Introduction

The lines between work and play are no longer so clearly drawn. The information revolution, driven by internet-accelerated infrastructures, has drawn ever more workers out of the 9–5 routines normalised during the twentieth century. The proportion of workers in freelance, temporary contracts or self-employed work is at a record high (Chandler, 2016). Many full-time contracts now also contain stipulations on flexible working, hot-desking or pieceworking which would previously be unique to freelancing. Zero-hours contracts are perhaps the most infamous negative result of these changes, the disruptive tech start-ups of Silicon Valley the most acclaimed positive. The most audacious claim routinely made by start-up culture, especially companies involved in crowdwork, is that by making work flexible, they’ve also made it fun (Huotari & Hamari, 2012). The language of play has been adopted throughout the world of work. Play is cited as a driver of creativity and playful competition has been shown to increase productivity while raising job satisfaction (Hamari, Koivisto, & Harri, 2014). Meanwhile, play itself has adopted many of the characteristics of work; particularly revenue generation. Video games are drivers, transforming one-time-purchase commodities into rent-seeking revenue streams. One no longer buys a game but instead subscribes to a service, purchasing additional DLC and season passes on top. The lootbox online gambling system, first introduced with video game CS: Go, has generated a number of substantial online gambling communities, bypassing government restrictions and so allowing minors too to play (Gambling Commission, 2017). Social media in particular is incorporating video game business models for better data collection, but the process of monetising play is far wider and has considerable repercussions for the way in which we experience play. Taken together, the shifting relationship between work and play as concepts may be the defining feature of twenty-first century capitalism.

To better understand our changing notions of work and play the editors of this special edition organised the Work and Play Conference, held at Futureworks Media School in Manchester UK on the 6th of July 2016. This one-day symposium brought together academics from sociological and media backgrounds with those from the arts and humanities in order to discuss our research findings. The day was considered a success and the papers included in this special edition represent the best of the proceedings. One of the central findings of the day was that, whereas the workings of the market are dissolving barriers between work and play at an astonishing rate, we, the academics studying these developments, remain bound by the distinct discourses of our fields. Although occasional terms may have relevance across fields – ‘neoliberalism’, for example, appears omnipresent – when it came to actually discussing findings the aesthetic approach of the humanities often misaligned with the structural theorising of sociology, and vice versa. It is a matter of emphasis: does one seek a general trend or interrogate the particular example? The papers appearing within this journal represent a distinct interdisciplinary fusing of perspectives. The papers engaging with cultural productions – games, animation and film – reject the traditional single-text focus and analyse broader tropes in the manner of sociology. Meanwhile, sociological investigations into labour, education and the workplace display an increased focus upon the value of individual experience, inspired by the qualitative methodologies of the humanities. We believe that our example demonstrates the kinds of adaptive cross-disciplinary work which must be done in order to engage with real-world shifts in culture and society.

The foundations of this work are quite clear. Since the crash of 2008, there has been a swathe of new analyses representing important steps forward in the understanding of contemporary economic practice. The work of David Harvey, in particular, has popularised the term ‘neoliberalism’, with the bestselling Enigma of Capital (Harvey 2010) bringing his fusion of geographical and political economic approaches into the foreground of contemporary study. With a more specialist focus, the work of media and cultural theorists like Jodi Dean (2010, 2016), Kristin Ross (2015) and McKenzie Wark (2012, 2015, and Wark, et al., 2013) have introduced a number of politicised innovations to the contemporary conceptual landscape and the thorough empirical work of Trebor Scholz too, especially 2016s Uberworked and Underpaid (2016), has given us the clearest picture yet of contemporary working practice. To this too we must add the digital labour theories of Christian Fuchs (2015), Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (2015) insights into globalised infrastructure and the macroeconomics of Thomas Piketty (2014). Together, these researches depict a world ever more decentralised, accelerating the fragmentation of communities on the micro scale while, on a macro scale, the power of international finance capital begins to exceed that of sovereign nations. These emergences have, in turn, inspired new creative solutions which go beyond the traditional dynamics of right and left. Guy Standing (2014, 2017) and Andre Gorz (1999), among many others, propose a universal basic income programme to reinvent welfare for a precarious economy. Platform cooperativism (Scholz, 2016) and community intranets (Srinavasan & Fish, 2017) have been proposed as twenty-first century variations of worker ownership, while scholars like Jack Qui (2017) have called for a renewed charter of internationally enforced rights.

Further solutions have been proposed from scholars of digital play. Drawing upon the foundational texts of Huizinga (1955) and Callois (1961), theories of play have been applied to problems of education and literacy (Gee, 2003), problem solving (Begost, 2007), sustainability (Bissell, 2011), wellbeing and innovation (McGonigal, 2012). Theories of play tend to be adaptations of design thinking which amalgamate current psychological and neuroscience thinking with a cyberneticist’s appreciation of feedback loops. Where sociologists, economists and labour theorists draw our attention to the systems and platforms, theorists of play focus upon the individuals within these systems and the choices which are made available to them. Systematic contingency may represent a new potential for the practice of free moral choice (Bateman, 2011; Begost, 2007), or, as is all too visible in current Twitter and forums discourse, more freedom can mean more conflict and political polarisation (Nagle, 2017). That our wider culture too is tending in the direction of interactivity, data gathering and monetised choice systems – be it films (Gray, 2010), advertising (Rose, 2012), pop culture (Condry, 2015) or music (Anderson, 2013) – understanding the pleasures and pains of our new world of ‘playbour’ will be important both for free personal choices, potential government regulation, and for informed aesthetic appreciation. If our appreciation of an experience is revealed as a product of manipulative design, the staged triggering of reward centres in the brain, will this reduce our pleasure, or is it simply good design?

To give a (relatively) current example, the video game company Niantic released the free-to-play app Ingress in November 2012. The game used Google Maps to position virtual ‘portals’ over local landmarks – art galleries, parks, statues – which players would need to stand near in order to ‘capture’ them for their team. The game was simple but compulsive and had the added novelty of being played in the real world; so-called ‘augmented reality’, or AR. The game is free to play but requires the player to turn on the location tracker on their phone and to agree to Niantic, a subsidiary of Google, collecting the location data. Google could then use the data gathered from Ingress players to better map pedestrian routes for its Google directions service. For Google, Ingress was solving a design problem: cars already sent vast amounts of satnav data to their systems, meaning roads were well mapped, but the best route through, say, a local park or pedestrianised shopping centre were unavailable to them. By placing ‘portals’ in these areas, Google could build a model of the most direct pedestrian routes through a given city. A player’s play was Google’s labour. Once the game was popular, Niantic could then generate extra revenue from businesses, who would pay to have a ‘portal’ placed at their establishment; drawing in players. Ingress was now simultaneously a game, a data collection system and a marketing platform. In July 2016, a number of additional mechanics were bolted on to the games’ core system and it was released as the repackaged Pokémon Go. The game was a worldwide phenomenon and served the same ‘playbour’ functions of Ingress, with the added benefit of promoting the Pokémon brand, adding an in-game purchases system for ‘pokeballs’ and driving sales to other games in the franchise. Although these surreptitious motives and hidden revenue streams may appear sinister, it is worth restating that both Pokémon Go and Ingress are free to play. They can be downloaded from mobile storefronts, no purchase required. Whether the model of working-play, or playing-work, described here represents a great innovation in the provision of free entertainment or a morally suspect act of deception depends upon who you ask. It is questions like these which this special edition seeks to answer.

The ‘Work and Play’ special edition of Information, Communication and Society was initially structured into two sections: ‘Work’ and ‘Play’. However, as we received the final papers it became clear that a more complex dialectic was under way. As such, the papers begin by investigating play-structures incorporated into work, theorise play as work, analyse the workings of play, diagnose the new world of work and, finally, suggest ways in which a work-play dynamic might be utilised by radical pedagogy.

‘Gamification’ is the keyword connecting many of this edition’s core concerns. Chris Bateman’s paper on ‘Playing Work or Gamification as Stultification’ gives an in-depth analysis of the concept’s recent mobilisation. Alongside its more commonly understood application in the workplace – the turning of routine tasks into games, the implementation of video game style reward systems for hard workers – Bateman also argues for gamification as a concept driving changes within the video games industry itself. Contrasting ludology with wider social theories of play, Bateman demonstrates how the game mechanics associated with gamification only relate to certain forms of play; the broader range of play types (categorised by Callois (1961) in terms of Agon, Alea, Mimicry, Ilinx, Paidia and Ludus) are only very partially engaged by gamification’s acquisitive objectives. For Bateman, the results are detrimental in both work and play: workers replace their multifaceted sense of emotional and financial rewards with an anaemic points system, players replace playfulness and openness to possibility with pre-established, targeted objectives. Jacob Johanssen draws on the same concept in his paper ‘Game-Playing on Social Media’. The gamification of communication explains much of the success of platforms like Twitter and Vine which intentionally limit their user’s functionality (180 characters and 7 second videos respectively). Facebook, which places very few limits on posts and media uploads, utilise gamification in more elaborate and data-driven ways. Drawing upon the labour theories of Christian Fuchs (2015), Johanssen then analyses the cost-to-benefit ratio of these seemingly free platforms, citing the generation of surplus value and cultivation of neoliberal ideology as arguments against the expanding use of the social web.

Moving away from gamification and the attempt to turn work into play, Tom Brock’s paper ‘Play as Craftsmanship in Computer Games Consumption’ offers a provisional antithesis: that play is in many ways becoming work if it isn’t already. The expansion of esports – competitive exhibition gaming comparable to professional sport – now offers considerable financial rewards for the most highly skilled players. As with any professional sport, esports also inspires a large number of aspiring amateurs and ardent fans. Through interviews with pro gamers and those who aspire to be them, Brock outlines a theory of play-as-craft that more closely aligns with the player’s image of themselves. Rather than enjoying a playful pastime, the competitive gamer studies the methods of other gamers, hones their own craft through physical training and tactics, and ultimately draws a sense of meaning and identity from gaming that transcends the play-related categories of victory and achievement. Brock suggests this identity is something akin to a gamer-craftsman.

Joseph Darlington and Conor McKeown both offer papers on playful media showing their craft. McKeown’s paper ‘Playing Flappy Bird in Super Mario World’ interrogates the emergent modding-play culture whereby a game’s code is manipulated in order to generate a new game or else emphasise an element of the original. His examples include fighting games where the animated characters are removed to speed up the game, leaving only their wireframes and hitboxes on screen, and the YouTube-driven phenomena of speedrunning where players compete to finish a game in record time, often jumping through walls or tricking the camera in order to manipulate weaknesses in the code from within the game itself. For McKeown, these developments demonstrate a rising awareness and interest on the part of players about the material construction of their games. Darlington’s paper finds a corresponding trend in 3D digital animation, particularly online, where the labour processes underlying animation are revealed to pleasurable effect within the animation itself. Where 2D animation has a long history of revealing its workings, 3D digital animations are judged primarily on the basis of ever-increasing levels of believability; an aesthetic, Darlington argues, which alienates the viewer of 3D digital animations from the craft of producing them. Both McKeown and Darlington argue that digitisation is bringing viewers and players more closely into contact with the labour processes that create their media, and those aesthetics are a driving force behind this increasing familiarity.

The visibility of work is a key concern in both Teodora Constantinescu (et al.) and Brian Elliot’s papers. Elliot draws upon labour theory and continental philosophy to argue for an underlying utopian aspect to the seemingly rational ideology of neoliberalism, or free market capitalism. Against the dream of unifying work’s productive elements with play’s enjoyable rewards, Elliot transposes increasing precarity, inequality and social conflict in the West, and the exploitation of workers in the East and of natural resources in the Global South. Elliot’s theoretical work is supported by Constantinescu’s paper, ‘Playing with Interviews’, which reveals a ‘new world of work’ where instability and exploitation are commonplace. On a subjective level, the macroeconomic shift away from Keynesian models of labour security has, on a more local, resulted in zero hour livelihoods where forward planning becomes so risky as to be impossible. Any boost in productivity resulting from these circumstances, it is suggested, must surely be undermined by the ubiquity of short-term thinking that results socially. As a final contribution to the special edition, Erica Liu (et al.)’s paper, ‘Study Trip as Means of Expanded Learning’, inverts the neoliberal model of exploitative precarity by proposing a genuine playfulness among new space as a means for breaking up mechanised educational models. The benefits of playfulness that neoliberal work promises, but then undermines by creating artificial scarcity, is shown to be possible only outside of the work environment. Educational space, kept distinct from spaces of market-driven productivity, can enhance people’s lives through the playful cultivation of curiosity, independence and exploration. These positive results of working play conclude the special edition on a hopeful note.

Our intention with the Work and Play special edition was to bring together academics across disciplines to explore whether these concepts are still useful within the twenty-first century. We hope that the resulting papers demonstrate not only that these remain useful concepts, but that the increasing levels of uncertainty around them indicate that they are more vital than ever before. Collapsing the binary between work and play is unlikely to reap any real-life rewards. Rather, an increased concern for where we draw the line is essential the further our play is turned into work, and our work is couched in play.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.