Julian Kücklich

Bio

Julian Kücklich teaches Game Design at Mediadesignhochschule Berlin. He has been doing research on the politics, aesthetics and semiotics of digital games since 2000. More information on his research can be found at http://playability.de.

Abstract

Work Hard, Play Harder --- Labour, Playbour and the Ideology of Play

In my paper, I argue that much of the current scholarly discourse about virtual worlds fails to recognise the mode of governmentality that characterises these new social formations. Rather than to see them as analogous to societies in the real world, with their own cultures, economies, and political systems, I suggest to regard them as ‘social factories’ in which the social fabric is inextricably shot through with economic production. While the governmentalisation of the global economy, and the concomitant economisation of governments are processes which originate in the (increasingly virtualised) real world, they also result in a ‘naturalisation’ of virtual worlds, a tendency which also becomes obvious in the way virtual worlds are discussed in terms of ‘population’ and ‘territory’. At the same time, the integration of the economies of the real world with those of virtual worlds leads to similar results as the virtualisation of real-world economies, which is contingent upon the increasing valorisation of immaterial labour. In virtual worlds, the suffusion of governance with economic production thus leads to the formation of precarious forms of governmentality, which are veiled by a pertinent ideology of play. By de-ideologising the material processes of exploitation and accumulation that take place in virtual worlds, it is possible to recognise virtual worlds’ precarious sovereignty, and arrive at a conceptualisation of virtual worldliness that takes this precariousness into account.