By making work seem more like leisure time, gamification and corporate training games serve as a mechanism for solving a range of problems and, significantly, of increasing productivity. This piece examines the implications of gamification as a means of productivity gains that extend Frederick Winslow Taylor's principles of scientific management, or Taylorism. Relying on measurement and observation as a mechanism to collapse the domains of labour and leisure for the benefit of businesses (rather than for the benefit or fulfillment of workers), gamification potentially subjugates all time into productive time, even as business leaders use games to mask all labour as something to be enjoyed. In so doing, this study argues, the agency of individualswhether worker or player-becomes subject to the rationalized nature of production. This rationalization changes the nature of play, making it a duty rather than a choice, a routine rather than a process of exploration. Taken too far or used unthinkingly, it renders Huizinga's magic circle into one more regulated office cubicle.
In the game industry, community managers engage in social and emotional labor as they split their loyalties between game communities and game companies. Community managers do not fully represent the interests of one group, and their intermediary role puts particular stresses on the types of emotional labor that they are called upon to enact. Further, community managers must also participate in social labor---work that builds and exploits social connections for monetary gain. Most of this labor, however, is undervalued and in some instances is simply uncompensated "free" labor carried out by members of a fan community. Ultimately, we argue, casting the role of the community manager as a social and emotional laborer feminizes this work, monetarily devaluing it while isolating workers in these roles from the communities that they ostensibly serve.
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