Productive leisure in post-Fordist fandom

Abstract

For over a decade, scholars have considered how digital play has converged with the work of media production. From esports and volunteer moderation to play-testing, the circuits of game production are accelerated by players’ passionate engagements as fans and hobbyists, which are intertwined with their professional ambitions to join the industry. It is now taken for granted in scholarly discourse that work and play, production and consumption, and professional and amateur identities are blurring. Researchers propose hybrid terms such as ‘prosumption’ or ‘playbour’ to capture the variation, complexity and contradictions in media participation and value creation across diverse fan practices. This analysis proposes that these post-Fordist neologisms oversimplify techno-cultural changes and legitimate ambiguities in fans’ relationships with media companies and their imperatives for productivism in platform capitalism and its gig economies. In contrast, hobbies have always been a mediating category of productive leisure that can be traced back to industrialization’s cleavage of labour from recreation. This article argues that charting how this liminal category of hobbies has been institutionalized in contemporary media practices provides an analytical lens to interrogate post-Fordist obligations of productivity and neo-liberal expectations of entrepreneurialism.

A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning

“…Play is polyphonic (Stenros, 2019, p. 25) allowing many different behaviors under its mantle; it might boost civic participation (Gordon & Walter, 2016), tackle complex issues such as gender disparity or colonialism (Mukherjee, 2018) or give meaning to mundane experiences (Sicart, 2014(Sicart, , 2018. Yet play also is a driving force in ugly fan backlashes (Stanfill, 2020), exploitation of free labor (Chia, 2020) or locking users into compulsive manipulative systems (Joseph, 2021). The function of engagement also emphasizes affect, as shown by Reinhard et al (2022) in analyzing QAnon through the lens of fandom studies.…”

Gaming the System: Playbour, Production, Promotion, and the Metaverse

“…This murky status has polarized academic opinions on the effects of UGC: fans contribute to "participatory culture" by adding to, remixing, and reshaping their favorite media (e.g., Postigo 2010). However, worries persist concerning companies capitalizing on or exploiting user labor, even though users make content for reasons beyond economic value (e.g., Chia 2020;Fast et al 2016). UGC takes many forms in gaming, from streaming playthroughs to "modding," or modifying titles utilizing developer-released code.…”

“…Playbor satisfied both corporate needs for innovation and modders' desire for "problem solving, hacking, self-expression and portfolio building" (van der Graaf 2017: 33). The concept has been critiqued for lacking clarity regarding the relationship between, and reasons for, labor and play (e.g., Chia 2020;Duffy 2017;Fast et al 2016;Goldberg 2018). Chia, for instance, suggests that playbor does not "fully capture the productive relations" (2020: 52) between commercial and non-commercial activity, and argues that the voluntary nature of "hobbies" better characterizes this type of post-Fordist work (ibid.…”

“…First, prevailing hardware and software specifications dictated how early users played with and understood the technology. Gamemakers not only established the rules or "boundaries" (Chia 2020;Lobato et al 2013) by which VR enthusiasts could interact and understand what type of content was appropriate for the medium, but also provided the means for them to relate to and translate their activities to the wider industry (Chia 2020: 54). Because of the influence of studios, VR's potential was restricted to gaming; as of this writing, games, not social applications, comprise most available content.…”

Converging experiences, converging audiences: An analysis of doctor who on Twitch

“…This ‘private play turned into public entertainment’ (Taylor, 2018: 6) provides a space for viewers to log on and follow a stream of a video game player, all while chatting with other people watching the same stream. Turning their hobby into their labour (see Chia, 2020), some Twitch streamers have become celebrities in their own right and have garnered a strong following on the site; they can make money as ‘influencers’ on the site through paid subscriptions, donations and influencer marketing. According to ‘Twitch Tracker’, Twitch as per 2019 routinely has 4.4 million monthly streamers, 53,000 concurrent channels and over 260 billion minutes of content watched annually.…”