![]() ![]() Working towards solutions requires that, as male gamers, we become aware of the ways in which we unconsciously benefit from sexism. It’s not all bad news though as a result of the expanding discussion in and about gaming spaces, it’s been encouraging to see a small but growing number of male gamers who seem to genuinely want to understand the problem and be part of the solution. We can't work to fix something unless we first see and understand its effects The fact that a great number of women have been speaking out about how they experience prejudice, alienation or worse on a fairly regular basis seems to hold little weight. Despite the abundance of evidence, I’ve seen many of my fellow male gamers, in comment thread after comment thread, dismiss the issue as "no big deal" and insist that everyone is essentially treated the same. One particularly astounding theme I’ve noticed running through online discussions surrounding these incidents has been a consistent denial that there is any real problem with the way women are treated in gaming. ![]() This backlash, along with a number of other recent high-profile harassment incidents targeting women, has highlighted sexism in the gaming community and brought the issue to wider public and media attention. During that time, I have been taken aback by the intense and often abusive reaction to the project. Equally important is to investigate emerging cultural discourses which render certain social behaviours in the digital realm as normal and desirable while others as invisible.Over the course of the past two years I’ve had the opportunity to serve as producer on the Tropes vs Women in Video Games web series. Therefore, to further understand the conditions of digital labour, historical global inequality needs to be articulated. Second, precisely because the production process has become normative construction site, meanings and values of labouring are subject to broader social and cultural context beyond the digital realm. Culturalization of production process (re)draws the boundaries for the meanings of labouring and thus is complicit in constructing ideal digital labourers with exemplary, normative social behaviours. How labourers perceive their relations and interactions to the digital production process is as crucial as which capacity they rely on to perform their labour. First, the author complicates the relationship between culture and production by bringing the former from the “superstructure” in the classical Marx’s framework to the “base.” As various cultural production, consumption, and economic activities converging onto digital, networked media eco-system, digital labour is indeed the indispensable source for capitals’ accumulation of surplus and, more importantly, for cultural differentiations of production process. Practically, a fetishist process of hiding human relations behind relations among things (elements in the video game environment) reaches its paradoxical apex in the quality assurance task of this profession: the more the game tester succeeds in debugging games higher is the fetishization of his/her activity.Ībstract: The article makes two theoretical interventions to engage with current scholarship on digital labour. Ideologically, the " playful ", " carnivalesque ", quasi-subversive facets of this job are rejected because of their resistance to be easily subsumed by the logic of capitalism. Drawing on Lund's (2014) distinction between the creative aspects of " work-playing " and the con-straining/instrumental aspects of " game-labouring ", I claim that video game testing is buried under several layers of invisibility. In this paper, I examine video game testing as a lens through which exploring broader aspects of digital economy such as the intersection of different kind productive practices-working, labouring, playing and gaming-as well as the tendency to conceal the labour associated with them.
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