Abstract:The aim of this article is to define the concepts of playing, working, gaming, and labouring, through a literature study, and to construct a typology. This typology will be used to create a field model that is structured by the horizontal parameters of qualitative-quantitative (characteristics) and the vertical parameters of activity-result (in focus). It is shown how this model can be used to visualise different theoretical positions in empirical material, which connects to the concepts and their relations. Working and labouring are distinguished into a trans-historical and a historical, capitalist, category, and likewise playing and gaming, where the former is the trans-historical category and the latter the historical one. The main focus of the article, since working and labouring is well covered within the critical Marxist tradition, is on playing and its relation to working, with the aim of understanding and criticising the concept of playbour.
This article contributes to the debate on the possibilities and limits of expanding the sphere of peer production within and beyond capitalism. As a case in point, it discusses the explicit and tacit monetary dependencies of Wikipedia, which are not only due to the need to sustain the technological structures that render the collaboration possible, but also about the sustenance of the peer producers themselves. In Wikipedia, the “bright line” principle for avoiding a conflict of interest has been that no one should be paid for directly editing an article. By examining the case of Wiki-PR, a consultant firm allegedly involved in helping more than 12,000 clients to edit Wikipedia articles until 2014, the goal of the analysis is to shed light on the paradoxical situation where the institution for supporting the peer production (Wikimedia Foundation) found itself taking a more strict perspective against commercial alliances than the unpaid community editors.
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