Digital Culture & Society (Dcs): Laborious Play and Playful Work II - Paperback

by Pablo Abend (Editor), Sonia Fizek (Editor), Mathias Fuchs (Editor)

The issue on Playful Work is the second part of the double issue of Digital Culture & Society Laborious Play and Playful Work. The double issue addresses the complex thematic field of play and labour dialectics. The articles take a closer look at the problem of play and work from two overlapping, albeit non-mutually exclusive, perspectives: laborious play and playful work. With these terms we want to focus hybrid practices, phenomena and situations beyond the work-play dichotomy. After focusing on leisure activities turning into laborious ones, this second issue looks at playful work. The concept of playful works includes promises of a joyful and rewarding working experience which have been promoted as gamification. Playful work can be related to the concept of ludification of culture, embedded in cultural transformations he observed as part of the digital.

Author Biography

Pablo Abend (PhD) is the scientific coordinator of the Research School »Locating Media« at the University of Siegen. He is interested in geomedia, situated methodologies, participatory culture, and Science and Technology Studies.

Sonia Fizek (Dr.) is a digital games, design and media scholar. She was senior lecturer in the School of Informatics and Design at Abertay University in Dundee. Before joining Abertay, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Fizek is an active member of the research community as an associate editor of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and a board member for multiple initiatives and journals, such as: Digital Culture and Society Journal, Digital Games Research Association (British DiGRA), Replay. The Polish Journal of Game Studies, and Journal of the Philosophy of Games, amongst many others. Her current research focuses on the relationship between digital games and automation. She looks at self-playing games, automated gameplay, and algorithmic players to understand the essence of and the fascination with self-acting playful systems.

Mathias Fuchs (Dr.) is an artist, musician and media scholar. He is the director of the Gamification Lab at Leuphana University in Lüneburg. He is a pioneer in the field of game art and is a leading scholar in game studies and directs a project on Gamification that is funded by the German Research Council (2018-2021). Karin Wenz (Dr.) is an assistant professor of Media Culture at Maastricht University, Netherlands, and director of studies of the MA Media Culture.