The Moral Calculus of Vocational Passion in Digital Gaming

Abstract

The desire to “do what you love” energizes employment and engagement in creative industries such as digital gaming yet drains hobbyists and aspirants by normalizing expectations to sacrifice job security for passionate work. This article investigates how individuals regulate their aspirations through taken-for-granted trade-offs between vocational compromise and compensation. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with players at fan conventions and recruitment events in North America suggests a moral calculus of corruption and sublimation between passion and profit, which can be traced back to industrialization’s cleavage of labor from recreation and its institution of hobbies as productive leisure. Building on existing research about waged labor’s imagined denigration of hobbies, this argument juxtaposes the passion that is corruptible by work and the passion that promises to sublimate work from drudgery. Interrogating this confounding logic cultivates counter-narratives for purposeful livelihoods beyond industrial-era notions of productivity and neoliberal notions of passion.

The Passion Paradigm: Professional Adherence to and Consequences of the Ideology of “Do What You Love”

“…This Marxist approach presumes that coercion lives at the center of the employment relationship and that ideologies of work make workers complicit in exploitation and inequality, and ultimately the perpetuation of capitalistic relations (Burawoy 1979; Endrissat et al 2015; Weeks 2017). Scholars have found that culture has the power to overcome or mask negative working conditions in “bad” jobs that are still considered “cool” (Neff et al 2005; Ocejo 2017), hide the costs of bottomless work, risk, and no ownership with the promise of more invigorating work (Ross 2003), and subsume demands for pay, better hours, and social security under pleasure or other immaterial benefits (Chia 2019; Gill 2010; Sandoval 2018). This critical approach demonstrates how ideologies of work serve as a lubricant for smooth capitalism.…”

“…In sociology, there are only a few studies that center on work passion as the object of analysis (Chia 2019; Duffy 2017; Rao and Tobias Neely 2019; Sandoval 2018; Weeks 2017). The concept of work passion, however, has peppered literature on the cultures of work among structurally precarious professionals for the last two decades.…”

“…Passion has been identified as a “relatively stable” feature of cultural work (Gill and Pratt 2008; Gill 2010), part of a congealed set of norms in the creative economy (McRobbie 2016), and linked to a narrative of self‐realization in personal branding discourses among precarious professionals (Vallas and Hill 2018). Work passion energizes engagement in digital gaming (Chia 2019), undergirds expectations of enjoyable work for “No‐Collar” professionals in Silicon Alley (Ross 2003), offers cultural legitimacy to downwardly socially mobile craftsmen (Ocejo 2017), and justifies insecurity, low pay, and long hours in new media labor (Ross 2000) and fashion (Arvidsson et al 2010). In her work on female bloggers, Duffy (2016) argued that the passionate rhetoric of aspirational labor successfully “romanticized work in a moment when its conditions and affordances are even more precarious, unstable, flexible – and un romantic” (454).…”

“…Because scholars have found that love of the work—what I will henceforth refer to as work passion—often characterizes the culture of work for precarious professionals (Chia 2019; Duffy 2016; Ross 2000), it is possible that the pursuit and experience of work passion constitutes a broad ideology motivating work and controlling professionals in the new economy. In fact, recent scholarship does suggest that passion “is a primary cultural schema adjudicating labor market rewards” in the new economy (Rao and Tobias Neely 2019: 10) and that work passion is an “increasingly hegemonic…cultural script and normative ideal” within professional and managerial classes (Weeks 2017), which diffused from creative market niches into economic centers of production (Ross 2000; Chia 2019).…”

Capital Lúdico: um reflexo da tecnocultura algorítmica em performances na plataforma de streaming Twitch

“…"Combinar diversão e trabalho garante uma sublimação do trabalho assalariado, embora também ameace corromper os hobbies, da forma como existem e são compreendidos" 32 (Chia, 2019, p. 775). Por mais que o streaming de jogos ofereça algum retorno financeiro (não sendo apenas um trabalho feito por amor), as bordas entre trabalho, que incluiriam pausas para descanso ou objetivos profissionais, são perdidas e, em uma visão geral, beneficiam as empresas às custas dos trabalhadores (Chia, 2019).…”