Politicising digital labour through the politics of body

Abstract

By analysing the recent emerging labour movement of Korean digital game workers, this article seeks to explore a relatively novel issue – the importance of a politics of body in digital labour. By employing Elaine Scarry’s concept of ‘language of agency’ and ‘analogical substantiation’, the article first investigates how digital game workers express their work experiences and their embodied pain by analysing the mechanism of ‘crunch’ practice. Second, by examining ‘karoshi (overwork to death)’ and a series of suicides of digital game workers in Korea, it seeks to explore the problem of death as the final form of bodily pain – focusing on how these death events led workers to develop new forms of politics and solidarity by organising labour unions. Finally, by analysing the newly established digital game worker unions’ opposition to the violation of worktime regulation as a ‘struggle for recognition’, this research illuminates how digital game workers not only acquire self-respect but also achieve social recognition for their bodies as working labour. By examining this labour union organisation practice in Korea, the study ultimately argues that recognising the politics of body in digital labour offers the possibility that an emerging social category of precariat can actually co-exist and connect with the existing social class of proletariat. JEL Codes: J50, J81, L86

Fragmented Control of Platform Game Work in China

“…In the literature on digital labour, early discussion of video gaming saw the production side of the story as a subtype of cultural and immaterial production (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009;Hammar et al, 2020;Whitson, 2019;Xia, 2021), with a major line of scholarship focused on the game workers who were integral to developing and maintaining the virtual economy (de Peuter & Young, 2019;Deuze et al, 2007;O'Donnell, 2014). Newer scholarship beyond the West has investigated game workers' resistance against bodily control (Kim & Lee, 2021). However, most studies still define game workers as either content developers (Whitson, 2019) or casual gamers who contribute free labour (Taylor et al, 2015), a framing which obscures the stratified nature of video game work and skews debates toward middle-class tech and creative workers.…”