Tom Rodgers
PhD Student

Research

Overview

PhD research: Towards a Political Economy of ‘Digital Cultural Production’: Labour-value, Commodification, and Monetised Markets in Online Games and Virtual Worlds

Tom’s current research looks at the relatively recent emergence and dynamics of labour-value in online games and virtual worlds, both of which are commonsensically considered to be exemplary forms of entertainment (or leisure) in an increasingly digital world. Over the last decade, online games and virtual worlds – for example, World or Warcraft, Farmville, or Second Life – have gained in popularity (thus, population-sizes) to such a degree that many of them now contain fully-blown economies of commerce and distributed labour-value(s), which, more importantly, intersect and interact with “real” economies to the extent that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a dichotomous distinction between in-game and out-of-game economies, both in terms of the generation of value (what has value, and how has it become of value?), and transactions (what is being traded, and what facilitates or subtends this process?). For example, the world-famous ‘massively multiplayer online game’ (MMOG) World of Warcraft has an in-game economy of practice and trade that, for reasons little known about, now has a relatively complex monetary market of supply, demand, and labour-forces located outside of the game world; this is generally referred to as the ‘real-money trade’ market (RMT), where players of the game can purchase in-game goods and currencies at a monetary exchange rate, often expressed in U.S dollars. Another example is the online game known as Project Entropia, where a player named Jon Jacobs, who bought an (in-game) asteroid for $100,000 (£56,200) in 2005, made headlines when he sold it for $635,000 (£395,000) in 2010; the asteroid, which Jacobs operated as a club called Neverdie, was said to have been turning over a yearly profit of around £125,000. Another, perhaps more well-known example of how online games and virtual worlds are places where activity is taking on forms of labour that is generative of value is the game Farmville, where over 80 million facebook users toil away at managing their virtual farms – often spending real currency in order to buy “premium” in-game items – in order to produce livestock, crop yields, and various other farm-like creations. All of these are examples of how various forms of gaming are taking on the form of ‘labour’ in the specific sense that they are generative of realisable and exchangeable (labour-)values, for which organised markets and systems of monetisation are emerging and taking hold – a key example being the monetisation of (in-game/virtual world) commodities and services, commonly bracketed under the umbrella term ‘virtual goods’. 

In order to interrogate such developments, Tom’s research draws upon and critiques a range of literature lying at the intersections of political economy, cultural production, and digital/new media. In broad terms, these are: autonomist Marxist literature – popularised through the work of Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) – on ‘immaterial labour’, ‘multitude’, and the ‘social factory’, which hitherto has served as the primary theoretical touchstone for politico-economic analyses of digital games and gaming thus far; current sociological research located within the cultural industries/cultural production/cultural work perspectives, particularly that which focuses upon the kinds of labour involved in the creation, adoption, and (re)appropriation of digital/new media; and, in close connexion to the former, a collection of literature (primarily from the fields of cultural studies and political economy) that attempts to grapple with the transformative impact of digital/new media on the forms and character of labour, production networks, commodification, and capitalist dynamics more generally.

The core themes and issues to emerge from a critical reading of these areas feed into the design of a set of case study examples.  For example, the first of these provides an historical account of the rise and development of forms of digital labour-value in online games and virtual worlds, tracing out a detailed account of how various value-generative capacities, both within and without these worlds, came to be mobilised in the realisation of profit and accumulation. The overall aim of Tom’s current research is to investigate how and in what ways games, gaming, and digital media more generally are both facilitating and developing into frontiers of Capital; moreover, what kinds of tensions and contradictions do these developments throw up aside from that of the seemingly paradoxical appropriation of “play” as a “work ethic”?

General Interests: Social, Critical & Cultural theory; digital media; games and gaming; political economy; labour theories;cultural economy; cultural production; cultural work; play theory; historical sociology; time-space diary method

Teaching

Undergraduate

Tom teaches on the first-year Sociology undergraduate module entitled ‘Introduction to Social Theory’. This module encompasses both classical sociological theory – the writings of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel – and the contemporary works of writers such as Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, and Bruno Latour.

Postgraduate

Tom has also lectured on the MA in Social Informatics course – jointly run by the Departments of Sociology and Computer Science (co-ordinated by Dr. Darren Reed) – about developing and using ‘digital time-space diaries’ as a method for researching everyday patterns and rhythms of mobile technology usage.

Publications

Selected publications

Book Reviews:

Conference Papers:

Compositions