Playlist Playing with/at Work - Christine H. Tran - Canadian Journal of ...
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Playlist
Playing with/at Work
Christine H. Tran
University of Toronto
Can you play a list? Suffixed or prefixed, to inscribe an object as “playful” often
means to modulate yourself in artifice, experimentation, and risk: overplay your
hand, underplay your flaws, display your work for review, or downplay the pain.
Advocates for scholarly annotations as playthings might operate from Johan
Huizinga’s (1949) definition of play in Homo Ludens: “a free activity standing quite
consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’” (p. 13). This playlist, from
the managed distance of the archive, is surely “consciously outside” the “ordinary
life” of the Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC). Ungenerous readers might
trouble what attributions of “play” do to undercut the hard-wrought, not-not-se-
rious efforts of CJC scholarship. Similarly, paranoid readings of Huizinga will ignore
the ambivalence of those quotation marks around “ordinary” or “not serious.”
“Did he not anticipate the extraordinary $168 billion game industry!?,” posits the
straw-doll reviewer. As his monograph title Homo Ludens itself signals, Huizinga
holds play with immense gravity as the adhesive of human enterprise. Play, in the-
ory, is a precursive and rehearsing plasticene that is always outside and therefore
all around us. In theory and practice, we freely play with this list.
Affinities between freeness and playfulness strike at the ambivalent heart of
“new” labour studies and its scholarly casting of Web 2.0 producers as protagonists.
Aided by information communication technologies, bedroom DJs, game streamers,
and viral vloggers ostensibly turn playful practices into profit from the comfort of
home. In studies of such cultural industry, the individual pursuit of careered hob-
bies too often precedes a collective resignation to subpar conditions and deferred
payoffs in the name of passion. “Fun over funds!” decrees the straw-doll cultural
sector entrepreneur. As Terranova (2000) and other Marxists remind us, the for-
mal economies of capitalism have long expanded themselves with our labour
done “freely” outside of factory walls in the name of care and recreation (p. 33).
Thus, I would hesitate to spin Huizinga’s emphasis on play as “free activity” as an
emerging call-to-action against commodification. We see this imperative to freely
give our work embedded in the playful voice of content creator programs for en-
tertainment platforms such as Twitch, YouTube and, most recently, TikTok.
Tran, Christine H. Playlist: Playing with/at Work. Canadian Journal of Communication 46(1),
733–738 doi: 10.22230/cjc.2021v46n3a4175
©2021 Christine H. Tran. CC BY-NC-ND734 Canadian Journal of Communication 46(3)
Play’s power as a conduit of pleasurable work also reverberates in popular
terms such as playbour (Kücklich, 2005, para. 4) “gamification,” and “prosumers,”
which synthesize (or oversimplify) our conceits of labour and leisure via digital
media. Of course, such infusions of work and play are not an innovation for all;
for gendered and racialized people working from homes (not always their own),
the lines between labour and leisure have never been so clearly defined. In addi-
tion to working so others can play, marginalized workers in the cultural and cre-
ative sector have long been room-mates with their productive leisure (Chess, 2017;
Duffy, 2017; Patton, 2020). If play is the social substance that folds paper into air-
planes and bibliographies into pleasure tracks, what and whose rhetoric does
“play” in the CJC archive put to work?
Most distressingly: can a playlist play you? As recent scholarship posits, es-
sentializing play as a human practice too readily bisects the world into a binary of
“player/plaything.” Building on the inter/intraspecies frameworks of Donna
Haraway (2007), Kara Stone (2019) argues for definitions of play that are “less in-
dividual-to-individual but [rather] something that happens in communion and
together … To be very blunt: individualism is destructive” (p. 99). Stone and
Haraway’s divestments from anthropocentric play read ever more urgent as we
recognize how non-human animators—from algorithms to the climate itself—
shape the terms of digital play and digital work.
This playlist seeks not to cohere a new definition of play. No end screens or
high-score charts here. Neither should we approach this playlist as a “game stud-
ies” list. Instead, toy with these annotations as a “choose your character” screen
in the clickventure of communication scholarship. CJC puts play to work, not
only for the study of digital games but also for policy analysis, labour histori-
ographies, and information technology speculations. Pick your proxy. And, in
the spirit of communal play, mind each “co-player” for additional context and
continuation.
Playlist
Article 1
Chung, Grace, & Grimes, Sara M. (2005). Data mining the kids:
Surveillance and market research strategies in children’s online games.
Canadian Journal of Communication, 30(4), 527–548. doi:10.22230
/cjc.2005v30n4a1525
Drawing from a longitudinal study of 17 online game sites frequented by youth of
the time (from Neopets to Barbie/Mattel’s Everything-Girl.com), Grace Chung and
Sara Grimes analyze the data mining practices that undergird the digitalizing lives
of young players. They hold these sites as more than pivotal data extraction points
in the networked ludic economy. Accordingly, these gaming sites are also terrainsTran Playing with/at Work 735
of struggle for the cultural creation of “media-savvy cyber-kids” (p. 530) in policy.
As conventions for data transparency form in adherence with the digital rights of
the child in North American policy documents such as the Children’s Online Privacy
Protection Act, this article advocates for further institutional support in ensuring
that kids understand the contracts they playfully enter.
Co-player: Harvey, Alison. (2015), Gender, age, and digital games in the do-
mestic context. New York, NY: Routledge.
Article 1 tag-teams dynamically with Alison Harvey’s study of games and policy
in domiciles. Studying the playful development of digital literacies at home,
Harvey pushes for a definition of “domestic policy” (p. 126) that emphasizes not
only state regulation but also the everyday time-management practices that cir-
culate games into and within domestic space users.
Article 2
Durlak, Jerome T. (1979). Thinkertoys in informationland. Canadian
Journal of Communication, 5(4), 45–56. doi:10.22230/cjc.1979v5n4a217
When are computers (not) playthings? Jerome T. Dulak examines the social, tech-
nical, and ludic layers of personal computing. Speculating about the games people
(namely youth) play on and around the computer, this article builds an early
framework that captures the (then) novel possibilities of digital literacy when we
remember that computational hardware is, to some, just another “toy.” Durlak re-
contextualizes the playful learning practices of youth in the “lightweight revolu-
tion (p. 56) of the microprocessor as an object in Canada, bringing together a vivid
ecological analysis that deserves to be analyzed beyond a reflective speculation of
computation in its time.
Co-player: Nooney, Laine. (2013). A pedestal, a table, a love letter:
Archaeologies of gender in videogame history. Game Studies, 13(2).
URL: http://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/nooney
Co-play with this and other recent historiographies of women’s role in the com-
puter industry and the resultant distinctions between computational hobbyists,
amateurs, professionals, and entrepreneurs.
Article 3
Dyer-Witheford, Nick, & de Peuter, Greig. S. (2006). “EA spouse” and
the crisis of video game labour: Enjoyment, exclusion, exploitation,
and exodus. Canadian Journal of Communication, 31(3), 599–617.
doi:10.22230/cjc.2006v31n3a1771736 Canadian Journal of Communication 46(3)
In 2004, a viral Livejournal post, signed by an “EA Spouse,” took the Canadian
game developer Electronic Games (EA) to task for its culture of overwork and the
ensuing effects on developers’ families. The blog post is the starting point for Nick
Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter to analyze multiple levels of exploitation
across the video game industry, a cultural site notorious for its “crunch” conditions
and fallacious meritocracies. Synthesizing interviews with game developers into
an analysis of the cultural response to EA Spouse in online forums, the authors
create an influential case study for future researchers of playful industries.
Co-player: Bulut, Ergin. (2020). A precarious game: The illusion of dream
jobs in the video game industry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
In kinship with Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this vivid ethnography of video
game development dedicates itself to the gendered and colonial register of work
regimes in the gaming sector. Bulut spotlights the lesser-known protagonists of
the ludic economy: game testers and game developer spouses, who can be imag-
ined as the key social reproducers or the new “EA Spouses” of the video game in-
dustry. Most interestingly, Bulut examines the municipal zoning policies in “fun”
cities housing ludic entrepreneurs (and their families). Paired together, these em-
pirical texts lend historically specific answers to the time-crossing material ques-
tion: who plays so others can work?
Article 4
Legault, Marie-Joseph, & Weststar, Johanna. (2015). The capacity for
mobilization in project-based cultural work: A case of the video game
industry. Canadian Journal of Communication, 40(2), 203–221. doi:
10.22230/cjc.2015v40n2a2805
As collaboratively fashioned units of sound, animation, and writing, video games
are frequently held by industry studies as a platonic model for cultural and tech-
nology employment en masse. Drawing from international survey data and inter-
views from game developers themselves, this article pivots studies of ludic labour
toward practical questions of resistance within a fraught cultural scene. Specifically,
the authors apply John Kelly’s framework of mobilization theory to recognize the
contradiction inherent in both games culture and media labour organizing indi-
vidual interest versus collective (inter)action.
Co-player: Cohen, Nicole, & de Peuter, Greig. (2020) New media unions:
Organizing digital journalists. New York, NY: Routledge.
What do game industry organizers gain from seeing themselves in cultural affinity
with other organizers—such as journalists? From GamerGate to today’s newsbeats,
games journalism has been a central character in the retelling of gaming histories.Tran Playing with/at Work 737
This book and Article 4 play well with each other, depicting how different tech-
nology users gamify picket lines on their own terms and those of others.
Article 5
Sklar, Alissa, & Derevensky, Jeffrey L. (2010). Way to play: Analyzing
gambling ads for their appeal to underage youth. Canadian Journal of
Communication, 35(4), 533–554. doi:10.22230/cjc.2010v35n4a2331
Performing a discourse analysis of gambling ads in the early 2000s, Alissa Sklaar
and Jeffrey K. Derevensky consider how (and which) values can be codified as ap-
pealing to youth. Recurring references to themes such as “sport,” “excitement,”
and “easy money” function as potential appeals to youth, even as law and policy
officially codifies the act of gambling itself as “adult.”
Co-player: Fickle, Tara. (2019). The race card: From gaming technologies to
model minorities. New York, NY: NYU Press.
This study argues that the cultural project of American gaming and gambling is
infrastructurally locked to the project of Asian-American identity. Fickle positions
the Asian “model minority” as itself a gambling device: an outcome manager of
the American Dream, a simulation of whiteness, and an extension of the history
of policing Chinese gambling houses all folded in one deck.
Article 6
Willett, Sean, & Hogan, Mél. (2019). Cheating the network: How
gamers play the infrastructure. Canadian Journal of Communication,
44(3), 339–453. doi:10.22230/cjc.2019v44n3a3382
Am I cheating to put such a new article in an archive list? Uniting frameworks
from critical infrastructure studies and critical game studies, Sean Willet and Mél
Hogan examine the social and technical work performed by “cheaters” in digital
discourse. From a case study of player alterations and exploits in the game Destiny,
the authors reposition cheaters as networked actors rather than insular players.
The article works toward a definition of “cheating the network,” rather than
“cheating the game,” to describe these players to better recognize the “fundamen-
tally material nature” (p. 447) of networks in analyses of game technologies, cul-
tures, and other infrastructure.
Co-player: Consalvo, Mia. (2007). Cheating: Gaining advantage in video
games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Willet and Hogan implicitly and explicitly converse with Mia Consalvo’s rule-setting frame-
work of “gaming capital” (p. 2). Here the parameters of who and what plays (or how they
play) give way to their own ludic economies in and around player communities.738 Canadian Journal of Communication 46(3)
Christine H. Tran is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.
Email: christine.tran@mail.utoronto.ca .
References
Chess, Shira. (2017). Ready player two: Women gamers and designed identity. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Duffy, Brooke Erin. (2017). (Not) being paid to do what you love: Gender, social media and aspirational
work. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Haraway, Donna. (2007). The companion specific manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness.
Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Huizinga, Johan. (1949). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. (R.F.C. Hull, Trans.).
London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kücklich, Julian. (2005). Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry. Fibreculture,
5(1), 1–5.
Patton, Elizabeth A. (2020). Easy living: The rise of the home office. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Stone, Kara (2019). What can play: The potential of non-human players. Pivot, 7(1), 78–102.
Terranova, Tizanna. (2000). Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text, 18(2),
33–58.You can also read
