research
Microsoft Research AI and Gaming Research Summit, February 24, 2021.
Based on “The Artist and the Automaton in Digital Game Production.” OA Download: Convergence. |
I research connections between "creativity", personhood, and inequality in:
♥︎ Passionate Work in Game Production
☮︎ Innovation Practices in High-Tech New Age Spiritualities
☯︎ Optimization Rituals in Social Media Disconnection
♥︎ Passionate Work in Game Production
☮︎ Innovation Practices in High-Tech New Age Spiritualities
☯︎ Optimization Rituals in Social Media Disconnection
The labor of Gaming hobbies
The desire to “do what you love” energizes employment and engagement in creative industries such as digital gaming yet drains hobbyists and aspirants by normalizing expectations to sacrifice job security for passionate work. This article investigates how individuals regulate their aspirations through taken-for-granted trade-offs between vocational compromise and compensation. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with players at fan conventions and recruitment events in North America suggests a moral calculus of corruption and sublimation between passion and profit, which can be traced back to industrialization’s cleavage of labor from recreation and its institution of hobbies as productive leisure. Building on existing research about waged labor’s imagined denigration of hobbies, this argument juxtaposes the passion that is corruptible by work and the passion that promises to sublimate work from drudgery. Interrogating this confounding logic cultivates counter-narratives for purposeful livelihoods beyond industrial-era notions of productivity and neoliberal notions of passion.
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Technoliberal Affect
"Scaling Technoliberalism for Massively Multiplayer Online Games" uses the case of EVE Online to examine how the sandbox genre addresses players as subjects with agency to shape worlds, impact populations, and make history through their actions within virtual environments. Designed features afford feelings of empowerment and solidarity that undergird technoliberal forms of subjectivity, which uphold technological structures as legitimate means to emergent effects in virtual worlds. This article uses ethnographic fieldwork at fan conventions to examine how the ideas and affects of technoliberalism are afforded through procedurally-encoded game processes, yet are aestheticized through branding onto player communities and their platforms. This smooths over the contradiction at the heart of technoliberalism that players’ agency to shape virtual world content is contingent on rules encoded into platforms whose development and adjustment are beyond their control. This is key to understanding the pleasures of freedom and complexities of control in designed environments.
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