Laboring Online: Are There "New" Labor Processes In Virtual Game Worlds?

Abstract

As unemployment figures rise in the developed world, questions regarding the meaning of "labor" and the intrinsic"value" of work re-emerge. This paper examines labor practices in virtual game worlds to extend existing theoretical explorations regarding concepts of labor and work in the information systems field. The cases explored in this study observe the labor processes associated with two virtual game worlds. We explore whether labor processes are being replicated in virtual environments and, if so, whether "conventional" hegemonies identified by Marxist literature regarding labor are also found in these virtual worlds. This paper contributes to critical information systems research by exploring emancipatory claims regarding labor practices in ICT-enabled work. We present the findings from empirical studies of the Puzzle Pirates and Farmville virtual worlds where we examine the forms of labor undertaken online and their significance in the construction of hegemonic power relationships. The research utilizes a structured ethnographic-style methodology to explore daily working life found in these game environments. This paper contributes to critical information systems research by testing the robustness of existing theories of labor process in the problematic and expansive space of virtual worlds.

Full text

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Journal of the Association for Information Systems
Volume 14 Issue 11 Article 1
11-28-2013
Laboring Online: Are There “New” Labor Processes In Virtual Laboring Online: Are There “New” Labor Processes In Virtual
Game Worlds? Game Worlds?
Anita Greenhill
University of Manchester
, a.greenhill@manchester.ac.uk
Gordon Fletcher
University of Salford
, G.Fletcher@salford.ac.uk
Follow this and additional works at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais
Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Greenhill, Anita and Fletcher, Gordon (2013) "Laboring Online: Are There “New” Labor Processes In Virtual
Game Worlds?,"
Journal of the Association for Information Systems
, 14(11), .
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00346
Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol14/iss11/1
This material is brought to you by the AIS Journals at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for
inclusion in Journal of the Association for Information Systems by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic
Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact elibrary@aisnet.org.

Volume 14  Issue 11
Journal of the Association for Information Systems
Abstract
Research Article
Anita Greenhill
University of Manchester
A.Greenhill@manchester.ac.uk
Gordon Fletcher
University of Salford
g.fletcher@salford.ac.uk
As unemployment figures rise in the developed world, questions regarding the meaning of “labor” and the intrinsic ”value”
of work re-emerge. This paper examines labor practices in virtual game worlds to extend existing theoretical explorations
regarding concepts of labor and work in the information systems field. The cases explored in this study observe the labor
processes associated with two virtual game worlds. We explore whether labor processes are being replicated in virtual
environments and, if so, whether “conventional” hegemonies identified by Marxist literature regarding labor are also found
in these virtual worlds. This paper contributes to critical information systems research by exploring emancipatory claims
regarding labor practices in ICT-enabled work. We present the findings from empirical studies of the Puzzle Pirates and
Farmville virtual worlds where we examine the forms of labor undertaken online and their significance in the construction
of hegemonic power relationships. The research utilizes a structured ethnographic-style methodology to explore daily
working life found in these game environments. This paper contributes to critical information systems research by testing
the robustness of existing theories of labor process in the problematic and expansive space of virtual worlds.
Keywords: Labor, Virtual Worlds, Labor Process, Division of Labor.
Volume 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Laboring Online: Are There “New” Labor Processes
In Virtual Game Worlds?
* Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic was the accepting senior editor. This article was submitted on November 29, 2011 and
went through 4 revisions.

Labouring Online: Are There ‘New’ Labour Processes
Within Virtual Game Worlds?
Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
673
1. Introduction
In this paper, we discuss virtual game worlds as social environments that are fully enmeshed in the
wider experiences of late capitalist production and consumption (including the processes of labor),
and that are framed in a cultural environment that is driven and defined by the exploitation of and
obsession with the spectacle in all its forms (Debord, 1995). Grover, Lyytinen, Srinivasan, and Tan
(2008) outline the difficulties in introducing theory into the information systems (IS) domain.
Supported by the works of Gregor (2006), Alvesson and Deetz (2000), DiMaggio (1995), and others,
Grover et al (2008) encourage IS research to undertake the difficult challenge of expanding research
approaches in a rigorous manner. This research attempts to “cross the ocean” by building on the
exemplary research already carried out in the area of critical information systems (Howcroft & Trauth,
2006). We knowingly sidestep internal debates outlined by Thompson (2005) and Fournier and Grey
(2000) regarding the inevitable contention between poststructuralist and Marxist thought. This
irreconcilable ontological tension of materialist and idealist thinking brings varying theoretical
applicability to the studies of management. Instead, we commence by acknowledging the notable shift
that has occurred in critical approaches used in information systems after Orlikowski and Baroudi’s
(1991) premature announcement regarding the death of critical research in IS studies. While, for
many, the meaning of the term “critical” is not self-evident when studying information systems, critical
studies in the field have come to encapsulate a range of related theoretical approaches (Howcroft &
Trauth, 2006). In this paper, we critically analyse play in casual games as a form of labor that
reinforces and supports current capitalist modes of production. While other critical IS studies have
taken up and applied critical theory (Horkheimer, 1976), critical management studies (Alvesson &
Willmott, 1996), critical ethnography (Forester, 1992) and critical accounting (Mingers, 1992) the
unifying element among all of these studies is the notion of equity (Brooke, 2002; Cecez-Kecmanovic,
2001). While generally unified in their ultimate aim, critical theory studies themselves can be wide and
varied in focus (e.g., in their differing approaches to realism and relativism and in their diverse range
of epistemological and phenomenological positions). Brooke (2002) argues that critical theorizing in
IS has its foundations in the Frankfurt School of thought that is subsequently represented, for
example, in Marxist approaches, actor network theory, feminist theory, with theorists such as
Bourdieu, Dooyeweerd, Heidegger, and particularly with the works of Habermas (Ngwenyama, 1991).
Burrell and Morgan (1979) were notable critical theorizing pioneers in their explorations of critical
approaches to organizational studies and management. More recently, scholars now drawn on an
ever-expanding range of critical approaches to explore a full spectrum of concerns in information
systems research.
While this paper is related to earlier works that are positioned in the “critical” research milieu, it is
relatively unusual in that it 1) examines the environment of a networked game to examine the nature
and role of labor, and 2) subsequently uses this critical perspective base to interpret late capitalist
labor processes. Late-stage capitalism is dominated by the fluidities of financial capital and by the
increasing commodification and industrialization of ever more-inclusive aspects of human life. This
form of contemporary capitalism is characterized by a new mixture of high-technology advances, the
concentration of speculative financial capital, and an increasing differentiation between those who are
better or worse off. A key element of this form of capitalism is the ever more-complex appropriation of
social activities into the capitalist mode of production. This shift in the nature of capitalism constructs
social life into forms of labor. The labor aspects of everyday life are hidden and couched as
entertainment, leisure, and artistic endeavours. With so many casual games readily accessible online
this discussion is timely. Each of these games are integral parts of contemporary high late capitalism
that exploit the value of labor while recuperating gameplay as an extension of “hegemonic” capitalism.
The game worlds simultaneously act as a training mechanism that produces a capable cohort of
syntactic knowledge workers who serve the interests and as motives of this capitalism.
This paper is anthropological in its focus. but it deviates from the approach Avison and Myers
(1995) describe. In contrast, we examine the embedded strangeness of virtual worlds. Embedded
strangeness complements the consideration of anthropological strangeness by revealing “the
forgotten, the background, the frozen in place” (Star, 1999, p. 378). In effect, recognizing

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
674
embedded strangeness enables the critique of the structuring elements of everyday life. We see a
close affinity between this perspective and the observation that “the idea of syntactic labor is
embodied in ordinary discourse and experience, although it is not necessarily made fully explicit”
(Warner, 2002, p. 558). In contrast, and more commonly, seeking anthropological strangeness is a
method for treating the observed world as unusual and surprising to the observer in order to reveal
new anthropological insight found in directly visible cultural practices. The anthropological approach
tends to encourage analysis of online practices in a specific site that are then observed entirely in
this context without reference to other sites or everyday practices more generally. This is
particularly true of social networking sites in which research can ignore the existence of other social
networks (online or otherwise) beyond the specific site of analysis. A critique of this approach is its
reliance on the observer to be capable of identifying the strange, and holds the real potential that
they will inadvertently overlook wider systemic, structural, and embedded strangeness—the very
aspects of social, cultural, and information systems that assist in perpetuating hegemonic power
structures (Slezak, 1995).
We see syntactic labor practice (Warner, 2005, p. 559) as a key aspect of the embedded strangeness
found in both the Puzzle Pirates and Farmville virtual worlds. Syntactic labor is described as “the
primitive operations [such as] the writing, erasure, and substitution of symbols” and these operations
are, “possible on discrete messages and labor as the work expended in these operations” (Warner,
2005, p. 559). In effect, we see much of the gameplay and, by extension, the appeal of the virtual
worlds to be found in undertaking syntactic labor—the repetitive manipulation, transformation, and
combination of existing goods. In fact, in the games we examined, it is very often the specific actions
of syntactic labor that produce game-based rewards. These rewards are themselves often
represented as some form of virtual currency. The inability to craft customised items, a capability of
Second Life and other “gameless” virtual worlds, produces an absence of interpretive semantic labor
that largely prevents conflict over ownership or any questioning of existing hegemonic relationships.
By functioning at the level of syntactic labor, the key problem of reifying personal property and
creating notions of ownership and possessions is overcome in Puzzle Pirates and Farmville. “One
crucial difficulty [for virtual worlds] lies in the altered relation between selling and the exchange- and
use-value of the product ... in selling a copy of an information product, the use-value of the product is
retained while its exchange value is still realised” (Warner, 2005, p. 552). This is a key challenge to a
game world where exchange practices become the basis for determining ability and success in
accumulating goods, while scarcity and use-value is determined by the mechanics of the game itself.
The specific scarcity of goods and the ability to acquire them is the artificial manufacture of the game.
Kennedy (2008, p. 97) suggests that, “people tend to prefer playing in a game where there is scarcity:
it has 'turned out to be a feature, not a bug'”. The notion and creation of scarcity in a virtual world is
intimately tied, at least in the worlds we have examined, with the need to counteract this scarcity with
the application of labor processes in specific game-defined ways. For us, in-game scarcity highlights
the major distinction between gameplay and more-commonly recognised capitalist processes; the
construction of a simulation that itself is only possible because it exploits the difference between
human labor and the deferred form of labor performed by information technologies.
Labor delegated to information technologies … is relatively and increasingly less costly
than direct human labor. For instance, for the costs of automatically creating an index to
a record would be minimal, once the information technologies for this (in both hardware
and software aspects) are formalised and robust (Warner, 2002, p. 562).
By considering virtual game worlds rather than more clearly defined business information systems,
we also take up Greenbaum's (1996, p. 230) position that “the lens of labour process analysis gives
us pointers to what we miss when we focus too closely on work, instead of labour”. Our claim is that,
as capitalist markets fully occupy the digital domain, it becomes necessary for the functioning of
capitalist production to source labor and therefore to drill and rehearse the necessary skills required
to participate and contribute to transformative value in such markets. Becoming an efficient and
effective practitioner in the virtual game world provides the space to “practice” acts of labor.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
675
In presenting this claim, we take our research focus from the observable surface-level comparisons of
specific social networking sites towards established critical research agendas and theories in
information systems and its reference disciplines to highlight two pivotal concerns of critical theorists:
that of worker emancipation and the loci of hegemonic power.
2. Situationist Thought
Situationist thought emerged during a period of global post-war social unrest and a period in which
traditional economic certainties were being questioned. The intellectual heritage of the period and of
situationism itself is firmly located in a Marxist heritage, and advocates that, in order to achieve a
superior quality of life, alternatives must be presented that contrast with those of the dominant
capitalist order. Situationist thought encourages the use of non-conventional methods and even
playfulness through the construction of situations and psycho-geographies that favor the political
outcomes advocated by this form of thinking. The earliest expressions of situationism are notably for
their use of dissemination methods drawn directly from the creative arts. This experimental approach
affirmed the situationist resistance to definition as a theoretical position or as a theory. An indication of
the power and complexity of this thinking are the varying positions taken up by writers considered to
be situationist who still largely resist representation as a body of work. Authors claimed as proponents
of situationist thinking include those concerned with artistic representation and expression that reveal
the influences of the Surrealist and Dadaist movements (Internationale Situationiste, 1958). Others
took up a line of thinking that emphasized the undervalued consideration of everyday life (de Certeau,
1988), while Plant (1997, p. 12) takes up a more philosophical view by describing situationalism as
the “materialisation of ideology” and positioning it as a tension of power.
In this body of competing debates, Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1995) is the most cited
theoretical work of situationist thought. Debord (1995) argues that the “spectacle”, those features of
the everyday such as advertising and the mainstream media (and now the Internet and social
networks) have a central role in perpetuating an advanced capitalist society. The plethora of
competing spectacles propagates and presents a form of reality that masks the capitalist agenda that
reduces human life to a subservient and functional position in a wider system of order. Significantly,
this observation is a contemporary articulation and self-reflexive application of the Marxist concepts of
alienation, commodification, and reification. Marx (1906) observed that, in the capitalist mode of
production, we evaluate materials not by what purpose they serve or what they are actually useful for,
but instead we recognise them based on their value in a market. The value of a commodity is abstract,
has become detached from concepts of utility, purpose, or even critical aesthetic judgement, and is
actively disentangled from its actual characteristics. An essential process of contemporary capitalism
is to entirely commodify the material world.
We live in a spectacular society. Our lives are surrounded by an immense accumulation
of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived through proxies of that
experience. Once an experience is removed from direct experience within the 'real'
world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the
detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience (Law, 1979, pp. 2-3).
For capitalism to persist as the dominant economic and social order, the spectacle offers a mechanism
of control. The process of recuperation intercepts, modifies, and renders politically impotent any radical
social and political ideas or images. Recuperation removes radical thought by commodifying and then
incorporating these same ideas and images into the mechanisms of mainstream and capitalist society. A
contemporary example of this recuperation process can be identified in the X Factor and other reality
television programmes based on singing competitions. This systematised processing of musical talent
that is ultimately commodified with a precise schedule for release at key annual peaks in retail
purchasing is a distant remnant of the radical uses of music to construct and articulate sub-cultural and
youth protests. Recuperation is a significant and powerful tool for the maintenance of hegemonic power
that can obscure the importance of everyday practice and constant attempts to construct inequity.
Situationist thought is intended as a view of, and from, everyday life. Because this paper takes
situationist thinking into the research field of IS, it is important to place it in relation to other works.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
676
Information systems research frames a diverse body of work from a range of theoretical sources.
Core to this body of work are the works of Hirschheim and Newman (1991), Avison and Myers (1995),
Kaarst-Brown and Robey (1999), and Berne (2003). However, a pivotal distinction found in
information systems research is the presence of a theoretical self-awareness. This was originally
revealed in Avison and Myers (1995), who list researchers in IS utilising ethnography to carry out
fieldwork including Hughes, Randall, and Shapiro (1992), Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991), Suchmann
(1987), Wynn (1991), and Zuboff (1988), and who argue that culture had largely been overlooked in
IS research. Their conclusion was that more-critical approaches were needed to examine culture in
an IS context. This challenge has been widely accepted, problematized, nuanced, and taken up by
many researchers in the IS domain.
The argument presented here considers games and virtual game worlds as a form of information
systems and as an unrecognised domain of labor that is “hidden in the light” through the spectacle of
immersive virtual environments, cartoon-like graphics, and simplistic game mechanisms. Star argues:
Information systems encode and embed work in several ways. They may directly
attempt to represent that work. They may sit in the middle of a work process like a rock
in a stream, and require workarounds in order that interaction proceeds around them.
They also may leave gaps in work process that require real-time adjustments, or
articulation work, to complete process (Star, 1999, p. 385).
Star leaves no doubt that information systems are in multiple ways related to the everyday world of
work and labor. Our work takes up this position specifically with a critical examination of the labor
processes found in virtual game worlds. We adhere to Star's (1999, p. 378) methodological call to
consider the “embedded strangeness” of social networking in order to identify defining practices in the
integral structures of virtual worlds as information systems; however, while inspired by her writing
about the mundane, we use a structured ethnographic approach to disentangle anthropological
notions regarding the strangeness of everyday life found in games. Understanding these game worlds
as being part of the society of the spectacle and spectacles in their own right allows us to elucidate
the ways in which these games can enculturate players into the world of work as workers engaged in
the de-skilled and compliant actions of “syntactic labor” that is Warner (2002, 2005, 2007) identifies
and describes.
Warner (2007, p. 1786) emphasises that:
Following the late 20th century mechanization of mental labor, syntactic labor can be
transferred to information technology, operating deterministically between intervals of
human intervention, opening up and revealing a distinction between semantic and
syntactic mental labor.
He also asserts that:
Semantic labor is concerned with transformations motivated by the meaning or signified
of symbols, while syntactic labor is determined by the form alone of symbols, operating
on them in their aspect as signals. Semantic labor requires direct human involvement
while originally human syntactic labor can be transferred to information technology,
where it becomes a machine process. Direct human labor has high costs while mental
labor transferred to technology is likely to have relatively diminished costs, under
modern conditions (Warner 2007, p. 1785).
Warner (2002) also identifies the relationship between semantic and syntactic labor, and their
relationship to technology.
Syntactic labor is intimately bound up with physical labor (...) and performed directly by
humans, assisted by the established technologies of writing. Direct human labor has

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
677
high costs, even under 19th century capitalism, where wages might be limited to the
reproduction cost of that labor (Marx, 1976) in the diffusion of copying devices in the late
19th century, we can see the beginnings of a dynamic where machine labor, which was
lower direct costs, is substituted for direct human syntactic labor (Warner, 2002, p. 558).
We identify the presence of both syntactic and semantic labor practices in games, and argue that it is
through a familiarization with activities undertaken in gameplay that game players learn to undertake
forms of labor that reassert hegemonic power. The significance of Warner’s differentiation of syntactic
and semantic labor, for this paper, is the manner in which it helps to reveal the processes of
recuperation that can be identified in game worlds and other forms of everyday digital technology usage.
3. Games, Social Networks, and Virtual Worlds
The proliferation of research into social networking offers an extensive series of frameworks with
which to examine virtual worlds. The majority of this work (e.g., Adler & Kwon, 2002; Chen, 2005;
Ellison, Steinfeld, & Lampe, 2007) develops a broad sociological perspective that emphasizes
engagement and interactions, and the social construction of trust and identity. Many of these works
are cast in a generally critical interpretation but employ a transactional approach, with an underlying
implication regarding the assumed positive aspects of these interactions. The observations presented
in these earlier works do not necessarily disentangle the broader meanings and inter-relations of the
practices of “social networking” from the design, representation, and capabilities of a specific site and
its directly observable “anthropological strangeness” (Star, 1999, p. 379).
Virtual game worlds arguably present a “special case” in the framework of information system
research, but the blurring of times for labor and times for leisure and play that commenced with the
popularizing and theorization of teleworking (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007; Golden & Veiga, 2005),
coupled with the significant participation rates in virtual game worlds (Ahmad, Keegan, Srivastava,
Williams, & Contractor, 2009; Heeks, 2010), increasingly makes precise distinctions problematic.
Kennedy (2008, p. 102) claims that “It could be argued that what occurs in the game world is play, not
work but it is difficult to distinguish clearly between these” by suggesting that labor, irrespective of its
provenance or ostensible purpose, remains labor and all of the associations that this brings with
concepts of power and emancipation or their absence. Robey and Jin (2004, p. 151) claim that “work
is increasingly mediated by technologies that potentially liberate workers from specific places and
times”, but this observation can equally be applied to the concept of play with equivalent meaning and
consequences. The example of gold farming is instructive. The practice of gold farming involves
skilled game players of virtual games worlds acquiring items of value including items, gems, and gold
that can then be sold with the proceeds exchanged into conventional currencies. Dibbell's (2007)
observation of Chinese gold farmers specifically reveals how blurred this relationship has become for
the workers who have paid employment to acquire items in World of Warcraft, who then “to a man,
[...] log into their personal World of Warcraft accounts and spend these precious free hours right back
where they had spent every other [working] hour of the day: in Azeroth”. Heeks' (2010) observation of
gold farmers, their labor, and the income potential for working inside games shows that these
practices can actually become play. The gold farmers maintain a work relationship as they are paid an
hourly wage for their skills and exertions that their employer then benefits from by selling items and
ultimately profiting from their labor. Bartle (2004, p. 6-7) also outlines notions of virtual property in
game worlds that problematises the notion of the ownership of virtual property. Bartle (2004) sees the
claims that “I own the product of my labor”—the subsequent virtual item—or “I'm selling my time” to
craft the virtual items produced in the game as both potentially spurious claims by citing specific
comparisons in actuality. The danger of uncritically dismissing these claims through the viewport of
anthropological strangeness ensures that the embedded strangeness of game worlds will never be
questioned and the impact they have in influencing and shaping players' worldview and skills
development will always continue to be overlooked as “mere” play. Heeks (2010) is not so dismissive
of the potential claims of players in virtual game worlds and cites Chinese examples where players
have successfully won claims over the property created through their labor.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
678
Neither Bartle (2004) or Ahmad et al. (2009) question the structural and social order created in the
games by confining their analysis to the level of anthropological strangeness; in other words, they
examine the game in the game as a game. Heeks (2010, p. 68), however, recognizes the exploitative
aspects of gold mining and even suggests that it is “an ingenious, though controversial, way for
poorer nations to earn money from information and communications technologies and a way for
impoverished workers to build digital skills that might be later transferred to other information
technology jobs unrelated to game playing”. Our own focus on virtual game worlds reveals their
significant purpose and implicit agenda in perpetuating hegemonic power with the consideration that
“the privatized family unit within capitalist society is underpinned by the need to ensure workers meet
the physical and mental requirements of paid labor, and to bring up the next generation of workers”
(German, 2003, p. 10). We argue that participation in game worlds that use syntactic labor as a
structuring principal become training grounds for enculturating contemporary forms of labor (including
telework). Structuring labor within gameworlds in this manner requires only a restricted skillset and
potentially foreshadows future work environments. The acceptance and training of players in specific
forms of laboring and the shaping of their conceptualizations of work practices have consequential
political ramifications by accepting already experienced labor arrangements as a ”norm”. Post-
industrial economies require access to pools of suitably trained low-level (but nonetheless
knowledge) workers in a manner similar to the requirements of industrialized and industrializing
economies needing manual laborers.
The impact of participating in game worlds has still wider political significance:
For Marxists, the exploitation of some people by others, the existence of an oppressive
state and subordination, are products of human history and therefore capable of being
changed. In analysing worker’s oppression and a disadvantaged position at work the
Marxist focus is on the use made by capitalists of low paid workers (Wilson & Greenhill,
2004).
For Warner (2002), “living labor is required to reawaken the dead labor embodied in machinery and
thereby to confer use- and exchange-value on inert stuff”. This is a practice that is observable in
virtual game worlds generally made without any critical analysis of where, or by whom, the benefits of
generated surpluses are then enjoyed. The anthropological differences found between these worlds
cannot be overlooked, and we see this distinction in the types of labor that Warner (2002) labels as
semantic and syntactic. However, in order to examine the subtleties of game-based labor in virtual
worlds, we return back to the definitions of “labor process” and “work” developed from the work of
Braverman (1974) and its subsequent critiques that are regularly cited in information systems
research (Adler, 2007; Spencer, 2000; Tinker 2002).
4. Labor Process and Work
O’Doherty and Willmott (2009, p. 931) define the labor process as “a well established approach to the
sociological study of work which attends to the instabilities of capitalism and, more specifically, to the
volatile and contested nature of social relations at work”. We add to their call to extend existing studies
relating to labor process analysis beyond the dualistic and (critical) realist assumptions that inhibit
development of the theory in sociology and management. We also extend and develop a cross-
disciplinary strand of labor process analysis here by exploring the labor processes of virtual
environments. A comprehensive review of labor process theory is provided by O’Doherty and Willmott
(2009). Central to this study is the notion of the “immediacy of labor power” that emerges from a Marxist
tradition and relates to the transformation potential and the distinction of labor capital (i.e., the hiring of
labor at an hourly rate) from realized labor potential (i.e., the goods and services produced). It is this
transformational potential that remains the basis for contested labor relations creating disputes between
the payment received for labor and the quality of workplace conditions, which echoes Batstone’s (1984)
description of the “working order”. The cases explored in this study observe the labor processes
associated with two virtual game worlds. We ask whether existing labor processes experienced
elsewhere and whether the focus of previous Marxist analysis are being replicated in virtual
environments and, if so, whether “conventional” hegemonies are also found in virtual worlds.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
679
ICT-enabled work in contemporary discourse is currently presented in terms of “flexibility”. However,
the flexibility offered by ICT for new working patterns could also be seen as a way of
allowing government and employers to sidestep any responsibility entirely to the
individual by allowing her to adjust her life around paid work (Perrons, 2003, p. 73).
The rhetoric of work flexibility, however, is particularly hollow for two reasons: 1) absence from the
employing organization brings a cost of “invisibility” from any reward system operated by
management and, at the same time, 2) isolation rallies against traditional ways of collectively
organizing workplace and labor-based resistance to the excesses of capitalist hegemony. Gajendran
and Harrison (2007) and Mirchandani (1999) link the isolation of teleworking with workers’
disempowerment. Although some commentaries suggest that this powerlessness is by no means a
certainty, none of the current literature completely denies the potential for this situation (Gajendran &
Harrison, 2007; Golden & Veiga, 2005).
The definition of work as activity undertaken by an employee for an employer in exchange for some
form of payment constrains the concept to the perfunctory execution of tasks for the organization that
pays them. Other activities, such as socializing, completing a task to a high standard, and the
engendering of a sense of worth are relegated in conceptual and managerial significance to the
primary purpose of enlivening dead labor and producing profit.
Shin, El Sawy, Sheng, & Higa (2000, p. 85) say that “work performed at home or a satellite office to
reduce commuting is attracting much attention as an alternative way to organise work”. Uncritical
acceptance of the benefits of ICT-enabled work and teleworking further perpetuates the normalcy of
existing labor hegemony and produces a subtle form of powerlessness by removing the visibility of
labor from the socialized public arena where collective resistance can be organized and vocalized. A
sufficient body of work (cf. Golden and Veiga, 2005) criticizes the perceived benefits to workers of
telework against the actuality of increased hours of paid and unpaid labor activity in multiple locations.
Telework coupled with an “always-on” accessibility to ICTs blurs any possibility for the neat isolation of
labor from other aspects of everyday life. What activities and actions can be considered as labor (or
the assumed association of labor and laboring with “work”) becomes problematic with the blurring of
the differentiation of public and private spaces. The problematic nature of the relationship of work and
labor is reflected in “standard” business studies texts such as Lines, Marcouse, & Martin’s (2006)
Complete A-Z Business Studies Handbook, which does not offer a definition for either word and yet
offers twelve definitions that employ either labor or work as adjectives, which implies that these
pivotal concepts are assumed immutable givens, reinforcing their hegemonic centrality.
5. Research Design and Methodology
The empirical data gathered for this research is drawn from two popular social network games:
YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates and Farmville. These two worlds were initially chosen for their ease of
access: Farmville is freely available through the Facebook website, and Puzzle Pirates can be freely
downloaded via the Web and also more recently through the Facebook ecosystem. Additional factors
that influenced the choice of these games included both game worlds' being internationally popular
with large populations of “casual” players, a feature that is distinct from many commonly studied
virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft, but with more clearly defined game features than
environments such as Second Life. A key aspect of both the game worlds studied, in the context of
this discussion, is the need for players to undertake semi-regularized and specific labor on a day-to-
day basis in order to participate and to progress in the game. While situationist thinking argues for the
use of playfulness in approaching the object of critical analysis, this paper does not take up this
challenge and confines the discussion of play to the existing mechanics of the games examined by
incorporating the integral social aspects, participation, and voluntary labor found in game. A “playful”
approach to research would have involved in-game activities that created art where labor was
expected.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
680
For YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates (Y!PP), we used participant observation of in-game conduct and other
qualitative data-gathering techniques including gathering blog postings and other third party
documents describing players experience and understanding of the games. Several third party trade
analysis websites also proved useful to interrogate existing in-game activities from a distanciated and
disentangled viewport. One of the most useful of these tools from both an analytical and game-play
point-of-view is Pirate Commodity Trader with Bleach (pctb.crabdance.com), which provides live
updates on commodity trading prices at different locations across the game world. The researchers
were participants in Puzzle Pirates for 3 years and for approximately 2 years after the game world
introduced free “Doubloon Oceans” as an alternative to its subscription-only game.
For Farmville, we used visual methods and player interviews to complement and confirm the
observations made in the Puzzle Pirates environment. Our involvement with Farmville has been
continuous from approximately three months after its release onto Facebook in June 2009. However,
within 12 months of observation, the number of claimed active Farmville participants far exceeded
that of Puzzle Pirates (the number was approximately 10% of all Facebook users or 62,800,000
monthly active users) (AppData, 2010). The scale and importance of Farmville as a game, a business,
and a cultural practice was further reinforced in June 2010 when the Mozilla Foundation was forced to
release a new version of their Firefox browser in direct response to Farmville players who complained
that the previous versions of this browser prevented them from accessing and playing the game
(Keizer, 2010). This incident reveals the power and prevalence of games and their pivotal importance
in contemporary information systems. Analysis of the data acquired from both game worlds also
employed qualitative approaches, including identifying and tagging those events and instances of
activities associated with online labor, the transformative nature of labor, examples of reward and
punishment associated with social activity, and how and when intention and transgressions occurred
with community participants who were associated with the labor process supply chain. The body of
evidence was subsequently scrutinized and examples extracted to exemplify the labor processes and
power relations being activated in these virtual game worlds. The active research log documentation
is over 125,000 lines in length.
YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates can be defined as both a game and social networking interface. The virtual world
is based on a simulation of a romanticized view of being a pirate and historical pirate “communities”. In this
paper, we focus more specifically on the disentangling of the game and “laboring online” elements;
however, there is a mutual dependence between gameplay and social networking that is a microcosm of
systematized interaction carried out in a virtual world. As an example of late capitalist production and
consumption ,the interrelationship of social networking and gameplay is brought together through Y!PP’s
economic system, which is integral to the success and ongoing daily interactions of millions of the game's
participants. A constant goal of Y!PP is to acquire Pieces of Eight (PoE) in order to purchase goods of
higher value and increasing rarity including types of clothing and fixtures for land-based property or ships.
The requirement to gather PoE necessitates a range of collaborations including laboring, casual
socializing, and the development of more formal and regular in-game alliances. However, and importantly
for progress in the game, individual players can easily change affiliation and roles in order to improve their
income opportunities – most significantly by buying a ship and forming a crew. Y!PP does not require
continuous or steady allegiance to a specific sub-group. As such, identity and affiliation can be extremely
transient. From an economic point of view, this fluidity reflects the structures of a market-based economy
which, in effect, is the model for Y!PP’s gameplay and its central structuring device. It is also a key reason
why we explore the game as an example of late capitalist production and consumption. The wider-ranging
social network of Y!PP is also reflected by third-party tools, add-ins, and systems built around Y!PP for the
benefit of more-regular players. Examples such as Radio Free Cobalt, an online radio station, ArrBay, an
auction site for items, and Pirates Community Trader with Bleach, a type of commodity price ticker all
indicates the presence of a complex and rich economic environment that is ultimately built around the
profits that are derived from labor: either one’s own or, more significantly in terms of this paper and in scale,
from that of multiple others.
Farmville, in contrast to Y!PP, is attractive to casual players because of its relatively simple gameplay.
The game’s casual nature has been a source of criticism from more-serious gamers (Riggall, 2010).
They express dismay at the “grind” required to progress in the game—criticism that is similar to our

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
681
own. Riggal’s summary of casual gameworlds also echoes this critique: “With no narrative, no action
and no engagement beyond a drive for ever higher numbers these games really reduce players to
dumb automatons” (Riggall, 2010). Being hosted on Facebook brings the social networking element
to the game, rather than it being an in-built aspect of the game’s design. Farmville is a simplistic
simulation of an individual farm in which plants must be nurtured and eventually harvested for sale
and ultimately a profit. Animals are kept in order to reap what they produce (e.g., elephants produce
circus peanuts and pigs produce truffles, all of which can be sold). Facebook friends are encouraged
to assist in the maintenance and development of the farm—which is at least a partial explanation for
the viral increase in the game’s popularity because a player cannot easily expand their farm without
neighbours (in effect, an individual’s Facebook friends who have also signed up to the game).
However, the basic premise of the game is that players will expend a small amount of their virtual
farm coins to buy seeds, trees, or animals. Through labor that simulates the processes of physical
labor involving ploughing, planting, tilling, monitoring (waiting), and harvesting the crops, players can
then earn more farm coins, provided that they have harvested the plants before they wither. Because
the game runs in realtime, the player must regularly return to the game to tend their farm in order to
profit from their labor. Because of this requirement, it was not uncommon among the regular game
players we observed for them to interrupt other day-to-day activities in order to complete tasks
required on their farm.
The features common to both of these games are also significant. The most important is the ability for
players to buy—with legal currency—game credits to assist them to progress in the game more
rapidly than if they were to rely on the efforts of their labor alone. In Farmville, this arrangement
includes the “unwither” feature: three unwithers can be bought for 30 Farm Cash that would cost
approximately USD$5. The unwither feature enables plants to be harvested after they would
conventionally have been wasted, although having friends and fellow farmers who are prepared to
visit your farm can also unwither plants for free. Buying doubloons in Y!PP enables the purchase of
items not normally available including weaponry, clothes, and transport, all of which make it easier to
progress in the game. In both cases, the players prepared to buy goods are replacing the exertion of
their own online labor with their capital obtained by laboring offline, effectively using the existing
external economy to support the continuity of the virtual game world but with specific consequences
to the power relationships in the game.
6. Results and Analysis
6.1. Puzzle Pirates
According to various reviews of Y!PP, there are an estimated 2 million registered users and 30,000
paying subscribers (Schubert, 2007). Navarro (2005) describes Y!PP as a:
Massively multiplayer online puzzle game. Those are the only possible terms you can
use to properly describe Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, one of the weirdest and most original
puzzle games we've come across in quite a while… Imagine a persistent online world
where people's little avatars - essentially Lego people in pirate regalia - sail the open
seas, sword fight with one another, swab the decks, and even get in a few friendly parlor
games, all through the magic of simple puzzles derived from some of the best concepts
out there, like Tetris and Bejeweled. Now throw in a cutesy art style and a community
chock-full of crazy people who want to talk like pirates, and you've got a pretty
entertaining experience all around.
Krause (2004) identifies the economy of the game as a key aspect of Y!PP’s appeal:
One of the more interesting features of Puzzle Pirates is its fully player-driven economy.
Player labor is responsible for all items in the game, from ships to swords. Governors of
islands issue deeds to players to have shops built, which are then constructed, again,
by player labor. ... The distilling puzzle is quite fun, but in order to play the puzzle, you
must find a distillery that is hiring. The player owners of the shops decide whether they

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
682
want to hire or not and set wages. Players who take jobs in shops will affect the speed
with which goods are produced. Some things, like wood and iron, are foraged off
deserted islands and sold to the player shops (or they can be bought from markets).
The player shops then turn those things into something usable and sell them to players
or other shops.
The Puzzle Pirates game is generous with a low cost to entry through the free oceans
that provide the initial basics needed to participate. New players have a single ability
that enables them to progress in status and wealth through the game; their capacity to
labour. In addition, each new player receives a shack on a random island that is
complete with tattered curtains but unpainted and without furniture. A player must buy
paint and a paintbrush (which also wears out over time) for their shack from an
apothecary shoppe [sic]. After this they are able to buy furniture from one of the furniture
shoppes [sic].
Y!PP is orientated around earning Pieces of Eight (PoE) by either taking a job (or “jobbing”) with one of
the various navies (one of the safest routes to securing an income because a small financial reward for
your efforts is guaranteed) or by joining a pirate band to raid and pillage. Pirates are not guaranteed any
reward for working on a ship but, when a ship is successful, the amount each pirate receives is usually
higher than navy payments. As a sailor or pirate on a ship, labor is achieved by playing a variety of
puzzle games. Depending on the size of the ship, there are a variety of stations where the pirate can
perform a different task such as bilging, carpentry, or navigation. Some tasks require that the pirate (or
sailor) is more skilled (meaning that they have more in-game experience), and the game will prevent an
unskilled pirate from undertaking skilled tasks. There are rules to govern work conduct that are enforced
by specifically appointed roles in the ship's crew including the Man at Arms (MAA). For example,
[22:25:23] Staycr shouts, "Rules: NO 1vs 1 (unless u are GM+)... DO NOT TH unless I
say so... DO NOT leave the fray to TH"
This instructions tells players not to undertake a one-on-one fight against a non-player bot (game
robot) unless they have a ranking of grandmaster or higher. The second instruction is not to
undertake the Treasure Haul game while there is a team fight being undertaken because this takes
players away from the fight. The Man at Arms' instructions protect the investment of the crew.
[22:25:34] Staycr shouts, "#1 Priority is ship. No ship, no poe so lets keep stations full
at all times mates"
[22:25:40] Staycr shouts, "everybody (except gunners) please volunteer to defend"
[22:25:47] Staycr shouts, "you have 3 choices on our ships: #1 Station #2 Defend #3
Swim"
Ships' captain can also determine how attractive the pay is for individual pirates with a range of pay
options for joining a ship available.
[01:16:26] Anniangel says, "what is jobbers delight?"
[01:16:27] Superhit laughs nice
[01:16:32] Anniangel says, "is it better than even?"
[01:16:34] Superhit says, "jobbers get higher pay"
[01:16:36] Antisniper says, "jobber's delight means that jobbers get more"
[01:16:39] Anniangel says, "actually even is good for crappy jobbers LOL"

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
683
[01:16:45] Jayyajjay says, "jobbers get fatter share"
[01:16:46] Antisniper says, "jobbers get 5 shares, crew gets 4"
[01:16:54] Anniangel says, "i'll change it then"
[01:16:54] Antisniper says, "means jobbers make more money really"
[01:17:02] Jayyajjay says, "i prefer even pay any day"
[01:17:12] Antisniper says, "even pay is good if you're on the actual crew"
[01:17:20] Anniangel says, "it will stay same i think even if i change now"
[01:17:24] Antisniper says, "but when you're jobbing, jobbers delight is what people look
for"
[01:17:44] Avast! The crew upon whose boat ye sail has just changed its rules for
dividing booty. If the voyage has already begun then these new rules will not take effect
until after the booty division.
[01:17:44] Anni's Crystal Charm's articles have been changed.
The speed and accuracy with which the games are completed has an impact on the performance of a
vessel. Failure to bilge rapidly will fill the ship with water and slow the vessel’s travel speed. Similarly,
if a vessel has sustained damage, those players undertaking carpentry must work quickly otherwise
the bilging task becomes almost impossible. If a vessel has a poor navigator, this will result in the ship
drifting and missing islands or other ships to pillage. Reviewers have tended to focus on the actual
action in the gameplay playing of the puzzle games that constitute the basis of the labor tasks in-
game. Gameplay action relating to playing the puzzles is, in effect, online laboring: a mundane but
necessary aspect of the game (Figure 1).
[23:24:10] "i think its time to take a real good look and see who is not working and start
planking here cause you guys seem to have alot of people that are doing nothing"
The most common mundane labor activity is sword-fighting. Despite the swashbuckling and romantic
label, the game itself is a graphically updated two-player or team version of Tetris (Figure 2). Good
sword-fighting skills are important in the game, and, like all the tasks, players are rated on their
abilities. Players’ rating also determine if pirate crews will consider a pirate's application to job. Better
performing vessels will tend to have a captain who will be selective and have more tightly knit crews
than those composed of primarily new or casual players.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
684
This game is a form of Tetris that requires accurate placing of misshapen pieces into a semi-random
space.
Figure 1. Labouring at Carpentry.
Swordfighting is a variant of multi-player Tetris in which shapes “cleared” by the opposite are
depositing in the screen of the defending team. The shape of the blocks that land in the opponent’s
game are determined by the type of the pirate's sword.
Figure 2. Swordfighting.
These examples of game-based labor confirm assertions made by Heeks' (2010) in relation to gold
farmers, their work practices, and the income potential of undertaking labor inside games to show that
these practices can actually be described as play. The examples illustrate the impact of questioning
the structural and social order created in game worlds, which reveals the social construction of
notions of work, the relationship between computing skills developed in the online environment, and
the need to extend discussion of the game beyond examination of the game in the game as a game.
Y!PP’s gameplay represents a form of recuperated spectacle. While Y!PP is a light and tongue-in-
cheek simulation of an imagined pirate experience for the game player, it also embeds a
systematized series of expectations and requirements that approximates the labor requirements for
low- and medium-level IT and general workplace skills. These skills include, for example, the finding
of appropriate resources, basic levels of customization and configuration, and general levels of group
work and interaction. The ostensibly social nature of the game does not efface the fact that the game

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
685
is a distributed system with the tasks it requires to be completed being conducted individually at
separated locations constructing a form of alienated labor. This distribution of labor at physically
separated locations supports the maintenance of hegemonic power embedded in the game and is
continuously maintained by its developers through their control over the economic system. In playing
the game, the player's attention is diverted from the labor skills and ability required to achieve game-
based success. As game participants are made familiar with these specific game-based practices,
they are drawn (back) into the realm of systematized and conventional hegemonic power relations as
obliging and willing labor for capitalist knowledge-based production.
6.2 Farmville
The economic processes to which labor activities contribute in Farmville are simpler than Puzzle
Pirates, which also makes the gameplay easier to understand for a new player and arguably explains
the high levels of participation this game has seen.
Reviews of Farmville reduce it to its simplest components:
FarmVille is first and foremost a game about crops. You’ll plow plots of land, seed them,
and harvest what grows. Ignoring all of the barn raisings and fertilizer, all of the
elephants and maple trees, this simple three-step mechanic is at [the] heart of FarmVille.
And unlike many games on Facebook, the only skill this one requires is patience. ...
Growing and harvesting crops will earn you money and experience, which you’ll use to
buy more seeds and to level up. You’ll also use the money earned to buy buildings and
decorations for your farm. Once you get used to the main mechanic, you’ll find that
purchases like these become central to the gameplay experience (Squires, 2010).
There is no need to map the virtual game world of Farmville, unlike the efforts that have been made in
YIPP, through third-party tools because the focus of activity is the farmer/player's own constrained
farm. The only opportunity to “travel” in Farmville is the occasional visits to similar farms of friends to
“help”. This mutual support is sometimes rewarded with an egg or fuel. In effect, each action in
Farmville either requires a payment of in-game currency or returns a payment. Playing the game
conventionally means trying to ensure that the inward receipts are greater than the outgoing
payments.
Each plant has a fixed cost to buy, a specified time from planting to harvest, and a fixed return for
harvesting. Experience is also gained by planting and harvesting each plant.
Figure 3. The Farmville Market

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
686
Outgoing payments of farm coins are made to the market for buying goods (Figure 3). The main items
purchased that contribute to progression in the game are the seeds, trees, and animals. However,
items such as vehicles can be used to help reduce labor time because the plough, seeder, and
harvester all can complete these tasks more rapidly. As with everything in Farmville, there is a cost.
Other items such as flags (which can only be acquired with purchased farm cash with the exception
of the Zynga and Farmville flags) and buildings are aesthetic and serve no direct economic purpose.
While it cannot be quantified, the extent of the decoration in a farm can be observed as an inverse
indicator to the degree of seriousness with which the game is being played. Committed players will
focus all of their resources on the items that produce a direct financial benefit (Figure 4). These
players are fully committed to the economy offered by the game world and support its continuity by
only engaging in productive labor that brings benefits to the holders of hegemonic power—the
designers of the game world. In contrast, more casual players make use of the available items to craft
larger landscape features such as a “Take That” symbol (Figure 5), potentially a tacit form of
resistance to the implicit laboring agenda of the game. These activities do not bring direct benefits to
the individual players in terms of the game economy, and their products create a type of “play despite
the game”. However, these activities still support the hegemony of the game, albeit less efficiently, but
significantly are still contributing to the tacit development of syntactic labor skills including decision
making, scheduling, and timing of activities and the selection of groups with which to distribute their
labor activities.
A utilitarian level 85 farm with only the house and barn not serving a direct economic purpose.
Figure 4. Utilitarian level farm
This free form farm design appear to indicate a more casual and playful response to the game play.
Figure 5. A “Take That” Symbol Within Part of a Farm

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
687
Farmville’s internal gameplay mechanics and its association with Facebook introduces a range of
social networking features that can be used to progress in the game. Many items required to progress
are gained from engaging friends in a form of gift exchange. It is theoretically possible to progress in
the game without interacting with friends, but it would be difficult and take a very long time. Players
who do not interact with friends can progress by purchasing Farm Cash to buy the items needed to
progress, and this becomes more and more necessary when as the player levels up. Players who
make exchanges with friends will also ultimately find themselves assessing new strategies for
increasing their exchange options as higher levels become harder to reach. Two options exist to
achieve this: the purchase of Farm Cash, or finding more Farmville friends. These friends are added
on Facebook only to increase the number of players who can be exchanged with. One of the players
we observed had maintained a small set of 26 Facebook friends, but had added another nine friends
to assist with Farmville. As a U.K.-based player, she described these additional friends collectively as
her “American friends” because they were all U.S. based and the only U.S. friends on her Facebook
account. Both the U.K. player and U.S. players only interact through Facebook games in order to add
each other as necessary additional friends in order to progress through the levels of the games. The
direct commitment of payment was substituted with the labor of identifying people—strangers—who
were also seeking additional friends to support their Farmville activities. This included activities and
time spent on third-party community websites that are specifically made available to facilitate the
building of wider networks.
7. Conclusion and Discussion
7.1 Theoretical Contribution - Hegemony in Virtual Game Worlds?
Information systems has a long history of exploring the relationship between computing practices and
the work environment. While Robey and Jin (2004, p. 151) have claimed that “work is increasingly
mediated by technologies that potentially liberate workers from specific places and times”, we argue
that more-closely examining labor processes and bridging the theoretical foundations of sociology
(that concern themselves with class relations and the daily work practices of late capitalism) and IS is
necessary regardless of the technologies being used. Furthermore, we show how examples of labor
processes in virtual game worlds viewed from an IS perspective provide valuable insight into labor in
action. This situation is reconfirmed by the U.K.'s National Occupational Standards for IT Users (e-
Skills UK, 2009) that reveals a number of comparisons being the expectations for IT Users and the
activities undertaken in-game (Table 1). In this table, we have from the U.K.’s National Occupational
Standards for IT Users (e-Skills UK, 2009) a selection of low-level categories such as “select and use
interface features” and “access, navigate, and search” to identify experiential components of syntactic
labor as “the primitive operations [such as] writing, erasure, and the substitution of symbols” (Warner,
2005, p. 229). In Puzzle Pirates and Farmville, the ability to “access, navigate, and search” are basic
and observable skills that must be successfully undertaken in order to play the game. The tacit
training provided by virtual game worlds develops these knowledge workers at no cost to employers
with the players even paying (in many different ways) to play.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
688
Table 1. Comparative Table of Occupational Standards for IT Users and Virtual Game Worlds
National occupational
standards for IT users:
performance criteria
National occupational
standards for IT users:
examples
Puzzle Pirates
Farmville
Select and use interface
features
Drag and drop, zoom
shortcuts
Interaction in the virtual
world
Interaction in the virtual
world
Access, navigate and
search
Evaluate information
Choice of activities, find
resources
Choice of crops to plant
Schedule activities
Send and respond to
meeting invitations
Join a crew, participate
in a Sea Monster Hunt
Visit friends, pick crops
before they wither
Set up IT tools and
devices
Outcomes of
collaborative working
Change home island,
success in Sea Monster
Hunt
Change farm layout and
focus
Throughout this paper, we discuss the significance of questioning the issue of whether syntactic labor is
considered to be integral to a “work” practice or realized as an aspect of recuperation through gameplay
in a virtual game world. While gameplay is itself voluntary with no compulsion to participate, this fact
belies the persuasive and pervasive nature of hegemonic power. Games are a significant aspect of
contemporary culture and represent a significant aspect of the economy. The games themselves are
presented in a variety of forms as entertainment that attracts engagement. This is a desire that is
supported and encouraged by contemporary capitalism through significant investment and even more-
significant financial rewards. Among other reasons, people want to play games for the sense of social
participation that they bring. This persuasiveness is the vehicle for the recuperation of key skills to the
hegemonic order. In this paper, we focus specifically on the relationship of syntactic labor and the skills
that this gameplay can produce that support the development of low-level knowledge workers. It is the
skills learned in game that are internalized with the potential to be transferable to more conventional and
visible forms of work. In order to evaluate the potential opportunities and threats that ubiquitous ICTs
offer, we present a situationist and Marx-inspired critique of the networked computing phenomenon in
the context of game-based virtual worlds. Situationist thinking allows examination beyond the superficial
play elements of virtual game worlds to examine the everpresent and embedded strangeness of labor in
games. We draw on the tradition initiated by Braverman (1974) to argue that a radical critique of the
understanding of the use of technology in organizations is necessary because of the potential for the
labor-based exploitation of gamers. For the researcher, this requires examining the construction and
use of the labor of participants at both social and technological levels to assess whether, and in what,
form exploitation in a game can occur. It is the voluntary aspects of gameplay that frames exploitation of
labor in virtual game worlds. In contrast, traditional forms of exploitation in which surplus value is
extracted from labor rely upon the need for workers to gain recompense from their individual and
collective efforts (Marx, 1906, III.X.46). In choosing to participate in the spectacle of virtual game worlds,
we describe a form of exploitation that does not have direct impact on individual sustenance and
physical wellbeing, but in which labor is undertaken to satisfy needs and desires that are more broadly
social but nonetheless present. Contemporary capitalism, as described by situationist thinkers, is
dominated by the spectacle and the desire to participate in its performance. The multiple contexts of the
spectacle are not easily differentiated into silos of work, leisure, and other activities. For example, in the
cases presented in this paper, the skills developed in playing at planting and harvesting plants in Farmville
is a contemporary extension of hegemonic practice and the normalizing of exploitation that can then be
transparently continued through IT-oriented work in a conventional workplace. By building the spectacle of
the virtual game world as an entertainment space, the owners of the game world directly profit from the
surplus value generated by the labor of its participants. The recompense for in-game labor is entirely
synthesised within the game as a virtual currency, a badge, or reward item. This specific shift in the
motivations to undertake syntactic labor and why this might be done in games reflects a wider shift in the
relationship of everyday life, social practices and the spectacle to labor. What remains constant in these
shifting relationships, however, is the exploitation of labor in its many forms to benefit those who hold
hegemonic power.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
689
The mundane situation of this economic order benefits the developers of the game—in effect, the
labor of players in both Puzzle Pirates and Farmville and other virtual game worlds creates a game of
sufficient activity, interest, and popularity to make it worthwhile for some players to pay for in-game
credits and thus contribute to out-game economic success. However, by extension, the labor of those
players who do not buy in-game credits (and even those that do) constructs them as laborers—in the
Marxist and traditional sense—in the service of the game’s developers and recuperated late capitalist
agenda. Those who participate in online gaming are normalized to the expectation that the mundane
and repetitive laboring practices acquired in gaming skills can and will be exploited outside of their
control. Furthermore, it is not usual for gaming online to be seen as a form of unpaid labor, but this is
partly the result of their distanciation from one another in the same way as other forms of teleworkers
who are consequently not able to organize or withhold their labor. The anthropological strangeness of
these virtual game worlds obscure these power relationships and the opportunity to share in the
profits enjoyed by the game developers. The gameplay of these worlds actively discourages players
from identifying themselves in the role of laborer or from pinpointing the source of their exploitation. At
first glance, the immediate response (especially for those who play these games) is to reject this
claim, but the evidence of Heeks (2010) and Dibble (2007) show that only subtle changes in
perspective can readily reveal the extent of this exploitation.
By using a situationist view of social networking, we have identified the defining practices in the
embedded structures of two virtual game worlds as information systems. We explore the mundane
practices of casual gaming and use structural ethnographic analysis to disentangle the interactions of
everyday life found in these games. This examination reveals how the mundane daily practices of
virtual worlds assist, at least partially, in explaining the appeal of these game worlds and the ways in
which these games enculturate the players into structured labor relationships. As (unpaid) workers,
the casual gamers are engaged in a process of active deskilling undertaking compliant actions of
“syntactic labor” (Warner, 2002; Warner, 2005).
What we are observing is change in the relationship of work and labor to play and leisure and their
increasingly subtle differences. More specifically, we are seeing a convergence of the notions of
technologically enabled laboring with that of playing virtual game worlds.
A critical reading of the history of capitalist reforms in relation to work and working hours warn that
outcomes may be quite different from expectations. We draw on Marx-inspired perspectives, focusing
on new forms of labor in technology-mediated spaces to offer an alternative position for interpreting
virtual game worlds. We explore how contemporary capitalism employs the recuperated spectacle to
exploit forms of labor that are undertaken with uncritical acceptance. Echoing Couldry (2003), it is
necessary to look to more fundamental issues such as the structure and design of the Internet-based
services to address issues of emancipation and equity. While this paper documents voluntary labor
and its potential to be exploited have, further potential exists to use the situationist perspective to
deconstruct the labor embedded in other voluntary activities found in contemporary capitalism. Rich
sites for understanding the embedded labor skills that are developed in technologically enabled
spaces of the spectacle includes image sharing through Instagram or Flickr, concept “curatorship” on
Tumblr, and the creation of “lols” on icanhascheezburger.com. Further opportunity for research exists
in examining these games, and others, as metaphors for contemporary capitalism. We hope that
further exploration of virtual worlds (game-oriented or otherwise) using Marx-inspired and situationist
perspectives will offer the potential to resist the uncritical adoption of ICT-enabled work practices and
environments.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
690
References
Adler, P., & Kwon, S. (2002). Social capital: Prospects for a new concept. Academy of Management
Review, 27(1), 17-40.
Adler, P. (2007). The future of critical management studies: A paleo-marxist critique of labour process
theory. Organization Studies, 28(9), 1313-1345.
Ahmad, M., Keegan, B., Srivastava, J., Williams, D. & Contractor, N. (2009). Mining for gold farmers:
Automatic detection of deviant players in MMOGS. Technical Report, Department of
Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota.
Alvesson, M. & Deetz, S. (2000). Doing Critical Management Research. London: Sage.
Alvesson, M. & Willmott, H. (1996). Making Sense of Management. A Critical Introduction. London:
Sage.
AppData (2010). Retrieved August 24, 2010, from statistics.allfacebook.com/applications
Avison, D. & Myers, M. (1995). Information systems and anthropology: An anthropological
perspective on IT and organizational culture. Information Technology & People, 8(3), 43-56.
Bartle, R. A. (2004). Pitfalls of virtual property. Np, Apr.
Batstone, E. (1984). Working order: workplace industrial relations over two decades. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell. Berne, R. W. (2003). Recognizing religious mythology in visions of new technology.
Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE, 22(1), 34-39.
Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century.
NYU Press.
Brooke, C. (2002). What does it mean to be 'critical' in IS research?. Journal of Information
Technology, 17(2), 49-57.
Burrell, G. & Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis. London:
Heinemann Educational Books Ltd
Cecez-Kecmanovic, D. (2001). Doing critical IS research: The question of methodology. In E. M.
Trauth (Ed.), Qualitative Research in IS: Issues and Trends (pp. 141-162).
Chen, M. (2005). Addressing social dilemmas and fostering cooperation through computer games.
Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Digital Games Research Association Conference,
Vancouver, Canada.
Couldry, N. (2003). Media meta-capital: Extending the range of Bourdieu's field theory. Theory and
Society, 32 (5/6), 653-677.
Debord, G (1995). Society of the Spectacle. London: Zone Books.
De Certeau. M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dibble, J. (2007). The life of the Chinese gold farmer. The New York Times Magazine, 17th June.
DiMaggio, P. (1995). Comments on ‘What theory is not’”. Administrative Sciences Quarterly, 40(3),
391-397.
Ellison, N., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook ‘friends’ Social capital and
college students' use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 12(4), 1143-1168.
e-Skills UK (2009). National occupational standards for IT users, e-Skills UK, http://www.e-
skills.com/Documents/Standards-and-qualifications/NOS/IT-User-standards-2009.pdf
Forester, J. (1992). Critical ethnography: on fieldwork in a Habermasian way. In M. Alvesson & H.
Wilmott (Eds.), Critical management studies. London: Sage.
Fournier, V. & Grey, C. (2000). At the critical moment: Conditions and prospects for critical
management studies. Human Relations, 53(1), 7-32.
Gajendran, R. & Harrison, D. (2007). The Good, the bad, and the unknown about telecommuting:
Meta-analysis of psychological mediators and individual consequences. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 92(6), 1524-1541.
German, L. (2003). Women’s liberation today. International Socialism Journal, 2(101), 3-34.
Golden, T. & Veiga, J. (2005). The impact of extent of telecommuting on job satisfaction: resolved
inconsistent findings. Journal of Management, 31(2), 301-318.
Greenbaum, J. (1996). Back to labor: Returning to labor process in the study of work. Proceedings of
the Computer Supported Work Conference ’96, (pp. 229-237).
Gregor, S. (2006). The nature of theory in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 30(3), 611-642.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
691
Grover, V., Lyytinen, K., Srinivasan, A., & Tan, B. (2008). Contributing to rigorous and forward thinking
explanatory theory. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 9(2), 40-47.
Heeks, R. (2010). Real money from virtual worlds”, Scientific American, 302(1), 68-73.
Hirschheim, R., & Newman, M. (1991). Information systems development as symbolism: Myth,
metaphor, and magic. Information Systems Research, 2(1), 29-62.
Horkheimer, M. (1976). Traditional and critical theory. In P. Connerton (Ed.), Critical Sociology.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Howcroft, D. & Trauth, E. (2006) Handbook Of Critical Information Systems Research: theory and
application. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Hughes, J. A., Randall D. & Shapiro, D. (1992). Faltering from ethnography to design. In Proceedings
of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work (pp. 115-122). ACM.
Internationale Situationiste (1958). Definitions. No. 1. Retrieved October 12, 2006, from
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions/html
Kaarst-Brown, M. & Robey, D. (1999). More on myth, magic and metaphor: Cultural insights into the
management of information technology in organizations. Information, Technology & People,
12(2).
Keizer, G. (2010). Mozilla updates Firefox to crush Farmville complaints, Computerworld. Retrieved
from computerworld.com/s/article/9178578/Mozilla_updates_Firefox_to_crush_Farmville_
complaints
Kennedy, R. (2008). Virtual rights? Property in online game objects and characters. Information &
Communications Technology Law, 17(2), 95-106.
Krause, S. (2004). Yohoho! Puzzle Pirate Review: Yohoho and a barrel of fun. Retrieved from
http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/462/462371p1.html
Kreps, D. (2010). My social networking profile: copy, resemblance, or simulacrum? A poststructuralist
interpretation of social information systems”. European Journal of Information Systems, 19(1),
104-115.
Law, L. (1979). Images and Everyday Life. Spectacular Times. Retrieved from
archive.org/details/SpectacularTimesImages.pdf
Lines, D., Marcouse, I. & Martin, B. (2006). The Complete A-Z Business Studies Handbook. London:
Hodder Education.
Marx, K. (1906). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. The Process of Capitalist Production.
Library of Economics and Liberty. www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpA.html
Mingers, J. (1992). Recent developments in critical management science. Journal of the Operational
Research Society, 43(1). 1-10.
Mirchandani, K. (1999). Legitimizing work: Telework and the gendered reification of the work-nonwork
dichotomy. The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. 36(1), 87-107.
Navarro, A. (2005). Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates”, Gamespot UK,
http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/puzzle/yohohopuzzlepirates/review.html
Ngwenyama, O. (1991). The critical social theory approach to information systems: Problems and
challenges. In H-E. Nissen, H. Klein, & R. Hirschheim (Eds.), Information Systems Research:
Contemporary Approaches and Emergent Traditions (pp. 267-280). Amsterdam: NorthHolland.
O'Doherty, D. & Willmott, H. (2009). The decline of labour process analysis and the future sociology
of work. Sociology, 43(5), 931-951.
Orlikowski, W. & Baroudi, J. (1991). Studying Information Technology in organizations: Research
approaches and assumptions. Information Systems Research, 2(1): 1-28.
Perrons, D. (2003). The new economy and the work-life balance: conceputal explorations and a case
study of new media. Gender, work & organisation, 10(1). 65-93.
Plant, S. (1997). The most radical gesture: The situationist international in a postmodern age.
London: Routledge.
Riggall, J. (2010). Farmville vs Games. OnSoftware blog, http://en.onsoftware.com/farmville-versus
games/
Robey, D. & Jin, L. (2004). Studying virtual work in teams, organizations and communities. In M. E.
Whitman & A. B. Woszczynski (Eds.), The Handbook of Information Systems Research (pp.
150-165). London: Idea Group Publishing.
Schubert, D. (2007). Puzzle Pirates provides a second data point. Zen of Design,
http://www.zenofdesign.com/?p=838

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
692
Shin, B., El Sawy, O. A., Sheng, O. R. L., & Higa, K. (2000). Telework: Existing research and future
directions. Journal of organizational computing and electronic commerce, 10(2), 85-101.
Slezak, P. (1995). Sociology of scientific knowledge and science education part 2: Laboratory life
under the microscope. Science and Education, 3(4), 329-355.
Spencer, D. (2000). Braverman and the contribution of labour process analysis to the critique of
capitalist production – twenty-five years on. Work, employment and society, 14(2), 223-243.
Squires, J. (2010). Farmville Review”, Gamezebo. Retrieved from
http://www.gamezebo.com/games/farmville/review
Star, S. (1999). The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377-391.
Suchmann, L. (1987). Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, P. (2005). Brands, boundaries and bandwagons. In C. Grey & H. Willmott (Eds.), Critical
Management Studies: A Reader (pp. 364-82). Oxford: OUP.
Tinker, T. (2002). Spectres of Marx and Braverman in the twilight of postmodernist labour process
research. Work, Employment and Society, 16(2), 251-281.
Warner, J. (2002). Forms of labour in Information Systems. Information Research, 7(4), 7-4.
Warner, J. (2005). Labor in information systems. Annual Review of Information Science and
Technology, 39(1), 551–573.
Warner, J. (2007). Description and search labor for information retrieval. Journal of the American
Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(12), 1783-1790.
Wilson, M. & Greenhill, A. (2004). Theory and Action for Emancipation: elements of a critical realist
approach. In B. Kaplan, D. Truex, D. Wastell & T. W ood-Harper (Eds.), Relevant Theory and
Informed Practice (pp. 667-674). Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Wynn, E. (1991). Taking practice seriously. In J. Greenbaum & M. Kyng (Eds.), Design at Work
Hillsdale. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Zuboff, S. (1988). In the age of the smart machine: The future of work and power. New York: Basic
Books.

Journal of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 14, Issue 11, pp. 672-693, November 2013
Greenhill & Fletcher / Labouring Online
693
About the Authors
Anita GREENHILL is a member of the eResearch Centre University of Manchester, and the
Centre of Research on Social and Cultural Change (CRESC). Dr Greenhill has successfully
conducted research into the changing role of the city, local communities and their use of
community news media in the digital age. Key areas of expertise are in the areas of
Networked Usage of Technology within Community, Organisational and Business settings.
Under this broad theme she has specialised interests and is actively conducting research
into technologically enable work, spatiality, and Internet / World Wide Web Usage in
Organisations.
Gordon FLETCHER is a senior lecturer in Information Systems, member of the Centre for
Digital Business and head of the International Operations and Information Management
academic unit in Salford Business School, University of Salford. Gordon’s research interest
focus on the relationship of digital practices to everyday life, popular culture and innovation.
He is currently working on projects to identify and track individual digital footprints as well as
the application of Science Fiction Prototyping to visionary management practices.