Glossary of productive play

Anchoring

definition (wikipedia): The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias whereby an individual's decisions are influenced by a particular reference point or 'anchor'.[1 Once the value of the anchor is set, subsequent arguments, estimates, etc. made by an individual may change from what they would have otherwise been without the anchor. 1. An individual may be more likely to purchase a car if it is placed alongside a more expensive model (the anchor). Prices discussed in negotiations that are lower than the anchor may seem reasonable, perhaps even cheap to the buyer, even if said prices are still relatively higher than the actual market value of the car. 2. While estimating the orbit of Mars, one might start with the Earth's orbit (365 days) and then adjust upward until they reach a value that seems reasonable (usually less than 687 days, the correct answer).

Who said it Mentioned in ["The addictive cost of predatory videogames monetization" (The Jimquisition) by Jim Sterling at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14] =

in context trying to sell a user a lootbox for 50$ and after a while telling them: "SUPERSALE NOW IT'S JUST 15$", the result is that it doesn't really matter if the price is still super high, the user will still think that it's advantageous to buy it immediately (+ the discount won't last long --> see "fast thinking")

In a sentence The anchoring effect is when individuals' decisions are influenced by a particular reference point or 'anchor'.

---> Ideology and anchoring point (the point de capiton [mentioned by Lacan] - French word to say anchoring point) How does an ideology maintain its consistency? What keeps of ideological field of meaning consistent? Any given ideological field is "quilted" by the point de capiton A point de capiton unifies an ideological field and provides it with an identity. What is at issue in the conflict of ideologies is precisely the point de capiton. Signifiers such as "freedom", "democracy", "human rights," etc. are open-ended. Their meanings can slide about depending on the context of their use. For example, a right-wing interpretation of the word "freedom" might use it to designate the freedom to speculate on the market, whereas a left-wing interpretation of it might use it designate freedom from the inequalities of the market. The word "freedom" therefore does not mean the same thing in all possible worlds: what pins its meaning down is the point de capiton.

See also Dispositif (as apparatus)

Anxiety

Definition
(1) Anxiety is a feeling of fear, dread, and uneasiness. It might cause you to sweat, feel restless and tense, and have a rapid heartbeat. It can be a normal reaction to stress. For example, you might feel anxious when faced with a difficult problem at work, before taking a test, or before making an important decision. It can help you to cope. The anxiety may give you a boost of energy or help you focus. But for people with anxiety disorders, the fear is not temporary and can be overwhelming. Anxiety disorders are conditions in which you have anxiety that does not go away and can get worse over time. The symptoms can interfere with daily activities such as job performance, schoolwork, and relationships.
(2) a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome.
(3) strong desire or concern to do something or for something to happen.

Who said it Mentioned in "We Are All Very Anxious" By weareplanc

In context

• "In contemporary capitalism, the dominant reactive affect is anxiety.
• "Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination."
  
• "Public secrets are typically personalised. The problem is only visible at an individual, psychological level; the social causes of the problem are concealed."
  
• "When discussed at all, they are understood as individual psychological problems, often blamed on faulty thought patterns or poor adaptation."
• "The present dominant affect of anxiety is also known as precarity. Precarity is a type of insecurity which treats people as disposable so as to impose control. Precarity differs from misery in that the necessities of life are not simply absent. They are available, but withheld conditionally."
  
• "Anxiety is reinforced by the fact that it is never clear what "the market" wants from us."

Period contemporary capitalism

See also precarity / competiton / capitalism / self-work / high performance

Artificiality

Definition

(a) The quality of being made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally. (b) Insincerity or affectedness. (Oxford Languages)

Click farm

A form of click fraud where a large group of low-paid workers are hired to click on paid advertising links for the click farmer. The workers click the links, surf the target website for a period of time, and possibly sign up for newsletters prior to clicking another link. It is extremely difficult for an automated filter to detect this simulated traffic as fake because the visitor behavior appears exactly the same as that of an actual legitimate visitor.

Context

Click farms are used by all sorts of businesses, often to inflate their following or engagement, and they can be hired to do multiple actions such as:

Services offered by click farms can include:

• Social media followers and likes
• Posting comments on websites or social media
• Generating website traffic
• Creating backlinks
• Carrying out repetitive click based tasks
• Channelling traffic to fraudulent sites to increase rankings, domain authority or to collect payouts on display ads
• Sharing , often fake, news articles (troll factories)*

With the majority of the world’s click farms based in countries with minimal employment and labour laws, their main legal issues are around employee rights, working conditions and wages.

In a sentence As online engagement became currency, click farms exploit workers in order to mass produce fraudulent user interactions.

Who said it Lee Munson

Mentioned in

See also Term

Counterculture

Definition (a) "A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores. A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era." [wiki] (b) Countercultures often are of dissenting character in relation to the established superstructure/ruling ideologies. They become part of the popular culture or fully integrated to culture after revolutionary actions or activist actions, consistent and confident defiance of established "rules". Counter culture can also purposefully present themselves as disturbances of defiance of any current stream (may they cross as certain times) as way to protest, as emancipation or contestation.

In context (1) (a) One famous counterculture is the hippy movement from the 60s-70s which was demonstrated by very defying aesthetically "divergent" hair features, sexual liberation, eye-catching fashion and uprisal against the dominant political/social structures. (b) Nowadays the queer community holds some of the keys to one of the main counterculture stream, where gender defaults are refuted, social norms re-evaluated and contested, communal cohesion starts with individual expression and affirmation, diversity first and foremost. Feminism has shared platforms between counter- and mainstream culture, where different aspects have been shared, when the queer community has always mainly evolved on the side-lines, it is now coming more and more in the main cultural streams. (c) Mainstream culture uses countercultures as fashionable ideologies on and off, but counterculture also makes use of mainstream society to vehiculate ideologies (pop culture, artists like Lady Gaga, channels counter-communities within mainstream medias). “Born this way” has been the rallying cry of the mainstream gay rights movement [[1]]

In context (2) See Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2008), which charts how the [(left)Libertarian] values of the US 1960s counterculture (hippy communes, experiments with LSD &c) are taken up by the big tec companies ; so a lot of the 'freedom' rhetoric on the internet in the 2000s is related to the US 60s counterculture movement. The model for the network is provided by The. Whole Earth Catalog (1968) which advanced freedom via "access to tools"

In a sentence Counterculture stands in opposition to the mainstream society until it gets incorporated within the mainstream society, mostly arises from social/political divergences/conflicts/defiance.

Period originated in the 1960s, to this day.

See also Counterhegemony and Mainstream

Entertainment

Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousands of years specifically for the purpose of keeping an audience's attention. [Wiki]

Mentioned in "Video Games as Meaningful Entertainment Experiences" by Mary Beth Oliver, Nicholas David Bowman, Julia K. Woolley, Ryan Rogers, Brett I. Sherrick and Mun-Young Chung

In context Movies are the easiest and most common form of entertainment that most people in the world consume. Other forms of entertainment are: Books, video games, tv shows, sporting events, circuses, comedy events, music festivals, etc.

In a sentence Entertainment consists of performances of plays and films, and activities such as reading and watching television, that give people pleasure.

False Consciousness

Definition "False consciousness is a term used by some to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes." (wiki)

Who said it Mentioned in [ Gamification as twenty-first-century ideology, Mathias Fuchs ] (a)"When the evangelists of gamification tell us that work must be play, that our personalities will be playful, that the whole economy is a game, and that each and every activity from cradle to grave can be turned into a game, we encounter false consciousness that is socially necessary." (b) "This state of alienation has also been referred to as ‘false consciousness’. In the closing chapter of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour (1978: 196), the author invokes the concept of ‘necessary false consciousness’. This is a type of false consciousness that is not just faulty consciousness; necessary false consciousness is rather a type of false consciousness that is logically correct. However cruel, meaningless or destructive it might seem, it is necessary for the system in which we are working to keep working until we die so that we will shop until we drop."

From leftypedia [ Consciousness, Class consciousness] "A materialist understanding of class is known by Marxists as 'class consciousness'. This understanding is the knowledge of one's own position in the economic hierarchy, and the acceptance of the interests which therefore benefit the individual. The term is most often used to describe the working class, or elements of it, becoming aware of their own exploitation and working to oppose it in unity with their fellow workers, but it can also be used to describe the self-awareness of the bourgeoisie of their superior position in society and their efforts to maintain the present hierarchy. It is often contrasted with its inverse, 'false consciousness', which describes the lack of this knowledge causing the worker to labour contrary to his own interests as a member of the oppressed class (for instance through vocal support of the ruling classes and existing power structures)."

In context [ Gamification as twenty-first-century ideology, Mathias Fuchs] "Gamification propaganda in the style of ‘work is play’, ‘work can be play’ or ‘work harder, play harder’ are suggesting that work can be contained within the ‘sphere of play’ (Huizinga [1938] 1949). Such statements and consequently the whole concept of gamification are ideological as they express false consciousness of the nature of work and play (see, e.g., the magazine covers in Figure 3, designed by Anthony Burrill 2008). "

In a sentence False consciousness is the state in which one feels like they are given full agency of their own choices/actions when in fact they are subject to a certain ideology that has come to seem so self-speaking they wouldn't question it

Period origin in History and Class Consciousness (1923) by the Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács. To this day.

See also Gamification, Capitalism, Alienation and Play

Fan culture/fandom

A fandom is a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of empathy and camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the objects of their fandom and spend a significant portion of their time and energy involved with their interest, often as a part of a social network with particular practices, differentiating fandom-affiliated people from those with only a casual interest. [Wiki]

The history of the word “fandom” starts with a very old word — “fanatic.” “Fanatic” arose out of a Latin word, “fānāticus,” which, in turn, came from the word “fanum,” meaning “temple” or “shrine". In the late 19th-century, the word "fan" started to be used to describe an enthousiast of a certain sports team.

Mentioned in

• "On productivity and game fandom" by Hanna Wirman
• “Textual Poachers: Television Fan & Participatory Culture” by Henry Jenkins

In context Members of a fandom associate with one another and build a community around their fan interest (e.g.: celebrities, hobbies, genres, fashion, ...). A fan culture often includes fan activities such as conventions, writing fan fictions, participating in fan online forums and discussions, purchasing merchandise and collector items, etc. Some of the largest fandoms are the Harry Potter fandom, Anime fandom and the BTS army (BTS is a K-Pop group).

In a sentence A fandom is a subgroup of fans that share a common interest.

Gamification

Definition the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service. Who said it Mentioned in [ Fuchs, Gamification as twenty-first century ideology ], [ Jennifer Dewinter, Katy A Kocurek, Randall Nichols, Gamification as twenty-firstcentury ideology]

In context [ Gamification as the process of turning extra-ludic activities into play. I argue that gamification might be seen as a form of ideology and therefore a mechanism of the dominant class to set agenda and to legitimize actions taken by this very class or group. [Gamification is based on similar principles of measurement and observation with a focus on both the reorganization of work and leisure

In a sentence to put it simply, a way to make any other thing look like a game, therefore it seems like a fun/desirable activity instead of an imposition/exploitation/slavery. Strategy used to motivate the user/employee/citizen in order to get more/better results/data.

Period 2003 - now

See also False Consciousness and Alienation and Capitalism and Ideology and IKEA effect and Productive Play and False Consciousness and Anchoring and Entertainment

IKEA effect

The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. The name refers to Swedish manufacturer and furniture retailer IKEA, which sells many items of furniture that require assembly. [Wiki]

Who said it Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon, Dan Ariely

Mentioned in "The 'IKEA Effect': When Labor Leads to Love" by Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely [2]

In context IKEA customers can build their own furniture. People can choose colours to customize their own shoes online. Children can design their own cuddly toy. Customers can order their own creations at chocolate manufacturers.

In a sentence The IKEA effect describes how people tend to value an object more if they make (or assemble) it themselves.

Period 2011 - aprox

Ideology

In a sentence Barthes: "ideology is disguised in plain sight"

Definition 1) a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy. "the ideology of democracy" 2) a system of ideas which seem self evident and 'natural' to those that hold them. 3) the science of ideas; the study of their origin and nature.

Context [ How does gamification express ideology? Note: "Hegemony and Ideology are two concepts that come in social sciences between which a key difference can be identified. In a general sense, hegemony is the dominance of one group or state over another. On the other hand, ideology is a system of ideas forming the basis of an economic or political theory."

Who said it Mentioned in Marx, Gramsci, Barthes , Hall, Hebdidge, Williams

Mentioned in

See also

Hook Model / Hook - Habit - Hobby

It's a business model that is used also in videogames to ensure that microtransactions are turned from an occasional event into a rooted habit for gamers. This model functions following different strategies to ensure continuous profiting, like fast thinking processes, gatchas (collectible items), subscriptions, etc.

At its simplest form, the hook model describes how businesses can fundamentally change behaviour within their users, and create day-to-day habits around their products. The heart of the principle is that businesses should always seek to connect a user’s problem to your solution with enough frequency to make it a habit. Through consecutive hook cycles, products reach their ultimate goal of unprompted user engagement, bringing users back repeatedly, without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. In the context of commodification of games, the habit becomes a real hobby for the gamer that would voluntary invest unlimited resources (⌚ + 💸💸) and energies in gaming.

The initial hook is fundamental to build an habit, it is an ice-breaker, something that presents itself as an immediately useful and convenient achievement. It's followed by subsequent phases in a cycle:

1. Trigger

it can be external like a notification or internal like an association made in the user's memory (like emotions) and it reminds or suggests you to do something.

2. Action

is the simplest behaviour provoked by the trigger in anticipation of a reward, or in other words the simplest action that a person can do towards the satisfaction of a little desire.

3. Variable reward

a little extra item, often from a lottery or randomly generated, that rewards the action and boosters motivation.

4. Investment

This the phase in which users are asked to do a bit of work, which turns out in the end to be unpaid labour. Investments are about the anticipation of longer-tern rewards, not immediate gratification. The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it.

Labour

Labour means physical or mental effort or in other words: Work.

Mentioned in: "Well played" by Vicky Osterweil

Mainstream

The mainstream is the prevalent current thought that is widespread. It includes all popular culture and media culture, typically disseminated by mass media. This word is sometimes used in a pejorative sense by subcultures who view ostensibly mainstream culture as not only exclusive but artistically and aesthetically inferior. It is to be distinguished from subcultures and countercultures, and at the opposite extreme are cult followings and fringe theories. The labels "mainstream media" and "mass media" are generally applied to print publications (such as newspapers and magazines), radio formats, and television stations that contain the highest audience or have the broadest appeal. [Wiki]

Mentioned in: "Well played" by Vicky Osterweil

In context: Everything that is seen as normal, that is familiar to the masses and available to the general public is mainstream. An example for mainstream cinema are Hollywood movies.

In a sentence: Media, people, activities, products and ideas that are part of the mainstream are regarded as the most typical, normal, and conventional because they belong to the same group or system as most others of their kind.

PAP

Definition If you describe something such as information, writing, or entertainment as pap, you mean that you consider it to be of no worth, value, or serious interest. (a)Bland soft or semi-liquid food such as that suitable for babies or invalids. ("a trayful of tasteless pap"). (b)Worthless or trivial reading matter or entertainment. ("limitless channels serving up an undemanding diet of pap"). (c)Pap culture is in a certain way trash culture, the sewer of popular culture, yet, the most consumed and produced. (d)Scottish and Northern England dialect. a nipple or teat.

Who said it Mentioned in [Cultural Resistance Reader, Stephen Duncombe] STUART HALL,"NOTES ON DECONSTRUCTING 'THE POPULAR"', "Yesterday's rebellious subculture is today's commercial pap and today's pap can become the basis for tomorrow's culture of resistance (cf. Cowley,Frank, and Hebdige)."

See also Counterculture

Productive

Definition
adjective

1. popular meaning: profitable, economic, efficient (economic sense), producing or able to produce large amounts of goods, crops, or other commodities
2. alternative (subversive?) interpretation: fruitful, rich, inspiring, creative; bringing positive emotions/effects on a personal human level (buildings communities, finding allies, embracing radical friendships, creating safe space etc). Example: helping and supporting a friend in need is the opposite of being productive in the economic sense of the word, but it is very valuable, fruitful, enriching ans in that sense also productive on a personal level

In context

1. You have to be more efficient to make profit.
2. This was a very fruitful conversation! I am so inspired.

In a sentence
Question: Is it possible to embrace the alternative interpretation of the word productive?
See also: productivity / production / productive play

Productive play

Definition

1. popular meaning: it looks and feels like playing (a game), but it's actually work. Sometimes you don't realise you are really working, sometimes you are aware of the fact that the work is "masked" as play.
2. alternative interpretation: as a creative person, you play around with certain materials and tools to experiment and experience a productive process; the state of being inspired / playing games for meaningful social interaction with other individuals.

Who said it

Lidia :)

In context

Vicky Osterweil in "Well Played" – Video games are a safe, controlled space of growth, learning, and repetition: a desirable fantasy version of the fractured, precarious, ever shifting workplaces most of us find ourselves in. – Video games, then, are the (highly profitable) media of consolation specific to neoliberalism. They reinforce a vision of a world entirely grounded in competition, and they provide the gratification of experiencing that framework as satisfying, just — we get to win with it, we get to escape through it, we get to experience a sense of mastery even as our lives are even more shaped by larger and larger forces and increasingly unfathomable networks. (1.)

– After-hours labour, masked with enjoyable activities that feel like leisure / also related to self-work (people trying to improve their own capital) (1.)

In a sentence

questions: – what is the difference between productive play and productive game? – how is it possible to subvert the capitalist/neoliberal mechanisms of productive play?

see also

productivity / production / productive / play / self-work / gamificaion

Productivity / Production

Definition
noun

1. the state or quality of being productive.
2. "the long-term productivity of land"

• • the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.
  • "workers have boosted productivity by 30 per cent"

1. [ecology] the rate of production of new biomass by an individual, population, or community; the fertility or capacity of a given habitat or area.

Who said it
Origin of the term - latin; established in early 17th Century; early 17th century: from French productif, -ive or late Latin productivus, from product- ‘brought forth’, from the verb producere.
Marx & Engels: Means of production: a concept that encompasses the social use and ownership of the land, labor, and capital needed to produce goods, services, and their logistical distribution and delivery. Productive forces (Marx & Engels) - In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' own critique of political economy, it refers to the combination of the means of labor (tools, machinery, land, infrastructure, and so on) with human labour power.
Mode of production: together with the social and technical relations of production, the productive forces constitute a historically specific mode of production.
Also can look at the term as evolving over very long period - starting from tribe culture and productivity of the small tribe society (growing crops, reproduction of the tribe ro survive …), going through medieval landlord society structure, to capitalist usage.

In context
“As bodies we are violently torn from the world’s embrace and belatedly return to it as property owners of ourselves,” Ed Cohen writes in A Body Worth Defending. Under this logic — one that sees bodies as “owned” by selves — care becomes entangled with a sense of duty to make the body endlessly productive, an investment capable of yielding returns. Each individual must be a manager of the self and an investor in the body as a capital stock.
This framework helps address the problem of meaningful work that haunted the old capitalism. Meaning is equated with maintaining the body’s productivity, as Taylor had hoped, fusing the elusive goal of self-esteem to measurable output. Only what it is measured is not work productivity directly but a more general potential capability for discipline and accomplishment, captured through the proxy of the body’s fitness." - "Selfwork", Karen Gregory; Kirsty Hendry; Jake Watts; Dave Young; February 02 __WOW__, 2017]

See also productive / productive play / base / superstructure / capitalism

Self-Work

Definition
Self-work is any action you take towards self-improvement.

Who said it
Mentioned in [ "Selfwork" by Karen Gregory; Kirsty Hendry; Jake Watts; Dave Young

in context

• "As the factory walls of the old capitalism have dissolved into the networks and virtual spaces of the “new economy,” the distinctions between work time, work space, and domestic space have blurred. Under what sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have called the “new spirit of capitalism,” technological advances in logistics have made “lean,” “just-in-time” production possible, which demands of workers more flexibility and risk management. This demand was sold to workers as an offer of more freedom and more meaningful work, performed on their own terms, addressing what Boltanski and Chiapello described as the “artistic critique” of the old capitalism, which attacked its tendency to standardize goods and human beings alike."

• "workers are invited to seemingly measure themselves, and use the data for their own personal betterment. This calls for different form of measuring that can assess the worker’s body as valuable property."

• "Wearable technologies bring Taylorism together with the “spirit” of new capitalism, putting them both in direct contact with our bodies. They let us measure our progress while synchronizing and standardizing our selfwork with the demands of waged labor. By using fitness-tracking apps and wearables, the quantification and efficiency fetishes of Taylorism become the logic by which we understand our body’s movement.In individualizing the act of self-care as selfwork, apps push targets, notifications, and nudges onto the user throughout the day as prompts aimed to encourage more activity and, subsequently, more data."

• "Both artistic labor and physical exercise are heralded as ways to know oneself, and both are often reduced to matters of quantifiable information production. They both hinge on incentives that seek to extract free work under the auspices of “investing in one’s own human capital.” Accordingly, both are affected by society’s intensifying entrepreneurial rhetoric and its erosions of the boundaries around work: incentives to self-quantify couched in “do what you love” rhetoric."

See also
productive play / gamification / anxiety / Taylorism

Tempo vs. Rhythm

Definition

Who said it

in context

See also