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” program constantly exhort us to “monetize free time.” What these tech companies, companies we are regularly told are the creators of the future by the media, are at their core trying to sell to the squeezed middle and lower classes is that “free time” is otherwise wasteful and should be converted in to a measurable resource or achievement (of which they will take a cut). And what is grinding gold or ore in a video game but another form of this imperative to monetize our free time?

In part three of Workified Games I’ll examine some of the possible interesting alternative ideals to workaholic tendencies in video games and the ways that culture tends to minimize their importance in life.

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games I

Eron Rauch — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 07:55:55 +0000

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games I

Eron Rauch Mi. 13 Apr 2016 - 09:55

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. Lovingly crafted for passionate audiences, these long-form pieces are perfect for Sunday reading alongside a warm beverage.

Part 1: Gotta Grind For Those Boots

I work too much, but like many Americans I find there are always bills to pay and projects to finish. Like many Americans, I also love to come home after a long day of work and unwind by playing video games, but lately this supposed transition from work to not-work seems like clocking out of one job and into another.

This feeling started to come to my conscious attention one cloudy Sunday evening last year during a video gaming group I help run. Our little group, Meats of Evil, had been meeting for almost a decade as a way for old friends from around the country to virtually hang out and keep up with each other, but we had been experiencing a lot of burn-out and no-shows over the past year, and even though we changed games and moved times around, this problem persisted. My friends and I were equally exhausted and one night while playing Guild Wars 2 I grumbled something like, “Why I am using my lone day off to finish a grinding reputation by collecting the same resource for untold hours to get my character fancy boots when I spent the pay I earned yesterday to replace my actual worn out shoes?” Everyone just kind of stopped and sat in silence for a long moment, then staticky affirmations started to come over the server.

We all took a break, got a refill on our drinks, and went back to our game on that Sunday, but looking through my Steam library afterward I got thinking about the menagerie of other games in my Library. Maybe I decide to spend my off-hours dawdling in Minecraft, digging ever downward in hopes of a rare ore, but as the name literally says, means I’m spending my free time mining, a very difficult occupation which kills tens of thousands of people a year. Maybe I’m leveling up crafting in World of Warcraft (WoW), making three or four dozen of the same leather belt and selling them for a tiny profit margin of a few silver, which is basically factory work. If I play X-Com: Enemy Unknown I’m working on trying to squash specified alien insect-beasts so that my bosses are happy at my progress. I mean, you may as well slap a giant fiberglass Chryssalid in a mouse trap on my drop ship, since I’m basically some sort of apocalyptic exterminator.

Perhaps I try to seem cultured and play some Civilization with building a compass as my goal for the evening. Yet that means I’m mostly means bashing against a spreadsheet like an accountant with a quill trying to figure out how to match purchase orders to the requests of the medieval IT team. I can get spastic and join the legions to play some League of Legends, but even then a huge chunk of the game is “farming” where I repetitively mercilessly kill small creatures like a fur trapper, to collect gold to buy better stuff than everyone else in the game. Maybe I’m going to go retro-old-school and play Pillars of Eternity, but even then I’ll be running around trying to collect some herbs for a lazy apothecary who must have the “Task Rabbit III” app in their wizard’s spell book.

The work-centric attitude in video games is so pervasive that it is almost impossible to see from within the video game community.

This work-centric attitude in video games is so pervasive that it is almost impossible to see from within the video game community. It is not just the kinds of tasks, like making boots, but also the very roles we inhabit in video games that are often replications of work. If you’re a playing a game where you’re a member of the military, you’re doing the same job that someone in the real world gets paid to do (no matter how patriotic, they still get a paycheck and a pension.) Every time you play a police officer, bodyguard, pilot, witch hunter, mayor, hacker, private eye, farmer, assassin, train conductor, boat captain, thief, spy, alchemist, or drug dealer, you’re replicating what many people do to pay their bills.

In fact, every time you hit the dusty road with a trusty sword in hand you’re reenacting the exact entomology of a job that is the shadowy historical origin for the way many video games now get funded. “Adventure,” a word so often used in video games that it can seem meaningless, has medieval roots and specifically was used to describe the act of merchant caravans and their hired muscle traversing the often dangerous roads to make money by selling goods.( *If you want to journey down that historical rabbit hole, Michael Nerlich’s The Ideology of Adventure is a great, if a bit musty, read) Of course, we tend to talk about dudes with swords fighting off brigands and carousing with wenches in far-flung locations because it is supposedly a much more fun story to tell than the margins of profit of selling pots to villagers, but it was the merchant work that was the primary origins of adventure. Now, it has come full circle with the games we play termed “adventure” funded by “[ad]venture capital,” whose only danger is a yearly helicopter trip to Burning Man.

Insidiously, it is not only the kinds of tasks we’re doing and the kinds of job-roles we’re inhabiting as players that have become work-focused. As game design has become increasingly obsessed with data and metrics in all stages of development and advertising, even the manner that we interact with video game content has grown increasingly focused around workplace-like ideals of maximizing productivity and efficiency in a way that would make any tech efficiency expert giddy. Think of how often progress in role playing and action games is broken into a unending stream of small, measurable tasks—pick up ten of these items; kill fifteen of these monster type; haul these three items to a nearby place—all doled out with the moment-to-moment orchestration of an Amazon warehouse puller. Starcraft 2 might be the prime example of gaming as efficiency: unless you’re a top tier professional, the game is won by forcing a linkage between your hands and your subconscious to increase efficiency and speed through repetition, all, to be a bit glib, with the intent of making your mining resources higher and your factories produce more.

The increasing ubiquity of achievements in video games is also a big part of this growth of work-like gaming. Most AAA games, and increasingly even many indie games, have elaborate systems that tally and reward you for almost everything measurable, from stepping foot in new areas of a map, to killing 50 of a type of enemy, to completing a zone in a certain timefame. Completing each one of these tiny chunks results in a recorded “achievement,” which accumulate like a million tiny worker-of-the-month awards. Players in X-Box live can see the aggregate of their achievements on a master scoreboard, where they can compete against other players to finish more tasks. In fact, a common achievement icon in many games is a tiny representation of an old-timey pocket watch which is usually given out for playing long amounts of time. It is not a coincidence that businesses used to give pocket watches as a reward for spending a long time at a company.

Achievements such as “kill 50 zombies in 5 minutes,” might seem different on the surface from the Starbucks corporate guidelines about how many coffees need to be made in 5 minutes by baristas, but even leaving out the obvious joke about those in need of caffeine [i.e. me] and zombies lusting for brains, they are the same in intent. They are ways to structure someone’s time to most efficiently accomplish the most work. Corporate controls of employees like preferential scheduling, rotations, break structures, job title improvements, tips, demotions, mandatory meetings, performance bonuses, and overtime pay are regularly all used in different guises and under different names within video games to structure the player’s experiences. It is no coincidence that our gaming group was starting to feel burnout trying to relax in the midst of the rise of lockouts, tiered loot drops, assists bonuses, titles, epic cosmetics, grinding, dailies, gating, and the ever-ravenous beast that is freemium gaming.

All of these internal work-like structures of many video games (whose origins I will speculate about in the other two forthcoming portions of this piece) are not happening in a vacuum. These work-like structures are bracketed onto an ever-increasingly sophisticated science of how to advertise games and make those games “sticky.” Stickiness is explicitly the science of how to make players spend as much time and money as possible within any given game ecosystem. Most freemium games, from Hearthstone to League of Legends, will let you grind for in-game money, but only in a currency that is unusable outside of the game.

So in my initial grumble, my frustration is not only because I have to accomplish many repetitious tasks to get some imaginary currency to pay for new boots for my plant-elf-mage-fighter-thing. But additionally the company who made the game has spent their vast resources to make me want to continue working toward those boots, but just frustrated enough that I’m always on the edge of wanting to plunk down real cash from my real job to skip the grind and buy them. This constant squeezing of the player from all sides seems a bit too close for comfort to the history of the company store, which were exploitive shops owned by the employers in fields like mining, whaling, or lumber. These stores gouged the isolated workers since the company, which as both employer and supplier, could set both pay (often in some sort of company-only scrip) and determine the prices for necessary supplies for doing the job, letting them profit doubly at the expense of their workers, who would then have to work extra hard.

What is particularly perverse is that while many games have begun to feel more like work than play, the contemporary marketing language of games often make vast claims for the open-ended and multitudinous ways we can engage with their game. But as history has shown us, these choices tend to be basically false starts. Whether it is World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, Final Fantasy, or Terraria, most games, both as story and as geography, can only be traversed and explored through grinding, repetitious work. Working to finish specific tasks and progress are equated. Even the language used in most major open-world games, like “percentage of completion,” highlights this task-oriented way of existence is deeply embedded in the subconscious or understructure of the game.

Though there are invariably hints of other ways to approach playing if this rigid way of understanding the game as work-in-progress-out isn’t used, the fullness of the “open” or “dynamic” world is invariably locked away. Which Zizek points out in A Plague of Fantasies: systems which want to control us do so by giving us an illusion of choice. But he also notes that it is possible to see just how limiting those systems are by how disruptive actually following through with their proclaimed bevy of choices would actually be. That is, to be attractive to participants, rigidly controlling systems, are “…compelled to allow for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate.” Similarly in many video games, the virtues of the open-world, non-linear, dynamic, and interactive are extolled, but are regularly non-starters as legitimately different ways to interact with the game worlds in a non-work manner.

While there has been a recent boom of players trying to beat games with (often humorous) self-imposed rules, such as only eating vegetarian power up items, these attempts to play video games in those “open” ways that the marketing promises have only ended up highlighting just how little choice most games really provide. One of the most instructive examples of what happens when a player tries to play in the fantasy realms of World of Warcraft as a “pacifist,” trying to kill no enemies and not facilitate any of the fictional wars in the game world. These attempts are theoretically possible and fascinate the community. Once this criteria is used to approach the game, it first and foremost means refusing to complete almost all quests. But even further, pacifist players basically have to abandon overwhelmingly large chunks of the game’s areas and story to do so, since they would have no items and be instantly murdered almost anywhere in the game, given that the game is mathematically designed to be lethal to players without certain levels of weapons and armor.

Work has colonized, and in many places supplanted, play in contemporary imagination of video games.

These pacifist WoW characters rely even more on base economic and work functions, like harvesting and crafting thousands of items, to get experience. Then once at maximum level, there is no in-game content for these characters, since without grinding items (the supreme measure of progress at end-game) which invariably requires repetitious fighting, they can’t access or participate in any of the higher-level content that is available to regular players. If any significant portion of players decided to play this way, the economies, dungeons groups, guilds, banks, town populations, and ultimately the user base, would be catastrophically harmed as markets would flood with items no one could use, servers would bog down as the few pacifist safe zones were overwhelmed with players, and the already difficult task of finding players to meet the criteria for higher end content would be hopelessly arduous and unpredictable.

Many games overtly rely on players doing tasks that are work-related, in the fictional guise of a job, all with the same control structures born of workplace efficiency. But even sandbox or open world games set up as alternative to "normal" games—as having more freedom—aren't really that different when it comes to being oriented around work. Tasks are hunting, gathering resources, building, finding or making food, getting rid of pests, claiming more land, and then increasing the efficiency of all of these tasks.

Yes, there certainly are some differences, but those differences might best be equated to being an independent contractor (or a small business owner) in the sandbox games or an employee of a large company in a “regular” game. Whether farming gold in League of Legends, or building the next tier of pick in Minecraft, the end result is the same: playing the video game requires some degree of thinking and acting within the terms, structures, and goals we typically associate with work. Work has colonized, and in many places supplanted, play in contemporary imagination of video games.

Next installment, I’ll discuss some of the causes for work-obsession in video games, and a potentially surprising diagnosis for us regular video game players.

Kommentare

Moritz Do. 14 Apr 2016 - 17:42 Permalink

the nature of the beast?

That seems to go back to the old saying that Art imitates life, doesn´t it?
I think it just profundly shows how insanly fixated we are on our role as an efficient workforce that has to be productive no matter what at all time in our sorta distopic society of the 21th Century. Wether you design a game or play it...it´s hard to break out of this ideology. And still, there are those games aswell that just provide unique experiences outside of this box every once in a while -as there are still people that know to do better than just being productive all day long.