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6Work Play is no longer a counter to work. Play becomes work; work becomes play. Play outside of work found itself captured by the rise of the digital game, which responds to the boredom of the player with endless rounds of repetition, level after level of difference as more of the same. McKenzie Wark, — Gamer Theory Some years ago we wrote an article with a colleague in which we proposed the neologism “gamework” as a way to call attention to the many kinds of work involved in the production,consumption,and study of computer games (Ruggill et al.). At the time, we were not so much concerned about the computer game medium as with the need to think through its many instantiations in material and textual ways. Our rationale was simply that much of the critical and popular discourse to date had focused on computer games primarily as objects of play, as enablers of the kind of “voluntary activity” that both Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois describe in sensuous detail. Huizinga writes: “Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’” (45). And Caillois says: “There is also no doubt that play must be defined as a free and voluntary activity, a source of joy and amusement. A game which one would be forced to play would at once cease being play. It would become constraint, drudgery from which one would strive to be freed. As an obligation or simply an order, it would lose one of its basic characteristics: the fact that the player devotes himself spontaneously to the game, of his free will and for his pleasure, each time completely free to choose retreat, silence, meditation, idle solitude, or creative activity” (6). And yet, as we noted in our article, there are times when the voluntary activity of computer gameplay Work 83 can seem much more like work—like a compulsory, laborious activity— than play.1 Consider the cognitive and physical effort involved in learning the many different hapto-kinesthetic interfaces of the Wii, for example, or the ludic work required to master the intricacies of Team Fortress 2’s various character classes. Requisite attention to a game environment’s structure and details ,prolonged periods undertaking tedious in-game tasks,organizationally taxing setup menus and command interfaces, learning to think algorithmically (see Galloway; Wark)—all contribute to the voluntary gameplay experience while simultaneously constructing that experience as a mental and often physical exigence. While “seriousness seeks to exclude play,” writes Huizinga,“play can very well include seriousness” (45) in the form of a great deal of work. Computer gameplay does so with startling efficacy; as Newman points out, “It is essential to note that [computer game] players want to work for their rewards. Gratification is not simply or effortlessly meted out” (16). Indeed, computer games are expert at creating “tension” and “consciousness that is different from ordinary life.” As we detailed in chapter 3, the medium constantly (and sometimes rather rudely) insists on interaction through audiovisual and kinesthetic prompts as a way to quickly and/or deeply immerse players. And yet, while such prompts facilitate immersion in game worlds via ceaseless call-and-response rhetorics, they also lend themselves to the blurring, and even transmutation, of play into work (and vice versa). In fact, it is often context alone that enables one to differentiate play from work under such conditions; people standing on a factory floor or in a cubicle farm and being driven to perform a multitude of repetitive tasks similar to the ones required by game series such as Project Gotham Racing or Master of Orion would need little time to puzzle out whether or not they were working or playing. Admittedly, it is tempting to assume that the context (or “consciousness ”) of certain human activities such as soldiering, exploring, or managing natural resources dictates whether those activities are forms of work or play (or both, alternately or simultaneously). Like many other assumptions about how media work, however, this one is highly problematical, since thinking about computer games in terms of play—as we do throughout this book— can be misleading. While play defines the computer game experience, work defines the computer game medium. It is the work of developers, players, scholars, and even games themselves that...

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