It’s quite alarming when I look at the first paragraph of Yee’s “The Labor of Fun” and am basically regurgitating exactly the type of gamer I am. ” Users spend on average 20 hours a week in online games, and many of them describe their game play as obligation, tedium, and more like a second job than entertainment” (Yee 68). This is true of many games I play. I tend to play at least 10 hours of Overwatch competitive every single week, and you’d think I hated the game with a passion if you were my girlfriend. I cannot tell you how many times she’s heard me screaming at my teammates to do something, scream at the game for lagging, or screaming into the void due to my own faults. As much as I enjoy it at times, it does feel like work sometimes. I’ve sat at the main menu questioning my life decisions at least twice today.
Yee goes into deeper and more labor intensive games like MMORPGs (like World of Warcraft) to explain the similarities between games and labor. He describes these MMORPGs to be similar to pharmaceutical manufacturing. “These raw resources, such as chemicals or minerals, must be located using geological surveying tools and harvested using installations bought from other players skilled in industrial architecture” (Yee 69). He later goes onto how these resources are then converted into “subcomponents and final products using factories (also provided by player architects)” (Yee 69). Sounds like work, doesn’t it? According to Yee, these games are inherently “businesses for fun”, and it seems many games are starting to add these labor intensive mechanics more and more.
Game Studies 
I definitely can relate to how you feel, especially with the design of games today. Many of them reward a player for getting on everyday and completing a few challenges. This definitely seems like a work routine. However, I feel like most games aren’t so easy to notice the labor we are doing, especially compared to Star Wars Galaxies. I feel bad for our professor after the story of his grungy truck stop dancing…
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It still baffles my mind to think that people are spending 20 hours a week playing video games, but I guess you could say the same about someone who enjoys leisure reading, painting, etc. What I find the most interesting is this idea of games creating a sense of responsibility on the player. if you start a painting one day no one is going to force you to continue it every day, you could set it down and finish it three years later, but when it comes to certain video games, specifically multiplayer games, people might feel inclined to play every day.
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