LABOUR IS
NOT
A GAME
All over the world are young and intelligent men working on a game that they cherish. A remake of a cult classic is in the making: Nightfire Source. A whole team spends day and night on software development and does not receive a nickel for their work. They call it play. But is it really? There is a company to earn money from their activity. It is exploited labour. One cannot doubt that. How did we ever get to this point? Why are those (once again) intelligent men not seeing what they are into? Are do they? I will seek an adequate answer to that complex question. It is complicated, because exploitation often takes place without a proper acknowledgement.
MA THESIS
Mitch van Helvert (6168035)MA Thesis New media and digital cultures Friday, June 27th 2014.
31th of December 6:29 AM GMT was Nightfire Source founded by Click4Dylan also know as 2GoldenBullet$. Sadly enough there was no one who took initiative to make Nightfire Source for real. Until 8th of April 2013 2:53 PM GMT when Kenny did read the post of Bullets again and started the topic again. Since 8 April 2013 Nightfire Source is a fact, a team of developers is working on this project for real.
INDEX
P.4 INTRODUCTION
What is at stake?
Research question
P.10 THE CHANGE OF LABOUR IN RECENT HISTORY
Marx’ industrial mode of production
Fordism/Taylorism to the postindustrial society
Production of service and immaterial labour
Computer technology facilitates post-‐‑Fordism (online)
P.14 FREE LABOUR
P.16 PLAYFUL LABOUR (PLAYBOUR)
P.19 ALMIGHTY VALVE COMPANY
… and their concurrent
P.21 PRECARITY, HUMAN CAPITAL AND THE MEANS OF DISTRIBUTION
P.24 METHODOLOGY
P.26 INTERVIEWS
Benjamin Anderson (Soup Can) Kenny.tw
CaptainCrazy
Yannick Zenhäusern (GoldenZen)
P.34 DISCUSSION
P.37 FANDOM AS A MOTIVE
P.38 COPYRIGHT/COPYWRONG IN FREE CULTURE
P.40 CONCLUSION
FIVE THOUSAND KILOMETERS AWAY from Bellevue, a young software engineer sits behind his computer. He is working long days on his open source software initiative, Nightfire Source. There is no fancy furniture in the office of 2GoldenBullet$ (pseudonym of twenty-‐‑year-‐‑old Dylan Hughes) in Valrico, Florida. He speaks to his colleagues on Skype, but has never met anyone of them in real life. Physically far away from his fellow software enthusiasts and video game development – and digital distribution company Valve, Hughes’ headquarters are nothing like the young man imagines his nirvana to be. Hughes is a
talented amateur developer, but he never received payment for his work and it seems unlikely he will sign a contract any time soon. Hughes is voluntarily working on his portfolio for a future career in a multi-‐‑billion dollar cultural industry. He lives with his unemployed parents in a small rental house at the east coast of the United States. He is a smart guy, but has no money and no education. Hughes finds himself in the tragic position, wherein he must work for free. It is his only chance for his dream to come true. Hughes tells me that if he does not do so, he has to work ‘for Burger King’.
Dylan Hughes is clearly not in a luxury position, in which he can fall back on family resources when things crash. Every day he is hoping an influential figure in Bellevue will eventually notice that he is successfully working on a new version of a cult game, first-‐‑
person shooter James Bond 007: Nightfire (2002). He is creating ‘a new gaming experience’1
upon an existing infrastructure: Source, a software framework that developers use to create games for video game consoles. Source allows third parties to create games or mods upon an existing software engine (the often-‐‑complex central part of a computer program). It is
another opportunity for users to create games for commercial release. Those game
development tools are becoming cheaper, sometimes free and more user-‐‑friendly than ever before. Digital distribution on the Internet seems to be a fairly easy practice too. The software development kit (SDK) that Hughes uses is free, yet the game developer retains the
intellectual property rights of all mods created using the software development kit (SDK). In fact that means Hughes and his team are working for Valve for free. Why would they do that? Are they being exploited? Or does the software company disinterestedly empower these young men and offer them a chance to publicly demonstrate their skills, while they are sometimes literally at the other side of the country.
Nightfire Source is the high definition-‐‑remake of the once poorly received game James Bond 007: Nightfire (2002). “How could they do this to James Bond? [James Bond 007: Nightfire] is not as bad as I thought – it is worse. The flattest multiplayer shooter I have ever played, horribly flat and ugly levels in spite of the Quake III engine”, one critic advices/asks his readers. Another journalist adds: “Nightfire’s multiplayer mode is pretty horrendous. (…) The game has only a handful of fairly drab multiplayer maps, and it does not have many multiplayer modes, either.” A third considers the game “another extremely unsatisfying attempt at the Bond license.” Despite the criticism, the game proves to be a cult classic over the years, popular among thousands of gamers. Nightfire Source only copies the successful multiplayer mode; there is no opportunity to play offline in single player mode in the remake. It is a first-‐‑person shooter, with certain references to famous Bond movies
throughout the years. The most apparent level design is Fort Knox, which plays a crucial role in the movie Goldfinger (1964). The game distinguishes three original multiplayer team, 1) everyone for his own: death match (DM), team death match (TDM) and capture the flag (CTF). Those multiplayer modes return in the remake too.
Dylan Hughes (photo, left) is not the only person to work on Nightfire Source. There is a small team of fellow fan-‐‑programmers (generally known as “modders’) working on several aspects of the game, such as a music composer, 3D artists and map designers. Many of these developers are gamer fanatics. Hughes is an autodidact, a self-‐‑taught teacher. He spent many hours mastering Valve’s SDK. Over the last twenty years or so, such
authoring tools have been increasingly packaged with computer games, helping to foster a vibrant participatory culture of game “modding”, or modification (De Peuter and Dyer 2005). Developers use those tools to deploy a range of techniques, from changing characters’ appearances, to
designing new scenarios, levels or missions, up to radical departures that amount to building a whole new game – a total conversion (Sotamaa 2003). It is exactly that what Hughes has done. Several years ago he began to create small modifications for the original game, James Bond 007: Nightfire, and then he made new scenarios, levels or missions. Nowadays he is working on building a whole new game. In all those occasions the efforts are voluntarily given. It is free labour. While it may seem as an innocent practice at first sight, there are problematic aspects about free labour simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited.
What is at stake here?
LOOK AROUND for a moment. Think of your friends, family and relatives. More of
them suffer from the consequences of the economic recession than you probably realize at first glance. Education does not seem to matter. Whether they are academics or college dropouts, craftsmen or entrepreneurs, the contemporary situation leaves no one unaffected. Young and old become freelancers, changing jobs more often than they appreciate,
sometimes relying on nothing but hope or another temporary contract. The Internet plays a vital role in the disappearance of employment. Think of journalists, or certain administrative jobs for instance. The example below from Chris Andersons popular-‐‑science book Free illustrates how the Internet does fold, spindle and mutilate the physical world:
Since [Craigslist] was founded, its no-‐‑charge listings have been blamed for taking at least thirty billion dollars out of America’s newspaper companies’ stock market valuation. Meanwhile, Craigslist itself generates just enough profit to pay the server costs and the salaries of a few dozen staff (2009: 95).
The Internet is changing the world. I do only speak for myself as a starting journalist if I remark the company I am working for is rapidly changing. It happens so fast the
company board has lost grip on the situation and the decreasing value of our financial share on the stock market. No longer do ‘we’ receive massive amounts of money for
advertisement. No longer do young families subscribe on a newspaper for three hundred euros a year. To sell their car they use the Internet, like for their news consumption. It is free. Jobs disappear in the physical world and labour is done in more efficient ways with lesser people. The race to the cheapest, most efficient models has a real human toll. It has since the beginning of capitalism. In the so-‐‑called knowledge economy a job is a privilege.
Free labour affects us all. The contemporary society is going through an evolution, wherein an employer has to make more crucial choices in his career than ever before. The job market is unstable and a fixed-‐‑term employment contract is the rule rather than the
exception. An employer has to constantly invest in himself to stay interesting for possible future careers. However unlike a company investment, the so-‐‑called human capital is vague. One can never measure its success. Free labour is all around us. Some companies ‘sell’ it as a valuable opportunity to gain experience, certain companies on the Internet (such as
Facebook, Google and – as I shall argue – Valve) do not advertise the activities to perform as labour at all. They are very successful too. Especially their users see free and exploited labour as a fun practice. I am critical of exploited free labour, both in the physical world and on the Internet.
The reason that I chose to focus on Nightfire Source is that I cooperate in the project myself, as a multiplayer level designer. A few years I -‐‑ by coincidence -‐‑ got my hands on the original map compiler that Gearbox Software, the developer of James Bond 007: Nightfire (pc), did not officially release to the public. From that point map designers, including myself,
could alter existing level designs and build up new projects from the ground. Nowadays the developer team uses the compiler files to modernize the existing level designs.
Throughout my master thesis I do focus a lot on (exploited) free labour as a
theoretical concept. From an academic angle I shall expand the meaning of free labour and argue it is free in multiple ways. I shall investigate whether those who perform free labour get the freedom to do whatever they like, whenever they want to. The popular adagium seems to be anything goes, nothing matters. It is true that these game developers do not receive a fair financial compensation for their efforts, but neither are they under supervision of a manager. There is literally no one to confront them with certain tasks and obligatory targets for the day or week. Often you find those young men (and few women) in a privileged position, such as a steady income, or parents to rely on. But above all these enthusiasts genuinely enjoy their cultural expression, something Tiziana Terranova refers to in her influential, often praised paper as a “desire for affective and cultural production” (2000: pagina).
Research question
In this thesis I want to formulate an adequate answer to the question what thrives
these often talented, young men to work for free on a project that is possibly exploited? They do not get a financial compensation for their hobby that, I shall argue, is labour at the same time. Who are they? What kind of reward compensates the financial aspect? I will argue that they symbolize the end of the employee, an era wherein a wage earner has become an enterprise that requires constant investments. Interviews with several stakeholders in the Nightfire Source project help me to come to an answer. I have been talking to a 3D modeler, a music composer and one of the two ‘leaders’ or the project. Their answers are different from each other, but there is consensus about several aspects: they do not feel exploited, their work does not feel like labour and eventually they will individually profiteer from their own investment, some for school, others on the competitive job market.
I begin by focusing on different types of labour and describe the transformation of production throughout the years. I will jump from immaterial labour to free labour, that is only a small step, as I shall explain later. Hereafter I put focus on (exploited) playbour,
seemingly innocent labour that feels like play and therefore not like work at all. Then comes Lessig that put rather focus on creativity, instead of exploitation. He argues creative labour unalienates the people involved. From this point I shall introduce to the reader four young men that gave me the chance to interview them about their role in the unfinished project. In a methodology paragraph I shall explain my interview preparations in more detail. After these interviews I reflect on our conversations in the discussion, where I relate those young men’s answers to phenomena such as venture labour (Gina Neff) and human capital (Michel Feher). Ultimately I take a few steps back, reflect on my efforts and end with a conclusion.
Marx’ industrial mode of production
It takes a few steps before I can discuss free labour/playbour in contemporary society.
Therefore I shall start by explaining the broader concept of labour and value, starting with German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-‐‑1883). The creation of value is a fairly complex process. Because what is labour? How does it create value? Marx describes economic value in relation to labour. He argues that economic value stands in direct relation to labour power; the latter creates a financial worth to a certain asset. Labour is the exchange of time for money.
Production is important to Marx: he thought that the mode of production determines
and encompasses all other dimensions of a society. Marx distinguishes between authentic use value (the usefulness of an object that satisfies human needs) and exchange value (the ratio in which a commodity produced by labour power can exchange with another). Marx wrote his influential, complicated yet relevant critiques on capitalism during and after the Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the eighteenth century. The Industrial Revolution refers to the application of power-‐‑driven machinery to manufacturing. It marks the moment in time when large numbers of people began to leave the farms and agricultural work to become wage earners in factories located in the rapidly growing cities. At the same time a relatively small group of rich investors became enormously rich from the mechanized production. They are the owners of factories, wherein employees work long hours for low wages. Marx sees this as a growing (financial) gap between upper – and lower class.
Marx criticizes the inherent inequality in capitalism. Marx sees the social labour-‐‑ process as a process of nature. The metabolism between man and nature is the framework for his view of labour. The human is social, wherein labour plays a crucial role. Productive labour is the necessary material condition for, or moment within, the existence and
development of human history and culture. In capitalism however labour is not as important as profit. Thus labour is no longer an aspect of human, but the most important reason for his existence, Marx argues. The working class alienates from itself, labour and other people, who are nothing more than productive forces. Labour is becoming abstract in several ways…
… (1) the product of labour does not belong to the worker and (2) the productive process is controlled by someone other than the workers (Knapp and Spector 2011: 87).
Key arrangement of capitalism is the sale of labour. Buying and selling labour becomes the center of social structure, one that characterizes no other social system. The capitalist buys labour and profiteers from its surplus value (originally Mehrwert), the additional value produced by labour in the process of production. Surplus value is due to
the fact that the capitalist makes the labourer work for him a part of the day without paying
him for it. In the first part -‐‑ the 'ʹnecessary working time'ʹ -‐‑ the wage earner produces the means necessary for his own support, of the value of those means; and for this part of his labour he receives an equivalent in wages. During the second part -‐‑ the 'ʹsurplus working time'ʹ -‐‑ he is exploited; he produces 'ʹsurplus value'ʹ without receiving any equivalent for it (Böhm-‐‑Bawerk 2007: 16).
More than a century after his death, Marx is still alive to many inside and outside the academic world. Economic issues such as class, exploitation and economic crisis form the heart of contemporary society. The recent recession results in a renewed interest in the Marx critique of the political economy. Marx is relevant to the postindustrial capitalism, represents a transformation of modes of production. It also ‘entails’ the practice of outsourcing our production to low-‐‑wage countries. The rich west has become a service economy over the years.
Fordism/Taylorism to the postindustrial society
Over the years, as society and labour are changing, labour is becoming something measurable. It is the era of the clock card machine: the hours worked by an employee of a company are becoming perfectly registered.
Postindustrial capitalism (1960/1970s) contains a ‘growing predominance of the tertiary (services) sector over the primary (agriculture and mining) and secondary (manufacturing) sectors’. In post-‐‑industrial capitalism the “mode of production”,
productive sphere. There is an increasing emphasis upon the role of knowledge-‐‑based and educational sectors (Bell 1974). Bell asserts that ‘the concept of the post-‐‑industrial society deals primarily with changes in the social structure, the way in which the economy is being transformed and the occupational system reworked, and with the new relations between theory and empiricism, particularly science and technology.’ (Bell 1974: 13). The emergence of the postindustrial society contains the migration from factory work from developed countries in the west to Third World countries that offer low wage jobs. In the service economy the role of the factory is marginal: we are dependent on the provision of services, rather than the production of physical goods. The service economy produces a need for salaried managers, professionals, office workers, and retail clerks: ‘white collar’ office workers.
Bell and Touraine stress the importance of consumer culture within the postindustrial
context. Yet the second author put emphasis on a desire for “creative participation in a system of meanings directly attached to professional and social experience.” Alain Touraine refers to post-‐‑industrial society as ‘information society’. Production of wealth depends primarily upon circulating, utilizing, and controlling information and its meaning, rather than manufacturing goods in factories. According to the author, culture is “what is produced and manipulated for the sake of capital accumulation in post-‐‑industrial society.” Industrial society “had transformed the means of production; post-‐‑industrial society changes the ends of production that is culture” (Touraine 1988: 104).
Fordism is a shift from the nineteenth century model of paying employees as little as
possible to the twentieth century model of paying them relatively much. The term Fordism is derived from American folk hero Henry Ford’s approach to the mass production for mass consumption of automobiles early in the twentieth century. Fordism focuses on the mass production of standardized goods, which are, in turn, assembled in large stocks.
Ford’s assembly line is the transformation from craft production to mass production. With highly mechanized production, moving line assembly, high wags, and low prices on products, Fordism was born. High innovation, high process variability, and high labour responsibility would typify a post-‐‑Fordism model. Post-‐‑Fordism means a shift in the
definition of labour from manufacturing to service economies, which effectively entail a shift from the factory to the corporate office or the home. Rather than mechanical machines,
information technologies became the pervasive tools for flexible, specialized modes of production and consumption. Post-‐‑Fordism gave rise to white collar’ office workers (a reference to detachable, starched white collars for shirts). Yet, there came a critique from a neo-‐‑Marxist movement.
Production of service and immaterial labour
We have come to an era of immaterial labour (Lazzarato 1996). The term immaterial may be misleading, in the sense that it requires material infrastructures to be sustainable. A neo-‐‑Marxist movement began to formulate a critique of post-‐‑Fordist-‐‑capitalist, reviving the Marx’ concept of labour power. They extent and radicalize the meaning of the theory. Labour power was about any human faculty, in any sphere of life, which could be “valorized” to produce monetary value: cognition, language, feelings and emotions, creativity and inventiveness. Every capacity and attribute that constitutes a human life can potentially become the source of economic value. Immaterial labour serves as an ongoing expansion of capital into media, culture, entertainment, and the "ʺproduction of affects."ʺ
Immaterial labour is the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity. “The concept of immaterial labour refers to two different aspects of labour. On the one hand, as regards the ‘informational content’ of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labour processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labour are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (…). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the cultural content of the commodity, immaterial labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’ – in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.” (Lazzarato 1996).
Immaterial labour is a cognitive practice. It does not rely on machinery, but on the ability to process information by human brain. Therefore we call it cognitive labour, a type of labour that produces knowledge, cooperation and communication. It is the dominant form of labour. Production in cognitive capitalism breaks down the distinction between production and consumption as separate spheres (323). Cognitive capitalism is the terminal
technology. Many phenomena formerly not classed as work belong to immaterial labour, including the creation of such ‘products’ as fashion, artistic standards, consumption norms, and involvement in advertising and creative industries (Lazzarato 1996).
Computer technology facilitates post Fordism online
As western countries outsource the production of their physical goods to low-‐‑wage
countries, society changes to a new state. No longer does the economy rely on agriculture, mining or manufacturing goods. Employers leave the factories and factories leave the countries. Education alters to suit the needs of the service society: people offer their knowledge and time to improve productivity, performance, potential and sustainability (affective labour). The computer facilitates this kind of immaterial labour in a postindustrial society, as influential Italian thinkers put it. The computer in the household encourages so-‐‑ called crunch time, where labour continues after five o’clock but overtime is not or poorly financially compensated. Instead it is inherently part of the contemporary society.
Free labour
The postindustrial society and the computer are inextricably connected. In a rapidly
changing world the computer enters different domains, from the work place, to the
university and to ultimately private space, the living room. Capitalism soon found a way to exploit a new opportunity. The computer removes the wall base from the factory. Work never stops in the 24/7-‐‑society, wherein employers always have access to means of communication that force them to be available at all time for their work. Computer
technology at the same time allows continuing work in the living room. Where a work day since then took from nine o’clock in the morning until five in the afternoon, nowadays people have the opportunity to work for either a boss or to be an ‘entrepreneur’, usually starting with free labour.
Free labour, like duct tape, has a dark side and a light side (Stanfill and Condis 2012). Consumers are willingly conceded in exchange for the pleasures of communication and exchange, argues Terranova. Consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited (2013: 37).
Free labour flourishes in the postindustrial economy as a ‘pervasive feature’ (Terranova 2013: 52). Free labour is a common practice within the digital economy as a performance and intersects with the postmodern culture economy and the information industry. Terranova put forward two propositions in her research project about the future of the Internet that she wrote in the late 1990s. The first argued that the future of the Internet was going to be driven by “the centrality of users’ active participation.” The second proposition argued that such process could be productively explained by “means of the autonomist Marxists’ thesis of the social factory and concurrent notions of immaterial labour and the social factory” (2013: 35).
Dylan Hughes and his team do perform free labour. It is beyond reasonable doubt that they shall not receive a financial compensation for their work on Nightfire Source, no matter how successful the game turns out to be. They perform free labour, simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited (Terranova 2013: 34).
Tiziana Terranova describes free labour as the moment where the knowledgeable consumption of digital culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurable – and voluntarily – embraced yet also shamelessly exploited. Terranova draws upon Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of immaterial labour, which he defines as the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of a commodity (Lazzarato 1996). The production of computer games is an ideal example too of ‘immaterial labour’; within the informational economy. It stresses that the game industry is inherently dependent on the ‘free labour’ of game hobbyists (Peuter and Dyer-‐‑Witheford 2005).
Terranova (2013: 37) argues ‘mankind’ has a desire for affective and cultural production. She conceives the Internet as “an increasingly blurred territory between production and consumption, work and cultural expression” (2000: 35). The Internet functions as a channel through which human intelligence renews its capacity to produce. According to the author free labour goes beyond the digital economy of the Internet. It is rather a fundamental moment in the creation of value in the economy at large. Only some labour is hyper compensated by the capricious logic of venture capitalism (2000: 48).
According to the author the sustainability of the Internet as a medium depends on massive amounts of labour. The users keep [the Internet] alive through their labour, the cumulative hours of accessing the site, writing messages, participating in conversations, and
sometimes making the jump to collabourators (Terranova 2000: 48). The commodity is only as good as the labour that goes into it. The expansion of the internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce, contours deskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices such as ‘supplementing’. The digital economy is about specific forms of production (Web design, multimedia
production, digital services, and so on), but is also about forms of labour we do not
immediately recognize as such: chat, real-‐‑life stories, mailing lists, amateur newsletters, and so on (Terranova 2000: 38).
Simultaneity of pleasure and exploitation seems to be a key aspect in (unpaid) fan
value creation. The video game industry is a master in blurring the distinction between work and play. Dylan Hughes shows in a development roster the ten sorts of ‘occupations’ aboard, including testers (otherwise known as QA, for quality assurance), a job that hardly feels like work at all. Alpha and beta testers are influential in shaping the final product (Stanfill and Condis 2014).
PLAYFUL LABOUR (PLAYBOUR)
Playbour is very similar to free labour only playbour focuses more -‐‑ than Terranova -‐‑ on the playful aspect in the labour. Game design is to (amateur) developers as much fun as playing a game. It would be wrong to overestimate the potential of them developers. They unthinkingly accept the dominant view of their labour being just ‘fun’ (Kücklich 2005). Why would a game developer give them the opportunity to create a game their selves? How is the company planning to ever sell a game again if it does that?
While playbour and free labour are alike, the difference that deserves special attention is how the concept playbour the relationship changes between play and labour: whereas labour is
permanent and play irregular, playbour does not take place at specific times either during "ʺfree time"ʺ or "ʺwork time"ʺ; rather it can take place any time during wage labour time, at home or on the move (via mobile devices) (Fuchs 2013: 269-‐‑70).
Nightfire Source is a form of free labour, but playbour suits the project probably better. The term playbour is used to describe forms of labour carried out in or around computer games. In playbour, joy and play becomes toil and work, and toil and work appear to be joy and play (Fuchs 2014: 60). Playbour is not work but it is also not not work. It is a productive activity, although its
products are immaterial (Kücklich 2005). What makes the concept so interesting is that it does not seem to fit neatly into Marx’s classic analysis of how surplus value is generated from socially necessary, waged labour.
On the other hand (…) Marx predicted the increasing dependence of capitalism on the “general intellect” or “social brain” – the vast network of cooperative knowledge that is the source and agent of the cognitive mode of production (Ross 2013: 26).
While I believe in the criticism above, I think it is important to shed light on a citation from
game designer Will Wright, who encourages studios to release a SDK together with their games:
I did not want to make the players feel like Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins. I wanted them to be like George Lucas or J.R.R. Tolkien.
Valve exploits playbour ever since it bought Counter Strike, which once began as a modification of Half Life. Nowadays the company is better in exploitation than ever before,
since the end user license agreements (EULA)2 forces all the users of their software
developer’s kit to hand over all their property rights. The EULA prohibit commercial
distribution of modifications. According to game scholar Julian Kücklich this is problematic. He believes the [game] industry ultimately must grant more extensive rights to software
engineers and modders, because it will become “harder for the industry to uphold the claim
that modding is merely a marginal activity that has no economic implications” (Kücklich
2005). The author argues much of the innovation in the world of digital games comes from
playbour and that is something the industry wants to avoid. According to the scholar the industry does not want to be caught in a vicious circle of ever more derivative products.
I doubt the assumption above is true. I rather agree to the point that the game industry “benefits from a perception that everything to do with digital games is a form of play, and therefore a voluntary, non-‐‑profit-‐‑oriented activity” (Kücklich 2005). Modding is still primarily seen as a leisure activity that fanatics engage in for fun rather than profit.
Addressing modding (“computer game modification”) as an extension of play helps to
justify the contemporary economic structure in which companies can decrease their risks by
transforming parts of the development tasks to the hobbyists (Sotamaa 2005: 8). Leisure is thus successfully being commodified by the games industry.
Media companies do invite consumers to participate in ‘co-‐‑production’ of a topical fictional ‘world’ or ‘universe’. Consumers receive opportunities for creativity and self-‐‑ expression, unavailable before, but on the other hand, we witness total commodification of their creativity, moreover, it is implied by the new business model and encouraged by it (Sokolova 2012: 1581).
In the case of the software project that I am discussing, the labour game never finishes either. Dylan Hughes prepares to outsource his labour to a future generation of developers by releasing the source code, the crown jewels, of the game, on the Internet. It is available at no cost. What has become a distinctive technological as well as economic feature of the growing next-‐‑gen video game library is that before, or just after buying a new game there is always the promise of additional digitally distributed material that ties directly into and thus extends the core artifact (Nieborg 2011). Hughes is planning to do the same, only he
outsources the labour to future aspiring artists. The open source nature of the game helps the (future) developers team behind Nightfire Source to better the game at all time. Because the source code shall be publicly available, they can be effective hackers and make a valuable contribution to the project.
Project initiator 2GoldenBullet$ will put the source out in the open
ALMIGHTY VALVE CORPORATION
Even though they spent literally hundreds of hours on their project, the developers of Nightfire Source do not own their product. The game remains the property of the game’s distributor. The developers do not receive royalties (Kucklich 2005). There is only one party to profiteer from the huge time investments developers make, being Valve. In the first place the developer and publisher do not have to create a new gaming experience and establish its quality. The game developers of Nightfire Source are responsible for their own success. Second, mods play an important role in extending the sales of the original game or
developing a devoted fan base (Postigo 2003: 596). Mods do also increase the loyalty of the customer. To modify an existing game or creating a new gaming experience closes the loop between corporation and customer, “by reinscribing the customer into the production process” (Kline et al. 2003: 57).
Before an amateur game developer can start to work on his own project using the software developer kit of Valve, they sign a contract with the company being the end user license agreements or EULA. It states:
You grant to Valve and to all users of the Developer Site a worldwide, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty free, fully paid up license, in connection with the Source engine and Source SDK (and games, mods and other products based thereon), to:
1. make, use, copy, modify, create derivative works of such Posted Material,
2. publicly perform or display, import, broadcast, transmit, distribute, license, offer to sell, and sell, rent, lease or lend copies of the Posted Material (and derivative works thereof), and
3. sublicense to third parties the foregoing rights, including the right to sublicense to further third parties. Your license to other users is further subject to the terms of the users'ʹ valid license(s) to the Source engine and/or Source SDK (and games, mods and other products based thereon).
For a large and important part, Valve depends on their intellectual property. It does not produce consumable goods, but – obviously – immaterial licenses to software. The software developer’s kit is one expression of that form of exploitation. The software tool relies on two immensely popular games, Half Life (1998) and Half Life 2 (2004). Its codebase was spread into two different modules. Valve put the game engine under a proprietary license and kept its source code secret, whereas it made the remaining application source code available to users under a broad license to allow users to modify and share the code.
Dylan Hughes and his team are working with Half Life’s successor, Half Life 2. Nightfire Source is build upon the Source engine. Those modifications are an important part of a digital game’s experience. Especially in the case of Half Life, many gamers enjoy to change the game on several levels. Nightfire Source is a huge modification, but large and medium-‐‑sized add-‐‑ons are not the only modifications available for download. In fact, most fan-‐‑produced add-‐‑ons are smaller in size and consist of maps or levels, weapons, and skins
(Postigo 2013). Those smaller add-‐‑ons are mostly from lone fan-‐‑programmers who wish to add new dimensions to games they enjoy playing with friends online. Postigo writes that these small add-‐‑ons usually take about twenty to forty hours to complete, in many occasions in the course of a month.
VALVE… AND THEIR CONCURRENTS
To draw an analogy to the music industry, the game publisher is like the record label, the developer like the band. Developers make games, while publishers finance, distribute, and market them (De Peuter-‐‑Dyer Whiteford 2003).
There are relatively few publishers that dominate the gaming industry. Publishers exert massive influence over what games are made and when, largely because of their control of financing and marketing levers (2003). Publishers often contract “third-‐‑party” development studios to make games for their publishing label. Only sometimes they put to work their own in-‐‑house development studios. Developers are ‘the David; the publisher is the Goliath’, according to De Peuter and Whiteford.
Luckily for capitalism gamers are active consumers too, rather than being a ‘passive’ audience. Players create their own game content, thus becoming co-‐‑developers. Gamers are produsers who write and discuss about games, create fan videos and art, and engage in game development. Valve is the first major publisher to have found a way to successfully exploit those so-‐‑called modding practices.
Although development tools are becoming easier to use, it is not a simple practice (Tavares and Roque 2007).
PRECARITY, HUMAN CAPITAL AND THE MEANS OF DISTRIBTUTION
Precarity describes experiences of risk and uncertainty associated with insecure patterns of employment from homework to illegalized, seasonal and temporary work, freelancing and self-‐‑employment (Pratt 2008: 3). It lays pressure on leisure and rest, it interferes 24/7 into every aspect of social and personal life. In the grand narrative about the insecurity of employment the precariat (Standing 2011) is unable to plan a future due to labour insecurity. Standing describes the precariat as a mew dangerous class. It has barely a
chance on a safe career, or secure occupational identity. The preoccupation is security. It is everyone every man for himself, and God for us all in the neoliberal state, thus requiring human capital.
The dependence on human capital is nowhere more visible today than in the creative cultural industries. They are the iconic representatives of the ‘brave new world of work’ that move away from stable notions of career to more informal, insecure and discontinuous employment. Unpaid internships are a de facto requirement for entry into a paid position. Maintaining future employability often requires years of unpaid training, continual skills updating, and market forecasting. Jared Bernstein has called this thinking “YOYO” economics, in which “you are own your own” (Neff 2012: 159).
In the society of control individuals move from one closed space to another in disciplinary societies: factory, barracks, hospital, school, prison (Foucault). Deleuze argues nowadays we find ourselves in the society of control, where education and profession collide (Deleuze). ‘Labour power’ [is] moving beyond the walls of the factory, into every facet of daily existence. In the post-‐‑Fordist era (…) exploitation can include any human faculty in any sphere of life (Van Doorn 2014: 3). Even the Dutch government confirms that we are, as it is reforming the educational system in the country. Society changes and so do the
expectations that employers have of their personnel, according to the Rijksoverheid3.
Students receive a two thousand euro voucher that they can use to spend on additional training in the years after their graduation.
The worker is now conceived as an enterprise unit. The entrepreneur of neoliberal analyses is an individual subject whose investments require comprehensive measurement in order to calculate her human capital – a measure that is always in direct competition with others (Van Doorn 2014: 6). Investment metaphors will continue in different settings and different markets. When a job is thought of as an investment – and not as a right, an obligation, or an earned position – losing a job can seem like ‘easy come, easy go’.
Free labour fulfills the top ideal of the capitalist: Mehrwert to a maximum. Whatever a volunteer does is hundred percent surplus value, while the salaried worker obviously earns a wage. However at the same time the lot of the salaried worker is losing everything (the
tools of production and the product itself), while the developers of Nightfire Source recapture/retake the means of production. Unfortunately for them the powerful capitalist took from them the means of distribution (the conduits through which the material flows to the user), which is apparently more interesting in the (contemporary) gaming industry. Distribution can be via physical means, electronic means, or in some markets even face-‐‑to-‐‑ face, though strictly speaking the last of these is not a publishing or media activity as the material delivered is not recorded, captured, or reproduced for dissemination (Eisenhart 1996: 100). Valve has an immensely successful platform where dozens of developers are willing to distribute their carefully produced efforts for free. Valve dictates its own rules to those handcraft workers and they do not bat an eye. To work on a game is a fun practice. It does not feel like work at all amateur developers.
Feher describes the objective of his influential paper ‘Self-‐‑appreciation; or, the
aspirations of human capital’ as to explore neoliberalism from within. Neoliberalism and free labour are inextricably tied together, Feher argues (2008: 24). Human capital is inherently its new dominant form of subjectivity. It refers to the set of skills that an individual can acquire thanks to investments in his or her education or training, and its primary purpose was to measure the rates of return that investments in education produce or, to put it simply, the impact on future incomes that can be expected from schooling and other forms of training (2008: 25). My human capital is me, as a set of skills and capabilities that is modified by all that affects me and all that I effect. It can thus not (emphasis added) be understood in a mere influx of money. However the returns on investments in human capital can be measured in terms of monetary, real, and/or physic income, but its consequences are difficult to predict at forehand (2008: 27-‐‑8).
Neoliberalism focuses on the self, you are on your own in an economy that requires
investments in the enterprise you. Human capital treats people not as consumers, but as producers, entrepreneurs and investors in themselves (Feher 200f8: 30). The subjective is the manager of his own company; a portfolio of conducts pertaining to all the aspects of a human life. It includes domains such as health, education and culture. The human capital commodifies everything and gradually subjects the entire planet and all of human existence to the laws of the market. It is a speculative ownership, even though the term ownership is
slightly misguided in this context. Neoliberal subjects do not exactly own their human capital. They merely invest in it. They can never sell it.
Valve exploits the users of their software being used to create new software. It has not the power of production, but controls the means of distribution.
Methodology
As a game and software enthusiast myself I have had the chance to ask four co-‐‑ developers sixteen questions to reveal their motives to perform free labour. I will first describe my own role in the process, to describe a litter how the interviews came to exist.
James Bond 007: Nightfire (2002) was once built upon the Half Life (Source) engine.
From parts of the source code that players could see, you can understand the developer has been considering adding a map editor to the game. The game was eventually released unfinished to the public in late-‐‑2002, with levels and other – irrelevant – aspects unfinished. Through the time I got lucky to get to know one of the professional developers, who gave me the tools that Gearbox uses to compile a map from one format to another. Without those, the Nightfire players could have never understood the software structure of the game. Back then, not much older than 18 years old, I was an enthusiast level designer myself, for different type of games. Suddenly it gave me the chance to develop new maps for Nightfire too. Those same compiler tools now help the Nightfire Source team to understand the structure of James Bond 007: Nightfire and to transform aspects from the old game to a modern version.
While I am no longer as active as I once was, I do know different team members aboard on the Nightfire Source project. I have been talking to four of them to adequately answer the research question: what thrives often talented, young men to work for free on a project exploited by a third party? In a certain sense they all gave me the same sort of
answer: they cooperate because they enjoy to, they feel no exploitation or do not realize there may be a company to profiteer from their labour. We enjoy what we are doing, so why bother? A noteworthy observation to draw from the interviews is that software development is a man’s world. I have not come across one single lady, in Nightfire Source or GoldenEye Source. I took the interviews on Skype chat, with the following questions:
1. (Nick)name, address, residence, marital status, age, education?
2. For how long have you been familiar with Nightfire Source (NF:S)?
3. How did you get in touch with this project?
4. Why do you cooperate in this project?
5. How often have you been active as a volunteer in similar projects?
6. What do you do within the team? Can you describe your function profile?
7. Are there certain aspects in your job that you (rather) would not do?
8. What are the efforts you make for your job? Think of computer costs for example.
9. How many hours per week do you spend on this job?
10. Are there things you cannot do as a result of the free labour?
11. What else do you do expect NF:S (study, a paid job, unemployed or different)?
12. How many hours per week do you spend on these activities?
13. What is it that you hope this job will result in?
14. Do you believe this job enlarges your chances at the labour market?
15. Do you believe Valve profiteers from (indirectly) from Nightfire Source? If relevant:
how do you feel about not earning a wage, but being exploited?
INTERVIEWS
… Benjamin Anderson, bettering skills…
17-‐‑year-‐‑old student Benjamin Anderson (nickname Soup Can) is a level designer. He works from his parental house in the state Florida (United States). His father and mother have no clue what their son is doing in his bedroom all these long nights. He was the leading level design artist for Nightfire Source. Indeed, was. He left the developer’s team after being heavily frustrated by the initiator, Dylan Hughes, who has not done a good job sharing his vision for the game with me, argues Anderson. “There [also] is not enough developer talent or an active enough player base to keep it going, so I decided to resign from the mod. I hope the mod becomes something great, but it is just not likely.”
In the four to six months he was an active member of the team, Anderson spent hundred to two hundred hours working as a level designer, what basically means
“improving some of the classic Nightfire maps.” Anderson says he enjoys the type of labour that he does for Nightfire Source and before too Goldenye Source and sees it as “something that I find fun to do in my spare time.” He describes to map for a mod as a rewarding thing to do. He distinguishes between commercial games (like Team Fortress II or Call of Duty) and other games, including mods (such as GoldenEye Source and Nightfire Source). The latter category gives the player and the content creator a better sense of freedom, argues Anderson, who claims, “Interesting things result from this.” Alongside that the young enthusiast says that Valve’s games are “better for bettering your skills in game content creation.” Commercial games try to make as much money as possible, for example by selling downloadable content.
Someone that enjoys his voluntary work as much as Anderson may give the
impression that he must be dreaming of a career as a level designer in a major game studio, but the young student ‘environment art and IT’ does not. “I probably would not want to. I would still like to improve my skills. I want to make the best maps I can, and this includes good knowledge of what works in certain types of games and what does not, and going through a proper creative process to build good maps efficiently.” He says he is not using his experience for a better portfolio, to impress a possible future employer. Anderson
experiences no pressure from an employer, but his efforts sometimes feel like playbour, he admits. Playful (playbour) in the sense that Anderson sees it as just another hobby, “[for] some
because it sometimes it “certainly feels like that.” “Later on in the process you have usually lost the initial energy and motivation. There are also occasional show-‐‑stopping issues – it can be fun, but also very irritating at times.”
Nevertheless, the moment that it starts feeling as an obligation, Anderson put the game aside. “I think that I make [maps] for fun, and I certainly do take long breaks from mapping when I am bored. But even though I make them for fun, it is also nice to make sure I have a pretty, and also playable result by the time I am finished.” Anderson realizes that other developers receive a monetary reward for exact the same work as he does. Yet, he emphasizes that he does not bother and feels no sense of exploitation. “Seeing a server full of people playing your map, seeing the hours of effort come together and seeing how it works is very rewarding”, he says.
… Kenny (Kenny.tw), for my portfolio…
17-‐‑year old unemployed Kenny (Kenny.tw) is obviously still in school at his age. His dream to come true after the summer is to go to college in Breda, to the highly regarded course ‘Game Architecture and Design’ in applied university. The school accepts only the best students, Kenny says. They are selecting their students for their knowledge and practical skills. Game developers know to find their way to Breda.
Kenny works on Nightfire Source “for his own portfolio.” It is not the first project he has been working on though. “I was only ten old when I began to experiment with Hammer Editor. In those first year I have made map designs for Counter Strike and James Bond: Nightfire.” It is not a difficult job, Kenny claims. “You just begin and always strive to a better result.”
Kenny ‘invests’ ten to twenty hours per week on his most recent project. Before has been working on a racing game for fun and several other games, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. “But I quit because I did not find myself good enough and made too little progress.”
Kenny claims he is building a valuable network of fellow developers from other countries. “To work with them is to learn a lot for me. I am defiantly not yet where I want to be. I can be better and to learn from my colleagues is more than I could ever wish for. It may sound strange, but I need no money for the work that I do. This is part of my education.” On
