Labor and Play in Platform Society


We invite audience to join us for the ICA post conference on Labor and Play in Platform Society, on June 18, at Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences. Registration is free.

Scholarship on ‘creator culture’ (Cunningham & Craig, 2021) and digital labor on social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok has shown how platforms infrastructure and governance condition the work of content creators (Bishop, 2018; Gregersen & Ørmen, 2021; Kumar, 2019). For example, while YouTube videos prioritize followers and TikTok prioritizes content, advertisements, and subscriptions (subbing) all determine how content creators work and broadcast, underlining the ideological nature of these platforms by pushing the exploitation of laboring bodies further.

On streaming services such as Twitch and YouTube, content creators’ ability to build a following has been referred to as viewer or audience engagement. These strategies can range from streamers actively encouraging emotional engagement by using humor, adapting to viewer wishes, or responsivity in rapid succession on the side of the content creator. Media scholars perceive this as aspirational (Duffy, 2022), hope (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013), or relational labor (Baym, 2018)  that can be both physically and emotionally taxing. For game scholars, this is also the platform convergence of labor and play, as in the pursuit of interactivity with an audience, creators find themselves increasingly engaged in a mode of gamification (Deterding et al., 2011), such as setting donation targets sometimes in competition with other streamers (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019). These strategies can be viewed as monetization attempts or seen as ‘gamification-from-below’ where creators gamify their lives to make it through. But one of the most pressing questions is, how does this configuration of play and labor constitute working? What existing worker vocabulary, such as gig-work, freelancing, entrepreneur, or platform work akin to annotation or Amazon Mechanical Turk workers adequately describe digital workers at the intersection of play and labor?

Keynote:

  • Daniel Joseph (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Talk description: What happens to a cultural industry when its platform-driven growth ends? As social media networks were becoming platforms in the late 2000s, the digital games industry was already firmly platformizing as console manufacturers, digital distributors, and production companies were finding ways to creatively extend their economic, infrastructural, and governmental power across a wide variety of networked games and services. In this talk I argue that in 2023 the digital games industry completed this process of platformization with the collapse of a long period of growth that began in 2006. The industry immediately went into crisis, resulting in more than thirty thousand layoffs to date. This talk also explores how the process of platformization created the conditions of this crisis and what new sociological and technological factors are at play for the industry now, be they AI, disruptive geopolitics, or a shrinking audience. I argue that the digital games industry’s crash signals the beginning of what I call “post-platformization”: an era where platforms are solidly integrated into the industry’s political economic calculus and, at the same time, no longer guaranteed to be able to drive growth they previously had.

Organizers:

  • Daniel Nielsen, Charles University
  • Alessandro Gandini, Milan University
  • Anne Mette Thorhauge, Copenhagen University

Program

Morning session
10:30Welcome remarks
Session 1Locating Digital LaborStreamers and Podcast Labor
11:00Jiaxi Hou & Xuanbo LiuPlaying to Earn by All Means Necessary: An Overview of Informal Gamer-Workers in China (REMOTE)Mark R Johnson & James Baguley“A really good network of people”: Knowledge Sharing and Community amongst Twitch Live Streamers (REMOTE)
11:10Xing (Stelle) WangCompassion or Commodification? The Dual Exploitation of Animal Labor in Stray Cat Rescue Vlogs (REMOTE)Ryan StantonExperiences of Play, Precarity and Platforms for Gaming Podcast Creators (REMOTE)
11:20Federico Gorziglia & Stefania ParisiThe Exploitation of Incivility. Performing Negative Emotions as a Mean of Audience Engagement in Game Video Content on Twitch’s Live StreamsWei-Ping ChenGaming, Branding, and Intimacy: Dual-authenticity Labor of Streamer-Influencers in Taiwan
11:30Q&AQ&A
11:45Break: Coffee/tea
Session 2Governance, Risk & Legal DimensionsPrecarity, Platform & Global Labor
12:05Yuening Li, Aphra Kerr, Linzi RyanGamified User Labour in Mobile Banking Apps: Agency, Responsibilities, and RiskZhang QiyunChinese Games Going Global: User Perception, Interaction, and Content Creation on the YouTube Platform (REMOTE)
12:15Laura Aade & Tom DivonCrisis as Commodity: The Gamification of Adversity on TikTok Live Matches and Its Legal Challenges (REMOTE)Selen BedirGetting Good at Lore Playing: Elden Ring’s Soothing Youtuber Hierarchies (REMOTE)
12:25Francisca Porfírio & Ana Jorge Sharenting play as digital labor: children of influencers on Instagram (REMOTE)Burçin SariClassifying Platform-Mediated Content Workers: Affiliates, Content Creators, and Social Media Influencers. (REMOTE)
12:35Taylor Annabell, Laura Aade, Catalina GoantaConsuming the selling experience in-the-moment: The use of TikTok LIVE during Black Friday in the Netherlands (REMOTE)Shane O’ByrneModerating the Work-Play Balance: Community Moderators’ Experience as Governors of Discord Gaming Servers
12:45Q&AQ&A
Lunch (13:00)
14:00Keynote: Daniel Joseph – Digital games after platformization
Session 3Futures of platform work
15:00Jacob JohanssenBetween Playing and Working Through: TikTok and Eating Disorders
15:20Paolo RuffinoEngine Workers: digital labour and videogame engines
(REMOTE)
15:40Franziska & Louise To sleep or not to sleep – the transactional performance of sleeping and waking on YouTube and Twitch
16:00Joy PanaliganLaboring Play: The narratives of Metaverse Filipino Workers (MFW) in Digital Futures (REMOTE)
16:20Q&A
16:40Closing remarks
19:00Dinner