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