1. The document discusses the concept of "playbour", which refers to productive activities that are engaged in voluntarily for their own sake but also generate value, making it difficult to classify as work or play. 2. In online games and social networks, the laborious aspects are obscured by an "ideology of play" even as value is generated through social ties and personal information. 3. Exploitation in these contexts results from both objectification through commodification of information as well as subjectification through processes that alienate individuals from themselves.

1. Work Hard, Play Harder. Labour, Playbour and the Ideology of Play Julian Kücklich, MD.H Berlin

2. Modding as Playbour

3. Modding as Playbour Textual poaching? Free labour? Crowdsourcing? Exploitation? Productive play? A waste of time? Playbour?

4. What is Playbour? Playbour is not work but it is also not not work Like play, playbour is usually voluntary and it is engaged in for its own sake However, it is also a productive activity, although its products are usually immaterial (intellectual property, community, etc.) This makes it hard to reconcile with traditional conceptualizations of work and play

6. The Ideology of Play In settings such as massively multiplayer games, playbour is often masked by an ideology of play While the laborious character of these games is all too obvious, the generation of value is put under erasure In these settings, the value of playbour resides mainly in its creation of social ties

7. The Ideology of Play In a similar way, the affective labour of members of social networking sites (Facebook, Flickr, etc.) is cloaked by an ideology of play Additionally, collusion between providers and users blurs the line between paid and unpaid workers Alienation is the result of disowning ( entäussern ) of personal information

9. Playbour and Exploitation This allows us to see that exploitation is underwritten not only by processes of objectification but also of subjectification Subjectification and objectification are intertwined and embedded in a form of multitudinous intersubjectivity Exploitation is then not simply the reduction of a human being to a commodity but a complex process of alienation and liberation

10. The Mechanical Turk

11. The Mechanical Turk The Mechanical Turk is a machine within which a human pretends to be a machine It is a metaphor of the plight of immaterial labourers on the internet, who are hidden, yet exposed, and who have to perform with virtuosity The Mechanical Turk can represent both the playbourers of digital games production and the virtuosos of social networking

12. The Mechanical Turk It is also evident that the Mechanical Turk is a “deludic” device, which is intended to trick players into thinking they are playing against a machine This draws attention to the possibilities of deludic strategies of resistance and refusal, such as disinformation or “grief play”