Dungeons and Dragons (and Programmers, too!): Games and Gamification in a Modern Workplace

• In Event: 2150 - Technology, Flexibility, and Work Arrangement

Abstract

Both labor sociologists and management theorists have long studied workplace games, describing how games build social cohesion within a workgroup, serve as a control mechanism, and enable firms to extract additional labor. All of the literature, however, is limited for neglecting the fact that multiple games can be coexisted, especially in modern work environment where work becomes more complicated and can be divided into multiple episodes with different functions. In this paper, we update this literature for investigating whether and how multiple games coexist in workplaces, and why some games can achieve hegemony while others can’t. Based on an 11-month ethnography of Huli, a leading technology-based firm, we identify three games: the game of collection is implemented as a management strategy to elicit engineers’ investment of extra time and knowledge; the game of surveillance, whose rules are negotiated between managers and workers, is used to monitor every aspect of collogues’ work routine; the game of metaphor is constructed relying on managers’ effort of simulating massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) from outside work and engineers’ strategies of drawing on their video-gaming experience to fantasize work process. Ultimately, we argue that four factors differentiated these games and determine games’ ability to enact hegemony, which includes the distance between game and work, level of workers’ participation, boundaries crossed by these games, and the achievement of the designed game outcome. We update literature by recognizing different types of games, and presenting games now are permeating to every corner of industry life.

Author

• Tongyu Wu, Zhejiang University