Overcoming The Exploitation Of Passion In Videogame Labor

Overcoming the Exploitation of Passion in Videogame Labor: Playing with Passion examines the intersection of passion, precarity, and collocation to pinpoint where and how interventions can be made towards better working conditions. Jackson contends that videogames and passion are inextricably linked and explores this intrinsic link where passion is expected and valorized, be it in the context of play, work, or culture. Passion, Jackson argues, is the connective tissue that sews together the shared experiences that people all over the world will undertake through videogames, including winning close matches, experiencing new worlds, and forging new friendships. This book interrogates the outcomes of labor, videogames, and passion colliding – work and play become inextricably linked, and suddenly a ‘passion for games’ becomes an insistent and expected ‘passion for work.’ This, Jackson ultimately posits, leads to the current reality of much of the videogame production industry, where passion is used as a workplace policing tool and a way to push workers to periods of extended work, or crunch periods. Through theorizations regarding passion, bodies, assembly, and assemblage, this text wrestles with what can be done to manifest real change in the videogame industry. Scholars of media studies, technology, and labor studies will find this book of particular interest.

This book explores the capitalist exploitation of digital media where creativity is a fundamental element in the production of digital goods. Yılmaz Alışkan focuses in particular on open-source hardware communities in which hackers give up a considerable amount of free time and labour to produce open technology they are not compensated for.

This volume explores the rise of immersive technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and 360 videos in the newsroom and how they affect newsmaking for journalists, news sources, and audiences. As these technologies offer journalists new and exciting opportunities to connect more deeply, emotionally, and presently with their audience, they also introduce unique ethical and practical questions concerning the collection and use of biometric, sensory, and metadata. Contributors analyze this shift from passive consumption to active engagement in order to investigate the positive and negative impacts that immersive technologies can have on journalistic norms, professional ethics, audience engagement, and data protection. Ultimately, this volume highlights both the potential for these technologies to redefine the relationship between news producers and consumers and the potential challenges their integration may pose. Scholars of journalism, communication, science & technology studies, and digital media will find this book particularly useful.

"Online discussions in the form of readers' comments are a central part of many news sites and social media platforms. In this book, Tamara Kunić explores and interprets the ways in which digital technology has impacted the production and dissemination of content and the need to adapt in the age of a new audience, the prosumer"--

On October 12, 1994, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen - announced they would form a new studio that was eventually called Dreamworks. Dreamworks would produce feature films, television series, and pop music recordings. In The Dream Team, Daniel M. Kimmel tells the behind-the-scenes story of DreamWorks' rise and the end of the dream eleven years later, when most of the company was sold off or shut down.

An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties. Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning.

Made Up exposes the multibillion-dollar beauty industry that promotes unrealistic beauty standards through a market basket of advertising tricks, techniques, and technologies. Cosmetics magnate Charles Revson, a founder of Revlon, was quoted as saying, "In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the store, we sell hope." This pioneering entrepreneur, who built an empire on the foundation of nail polish, captured the unvarnished truth about the beauty business in a single metaphor: hope in a jar. Made Up: How the Beauty Industry Manipulates Consumers, Preys on Women’s Insecurities, and Promotes Unattainable Beauty Standards is a thorough examination of innovative, and often controversial, advertising practices used by beauty companies to persuade consumers, mainly women, to buy discretionary goods like cosmetics and scents. These approaches are clearly working: the average American woman will spend around $300,000 on facial products alone during her lifetime. This revealing book traces the evolution of the global beauty industry, discovers what makes beauty consumers tick, explores the persistence and pervasiveness of the feminine beauty ideal, and investigates the myth-making power of beauty advertising. It also examines stereotypical portrayals of women in beauty ads, looks at celebrity beauty endorsements, and dissects the “looks industry.” Made Upuncovers the reality behind an Elysian world of fantasy and romance created by beauty brands that won’t tell women the truth about beauty.

"Originally published in digital form in Beyond The Fringe 1A-6A, 1B-6B."