When Work is a Game 45
Ever willing to explore the hidey-holes of thought, the Terra Nova blog has a discussion up this week talking about play as production. IE: What makes people willing to engage in 'productive play', like the crafting mini-games of Star Wars Galaxies or A Tale in the Desert? They also touch on the more pragmatic 'productive play', gold farming. From the article: "The outsourcing of labor is another interesting trajectory. We know that people outsource, for instance, 'Adena farmers' in Lineage, low-wage workers who farm for game currency to sell on the 'black market.' This creates interesting class and even race tensions, such as the Lineage 2 scenario described at State of Play 2004 by Constance Steinkhueler. Here, Adena farmers typically took the roles of female elf warriors (primarily for farming efficiency reasons); as a result, this race/class in the game began experiencing racial slurs and attacks by players who associated it with Adena farming."
It's an old story (Score:5, Insightful)
Quote from that page:
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
Re:It's an old story (Score:4, Insightful)
The very lucky among us have done that and not had it suck the fun out of said activity.
Re:Gold Farming. (Score:2, Insightful)
Still, i rather see people goldfarming than other "illegal" activities. Apart from causing inflation in ingame (which happens on most MMORPG's apparently) a bit they don't really cause a real matrial harm.
Game vs work (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is...where do you draw the line between Work and Play.
To me, the line becomes drawn when I have deadlines, quotas, expectations, and the very real risk of losing income. This all adds a lot of stress, and I cannot simply walk away from it because it is how I make a living. Play on the otherhand is something I can walk away from at any time for any reason...whether I'm bored, frustrated, found something new, have more important things to do, etc. There is potentially some stress with Play, such as with competitive Play, however it is nowhere near on the same level as with Work.
If anybody on Slashdot disagress with what I've written and can give an example from their own lives of how their work is considered play (based on the terms I've outlined above) please by all means do...as I am continually trying to figure out a way to find out what job I would love to do for the rest of my life and am looking for a way to actually ENJOY coming into work and not be wishing I was doing something else.
Please for the love of god prove me wrong.
Failed Econ 101/102? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, say you don't like... cleaning your house. You can hire a maid service to do it for $75. It takes you 2 hours to clean your house, and you don't enjoy cleaning it for the sake of cleaning it.
Do you pay the maids or not? If so, then you understand gold farming. If not, rerun the thought experiment with $25 to pay the maids. Or $5.
Of course, some people would say, "It is my house I'm going to clean it I don't care about maids no matter how cheap that'd be. This is Mine and I want to do it!" Maybe you're one of them. That's the same as those who don't buy gold. Because for them, for whatever reason (even if they claim to not enjoy cleaning house), they get something out of cleaning their house (farming their own gold).
That doesn't mean everyone does.
"But it is virtual! It doesn't exist." That's where you're wrong. It does exist. The person paying $$ for gold would be happier (overall) if they didn't have the $$ and did have the gold. The transaction created happiness for them. The person getting $$ for the gold (their time) is happier with the $$. It means they get to eat, which makes most people fairly happy.
It doesn't matter if it can be done "more efficently" by code. I could pray to the heavens (presuming the existance of some higher power, or that we're in the matrix) to rain manna down too. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have farmers growing crops. It is one of the "rules of that world": the game doesn't have gold+=500000, and you can't really expect it to rain manna from heaven. It doesn't matter that the rule is arbitrary in the game, only that the rule exists.
Re:Game vs work (Score:5, Insightful)
First, you must get yourself into a state where you are not paying off a debt. I don't just mean money. You might think of it as karmic debt. It is anything you have convinced yourself through social convention (or physical coercion) that you have to have (or do). So a mortgage is a debt. A cell phone plan is a debt. A responsibility that you can't shirk (like raising kids, etc) is a debt.
Once you have freed yourself of those debts, you can now start living hand to mouth and life is immediate. The only things you *have* to do are the things that sustain life. This reduces your work load considerably.
Having removed all those attachments, you can now reflect on how much you like life itself. You like to eat, you like to drink, you like to sleep, you like to be warm, etc. You then pursue those tasks gratefully, because they bring you joy. Not doing them brings you misery.
You realize that you don't *have* to do any of these things. You choose to live. You choose to be comfortable. Once you have discovered this, you realize that pursuing your life is not work. It is play.
But living is often not enough for most people. They would like to pursue more than that. They would like to make a contribution to society. They would like to spend time with other people. They would like to have a family.
So if you find yourself interested in pursuing these avenues, you can choose to do so. But it is your choice. You are not bound to do it. So it is not work. It is play.
I hope that helped...
Re:Failed Econ 101/102? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are rules in real life, too: they're called norms [wikipedia.org].