Its is ironic that computers were made to work for us, but video games have come to demand that we work for them (Yee 70). which has become more of a reality than a statement over the last decade. Most of what we depend on or use to go out through our daily lives is involving a computer whether its a work or when you at home enjoying a day off. Like Yee talks about in this reading video games have now become a job too, when gamer’s sign in to play online in these MMORPGs, where they become workers in the the game its self. Its interesting how he talk about pharmaceutical manufacturing, which is an career choice in a game, that reacquires you to actually spend time and labor to succeed to become prominent selling the resources they find in the game to other players in the game. He even goes on to talk about how some players get so in to it the either build up their supply-chain and try to become the most predominant source or either join another manufacture to become one strong faction. What brings this reading full circle is how Yee talks about the average player, who most are around the age of 26, have real jobs that the work at and when they come home to play these games its suppose be more of and escape but it fills more like a job. This definitely goes all the way back to the procedural rhetoric and how the developers are making these games the way they want us to play them. This also has grown to where some guys are actually being paid to play games for these companies and post it on their YouTube page. Its true that we are becoming more dependent on computers and now are working more with them than them working for us.
5 thoughts on “The Labor of Fun”
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Game Studies 
But is it more of an escape though? once a certain amount of time is invested into this game outside of your actual work, does that in a way make that another form of work? play that has turned in to labor maybe… or labor that we look at as play maybe….
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I can most defiantly agree. I went back and forth with that same question, but it does become labor when we invest a lot of our time in it and in the end the the games companies get the benefit and profit in the end.
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Sometimes I try to see the best that comes out of a life spent playing games for income. But what takes down that pro, are cons such as companies designing these games to make it seem like it’s benefitting you but really its in their favor. Both the financial and intel aspect.
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Exactly because at the end of the day video games began as a place to escape and be a place of just good play especially starting with arcades and as it grew and its defiantly kind of strayed away from that idea recently.
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I think games began that way, a stress-free form of entertainment, but through the decades it has become an activity that has taken over our computer screens and in some instances our entire evenings and nights. I feel like this is slowly becoming a trend not only throughout our society but in the world. We are already attached to our phones and the internet, who is to say video games are not any different.
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