Labor or play?

I like this reading because the distinction between labor and play is put into question. It is hard to define the difference when you’re looking at it from the surface level. Work is when you have to sacrifice your time and effort in order to meet a goal that you know you will be rewarded for. The concept of play is focused on free will and being able to enjoy it but at a certain point in a game you begin to sacrifice large amounts of time. In deep play the stakes are a lot higher when you’re gambling or in a video game where you have to do tasks that you may not like going through but you have to experience to get to the next level. The point of these games are to have you work enough and reach the next achievement so that you feel accomplished and more successful than other players. The concept of work is to keep going even if you don’t like the task in front of you so you can advance and get what you need in life. Yes talks about how these games take up time out of the lives of people with jobs and allows them to believe that there not still working for something else. Sometimes the player is only working to get ahead of the game and they don’t actually enjoy the gameplay anymore. I like how yee highlights the way work hasn’t been correlated with play even though they are designed around similar concepts with the games in modern day. This is important because it allows you to question if you’ve been working when you thought you were playing a game but you were mainly only trying to achieve what comes next. Yes does a good job of using common game play experience to prove the similarities in work and play.