The ludic takes work

Koutsouras, Panagiotis; Martindale, Sarah; Crabtree, Andy

Abstract

Games that revolve around user-generated content have been explored mainly from a ludic perspective, leaving the work practices that are entailed in content production underexplored. What we argue in this paper is that there is an underlying economy in Minecraft’s community, which plays a significant role in the game’s current form. Our ethnographic fieldwork revealed the various aspects of the work of producing in-game content, by teasing out the discrete segments of the arc of work of commissioning, creating and delivering a Minecraft map. The infrastructure this work relies on is fragmented though, with the various accountability systems in place being appropriations by the players themselves. This raises a number of design implications related to how members coordinate tasks and articulate their work.

Citation

Koutsouras, P., Martindale, S., & Crabtree, A. (2017, August). The ludic takes work. Presented at The 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work

• Conference Name: The 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
• Start Date: Aug 28, 2017
• End Date: Sep 1, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Apr 18, 2017
• Publication Date: Aug 28, 2017
• Deposit Date: May 10, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 28, 2017
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Series Title: Reports of the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies
• Series ISSN: 2510-2591
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.18420/ecscw2017-8
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/856317
• Publisher URL: https://dl.eusset.eu/bitstream/20.500.12015/2933/1/paper_8.pdf
• Contract Date: May 10, 2017