The Moral Calculus of Vocational Passion in Digital Gaming

Introduction

From volunteer moderation of community forums and esports to the shift work of play-testing, the circuits of game production are accelerated by players’ passionate engagements as fans and hobbyists, which are entangled with their professional ambitions to join the industry. Vocational passion energizes social, cultural, and organizational practices that create economic value for companies, yet drains workers and aspirants through class-based expectations to compromise employment security in “doing what you love.” This romantic orientation toward livelihood operates through an ensemble of discourses, architectures, and administrative measures in popular culture, education, and industry (McRobbie 2016). Hobbyists aspire to professionalize their media participation. However, these aspirations are restrained by outdated ideas about how the freedom and flexibility of hobbies are sullied by pragmatic concerns about wages.

Ideas about how pecuniary pressures compromise passionate endeavors are seen as a holdover from industrialization’s segregation of work from recreation. This segregation was facilitated by the mediating category of hobbies, which became institutionalized as productive forms of leisure. This article discusses how gaming hobbyists rationalize vocational passion’s promise and precariousness, its future potential and present obligations, and its public celebration and private contritions. I argue that a moral calculus of compensation synchronizes seemingly contradictory forms of vocational passion: the passion that is corruptible by concerns about livelihood and the passion that sublimates that livelihood from drudgery. The moralizing of passionate work as compensation for job insecurity and workaholism also patterns how leisure careers stand in for waning narratives of occupational development.

Hobbies gained their meaning by buffering industrialization’s separation of labor and leisure activities into the liminal category of “productive leisure” (Gelber 1999). Hobbies have generally been valued for mimicking the productivity of industrial labor but under more flexible and fulfilling circumstances. The freedom in the home workshop, for example, was imagined to redeem the work ethic from the supervision and repetition that dominated the Fordist factory. Hobbies were promoted by institutions and businesses as a restorative practice that psychically and physically compensated for the negative aspects of employment. However, as factories automate and home workshops digitize and commercialize, the meaning of hobbies is changing.

In pursuit of careers that harmonize labor and leisure, many aspirants commit to performing uncompensated work in hopes of future payoff (Kuehn and Corrigan 2013). According to ideologies about passionate work, economic security is an acceptable trade-off for self-fulfillment (Neff 2012). Research on creative industries has investigated this sacrificial ethos (Ross 2000), its neoliberal subjectivity of entrepreneurialism (Gill 2014), and its affective configuration of anxiety and self-blame (Berardi 2009). This study contributes to this scholarship by interrogating the logical inconsistencies in romantic orientations toward work. Highlighting this dissonance can encourage critical reflection on personal desires and reconfiguration of collective narratives about vocational passion and its anachronistic morality of compensation. This analysis also contributes to digital games research by showing how value creation and professional development in gaming hobbies are translated into gaming careers in uneven ways.

This argument is based on participant observation with players of the online game EVE Online and World of Darkness role-playing franchise, developed by CCP Games. ¹ Over eighteen months in 2013 and 2014, I spoke to players in Boston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Reykjavik as they attended fan and industry events, volunteered for co-creative development, and looked for work in the industry. I also conducted twenty player interviews. ² These events typically featured programming for players hoping to join the industry, which took the form of workshops on game design, job advice panels, and recruitment booths.

Vocational Passion

Four days a year, downtown Atlanta is taken over by tens of thousands of fans and gamers attending “Dragon Con,” a multi-genre convention featuring panels, workshops, photo shoots, tournaments, and dance parties. The streets and walkways teem with cosplayers parading their DIY science fiction and fantasy costumes for cameras and smartphones, while the convention centers buzz with panels of actors, authors, and developers sharing their expertise and experiences. One panel was called “Join the Video Game Industry!” and featured designers, programmers, artists, and animators from renowned studios. The room was packed with around eighty young students, freelancers, and job seekers who took turns asking the panel questions about how to stand out in a crowded field of hopefuls by networking, building portfolios, and getting training.

The overwhelming advice was for game industry aspirants to go above and beyond traditional recruitment channels to gain visibility in online fan communities. This included contributing positive criticism, steering conversations back on message, and galvanizing support for developers on player forums. This also included volunteering at brand events and creating fan art or mods. With the exception of the programmer, the panelists emphasized that getting hired entailed “taking it upon yourself to build a community.” Community managers in the digital game industry are expected to display their knowledge of games and encourage players to feel like they are part of a community of interest by producing content for social media (Kerr and Kelleher 2015). Even for those seeking jobs outside of community management, the panel’s advice was to contribute user-generated content (UGC), which sustains consumer engagement and creates value for companies.

John Banks (2013) emphasizes that UGC is integral to multiplayer online games, which are not finished products but are continually updated services that thrive on player engagement. When performed in the hopes of securing future permanent full-time employment, UGC can be considered “venture labor” (Neff 2012). This is performed by jobseekers who talk about their work in entrepreneurial ways, as an investment rather than wages, and think about the personal risk they undertake as acceptable and even cool.

Risk gives the appearance of choice, power, and individual agency, which drove many players I interviewed to perform unpaid UGC as well as underpaid freelance gigs. Jake, a white, male developer from North Carolina in his late twenties, recounted to me that the first game writing he published was a set of short stories contracted through an online freelance exchange for a World of Darkness game line. As we watched cosplayers in latex Star Trek uniforms get wet for photographers at Dragon Con’s gothic-themed pool party, the developer stated that he was a fan of the franchise and was honored to write for it. Even though the freelance pay was dismal, he rationalized that it was worthwhile because the work experience led to his current permanent, full-time position writing for AAA titles. When I asked about his work conditions, Jake admitted that the company was known to indiscriminately lay off workers according to the roles required for different stages of production. Such precarious employment and pressures to work overtime pervade the game industry (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009). Jake articulated these trade-offs and concluded that his current position was probably as close as he could get to his dream job.

These compromises and justifications are part of acceptable trade-offs between pain and pleasure in the creative industries, wherein chronic employment insecurity is an acceptable price to pay for passionate work (McRobbie 2016). This was evident at the Dragon Con panel when someone from the audience challenged the advice to contribute UGC to DeviantArt.com on the grounds that the popular content sharing platform’s copyright policies are exploitative, allowing it to resell illustrations without compensating creators. The artist on the panel insisted that his peers have found paid work through the platform, and that “if you weigh the risk-reward there, you’re probably better off putting your stuff on Deviant[Art].”

Crucially, this calculation of risk and reward has an affective and moral dimension. For example, one panelist recounted how he created animations before it became his job and would continue doing it even if it was not his job. He stated that developers do not start out designing, programming, or animating because they want to boost their résumé, get a job, get rich, “or to make money necessarily.” They do it because they love what they are doing and value what they produce. These uncompensated forms of venture labor are motivated not just by the hope of future work, but by the ideal of self-realization through passionate work (Duffy 2017). Andrew Ross (2000) maintains that cultural workers’ willingness to accept deeply discounted compensation for their labor is a part of long-standing sacrificial beliefs held by artists. The Romantic separation of art and culture from the commodity production of industrialization meant that pecuniary neglect of artists often translated into cultural credit. Today, this sacrificial ethos has spread from the margins of Bohemia to economic centers of production.

This rhetoric of vocational passion, known in popular culture by the motto “do what you love” (DWYL), was once reserved for artists, mystics, or aristocrats, but has diffused to the professional classes (Tokumitsu 2015). Over the past thirty years, DWYL has been actively promoted by businesses and self-help books, replacing company loyalty as a way to persuade employees to prioritize their job above other obligations (Gershon 2017). Based on beliefs that the road to self-discovery and personal fulfillment is through work, vocational passion enjoins game industry workers and aspirants to align their efforts, hobbies, and desires with their employers’ interests.

Compensatory Morality

Developers invited to speak at job advice panels possess economic security and personal confidence, which elude most who seek to professionalize their hobbies. A majority of the players I interviewed were in their late twenties to thirties. Some had stable jobs in administrative or technical roles, while others had less stable jobs in the service industry or were looking for work. Many of them vacillated between a desire to harmonize leisure and labor and resignation about its economic and social costs. Although many spoke out against the structural aspects of employment in the game industry, their unfulfilled ambitions were still felt as personal failures. For these aspirants, the flipside of the choice, power, and individual agency celebrated by vocational passion and venture labor was self-doubt and self-blame.

Many hobbyists I met expressed this range of emotions from indignation to anxiety according to a distinctly compensatory way of thinking about trade-offs and compromises that was tinged with moralistic undertones. One of these hobbyists was Greg, a white man in his early thirties who worked full-time as an administrative manager. He spent all his time outside work planning for tabletop games, making props for live-action role-playing, and playing strategy video games. As we paced the halls at the Penny Arcade Expo, a large gaming convention held annually in South Boston, he told me about freelance writing he contracted through online exchanges. Greg emphasized that he never seriously sought a career in the game industry because he did not want to get stuck doing noncreative tasks, such as technical writing and indexing, for little money:

If I had to endure all the boring shit work that comes with joining a game company, the things that I love—writing and games—wouldn’t be so fun anymore. That’s why, when I graduated from my Masters [in public administration], I had a choice: try to get into the [game] industry or get a real person job . . . I still love games, but I don’t need it to be my job.

Greg articulates a moral choice between a childish pipe dream and the realities and responsibilities of adulthood. His administrative position was “just a job,” but it had reasonable hours, decent salary, and benefits. Greg said he could not wait around hoping to land his dream job when he had bills to pay. Such moral choices about “right” and “wrong” career choices necessarily inform economic arrangements such as employment (Hesmondhalgh 2017) and practices such as jobseeking. Concerns about livelihood, while jarringly absent from the Dragon Con panel, were unavoidable for many hobbyists I met. For example, one white man supported his family of four as a computer programmer while developing role-playing games as a side gig. Another worked in web development quality assurance while volunteering on online game forums for a shot at joining a community management team. Others worked as lab assistants and food servers while supporting their side hustles in the game industry. Many of these hobbyists struggled to reconcile working-class jobs with middle-class values of freedom and self-expression through work (McRobbie 2016).

Proponents of DWYL, such as the Dragon Con panelists who downplayed wages, rely on a skewed harmonization of leisure and labor which emphasizes the freedom and fervor of hobbies while relegating employment rights and remuneration. Because doing what you love is not an occupation but a vocation, it is rightfully sullied by monetary concerns. This idea of purity and corruption is observable in Greg’s decision to get a “real person job” instead of sapping the fun out of games through boring entry-level work. This compensatory way of thinking is traceable to ideologies about play and hobbies as liminal categories. Many professional esports gamers, for example, talked about what they did as a hobby and struggled with the idea of making money from their play (Taylor 2012). Part of this was because they perceive play as a “magic circle,” where rules and motivations should remain uncorrupted by external social or economic concerns.

Leisure activities are corruptible by labor concerns because leisure and labor are understood as fundamentally separate domains, where the benefits of one compensate for the deficiencies of the other. Traditionally, leisure is a sphere of one’s life in which to exercise personal choices about what to do and how to do it, as compared to the domain of work, where one is subject to behavioral restrictions (Rojek 2010). Hobbies have been promoted by institutions, industry, and popular culture as productive forms of leisure that reinforce fundamental patterns found in labor, such as diligence, persistence, and organization. However, unlike jobs with fixed hours, hobbies allow people to engage in enterprises of their own choice, at their own pace, in their own homes. This contrasts with the alienating conditions of industrial work, which is marked by repetition, supervision, and task segmentation. Hobbies are valued in capitalist societies because they provide freedom and pleasure while still emphasizing productivity (Gelber 1999). However, to remain hobbies, “productive pastimes must produce items of value whose value remains secondary” (Gelber 1999, 35). The liminal category of productive leisure applies even to its professionalization, whereby the value hobbyists create (for companies) must remain incidental.

It is within this ideological paradigm that vocational passion expects complete devotion from laboring subjects while relegating remuneration. Indifference toward pecuniary compensation may also be compounded by the waning of the understanding of work as drudgery. Kathi Weeks (2011) maintains that the belief that working hours give one the right to recreation is a moral cornerstone of Western industrialism. By this logic, if pleasure and self-realization are found in work, the moral case to reward work with leisure time and wages would appear to be weakened.

The liminality of professionalized hobbies as productive leisure whose value must remain incidental also induces anxiety. This is because while professionalizing one’s passion is irresistible, it is also elusive. At the Penny Arcade Expo, Greg denounced a career in gaming as lacking the qualities of a “real-person job,” yet he blamed himself for still wanting to DWYL. Even though he did not expect to transform his gaming hobbies into a livelihood, he admired those who had the fortune and tenacity to turn their passions into full-time work. Greg said he envied that even though I was not involved in making games, by researching and writing about games, at least “you’re doing what you love.”

A Lopsided Love Affair

Compensatory thinking has deep roots in Western culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1940) proposed that in the universe there is a “justice” operative in the form of compensation, which functions through metaphysical checks and balances to bring actions and effects into a moral and material equilibrium. Whatever ideal of balance between labor and leisure was imagined through the industrial category of hobbies is eroded by the dream of its professionalization. Many hobbyists I spoke to did not see professionalization in terms of clear outlines of justice or balance. Instead, their aspirations were mired in the blurred categories of working life and its identities. A form of ambiguity has always been present in hobbies. For example, many post-war ham radio operators worked in technical fields and exploited the ambiguity in their status as both amateurs and professionals, when exerting their independence as men of leisure and seeking credit for technological developments, respectively (Haring 2007).

Today, the liminality of productive leisure functions in inverse ways: it is not as much a claim to independence as it is a badge of professionalism. I interviewed several hobbyists who framed their leisure as a career that included the progression of skill, responsibility, and status that was acknowledged within durable communities of practice. One of these hobbyists was Ned, a white man in his late twenties who held a string of jobs as a play-tester for several large game studios. This was a contract-based position involving eight-hour shifts methodically playing through segments of content in repetitive cycles, to ensure that there were no bugs in the software. Ned was one of 600 workers organized in three 8-hour shifts in a warehouse, who tested content around the clock. He never stayed at one position for longer than one year because companies often “pumped and dumped” play-testers according to product development cycles.

Even though it is related to gaming hobbies, play-testing did not offer the freedom and pleasure promised by vocational passion. Quality Assurance testers employ cognitive skills in the production of digital game commodities, but their work is qualitatively different and physically separate from creative work performed under the flexible conditions of new economy businesses (Bulut 2015). Testers see themselves as “second-class citizens” in companies where they are distinct from the middle-class club of designers, programmers, and producers that many aspire to join. Testers are part of “digital assembly lines,” which are highly rationalized, repetitive, and regulated in ways that are digitally surveilled, analyzed, and micromanaged (Head 2005). As Anna Ozimek documents in this special issue, testers are a class of precarious and highly supervised workers who perform a vital role within the international division of digital game labor.

As compared to the anonymity and transience of the play-testing warehouse, Ned was an avid player of EVE Online and a longtime member of World of Darkness Internet forums and live-action groups. Even though he recently moved to Boston, he knew players in the local clubs and boardgame stores from conventions he attended over the years. Ned also volunteered for storytelling and coordination positions in these communities and proudly listed his positions, roles, and accomplishments within the World of Darkness fan community in what he called his “club résumé.” He emphasized that it took a lot of time and work to get to where he was in the community, and that he spent at least an hour every day coordinating game activities via email with a team of ten volunteers he managed.

Markers of skill and influence in productive leisure, such as the club résumé, were important to most hobbyists in my study. Hobbies take up substantial time and resources and give rise to distinct ethoses, norms, institutions, and identities. Hobbyists devise hierarchies of capital to signal their skills and achievements and command the respect of their peers (Douglas 2004). The club résumé performs this function. This systematic pursuit of leisure activities in complex organizations often takes the structure of careers in which hobbyists acquire and express specific combinations of knowledge, skills, and experiences. ³

For many hobbyists I interviewed, hobby careers provided a kind of continuity and social esteem lacking in their work, and may have stood in for what Guy Standing (2016) calls narratives of occupational development. Employment is important to capitalist societies not only as a means of sustenance and healthcare but also to allocate social status (Weeks 2011). Not having secure employment or expected career progression affects people’s identities and relationships. Hobbies and volunteering have stepped into this role in the past. In Depression-era America, the New Deal’s “Works Progress Administration” promoted hobbies to shore up men’s self-respect and skills and preserve work values (Rojek 2010). Andrea Muehlebach (2011) describes a similar situation in post-Fordist Italy, where the state dealt with the crisis of unemployment by promoting voluntarism as an opportunity for civic belonging traditionally tethered to employment. Volunteers she interviewed at church-run nursing homes talked about their contributions as commensurable with other kinds of waged work, and deserving of the same claims to societal recognition, legal sanction, and personal identity. Such forms of recognition are also present in international volunteering programs such as the U.S. Peace Corps, where volunteers hone their professional and civic identities (Jackson and Adarlo 2016).

Entrepreneurial subjects in creative industries have to make do with individualizing strategies such as hobby careers to make up for the emotional and material fallout of structural shifts in labor processes and practices. The burdens of vocational passion fall to an individualistic and meritocratic subject who must be flexible, adaptable, sociable, and self-directing under conditions of radical uncertainty (Gill 2014). They must swallow their anxiety, shoulder their precarity, and eke out a sense of self-worth and respectability, all for a chance to (not get paid to) do what they love (Duffy 2017).

Muehlebach cautions that when people choose to work for no pay to simulate the community belonging and public dignity attached to work, it is imperative to reassess the social contract that made work a source of belonging and dignity in the first place. The social contract of Fordism—which demanded a lifetime of compliance and discipline from workers in return for purchasing rights and social inclusion—has not caught up with the material and affective realities of post-Fordist employment. When aspirants feel compelled to work for no pay to chase their dreams in the game industry, when hobbyists seek legitimacy and esteem by mimicking professional structures, it is time to reevaluate the Romantic orientation to work that underpins the post-Fordist social contract.

Conclusion: Reckoning with Toxic Romance

Work is a selfish lover. Vocational passion expects devotion and sacrifice but withholds material provisions. DWYL promises we will never work a day in our lives, but on the condition that work becomes our life. Combining leisure and labor guarantees to sublimate waged work, yet it also threatens to corrupt hobbies, as they have been and are still understood. This coupling of sublimation and corruption is not a contradiction but an ambiguity, which has been exploited by post-Fordism’s flexibilization of employment categories and laboring subjectivities. In the rhetoric of passionate work, the industrial keystones of work and toil, rest and reward, are moving targets. This ideological optimization has material, infrastructural, and emotional consequences that benefit companies at the expense of workers.

Creative industry research has investigated waged work’s imagined corruption of hobbies in esports (Taylor 2012), co-creative game development (Banks 2013), and post-war home workshops (Gelber 1999). My analysis contributes to these efforts to make sense of the changing relationship between leisure and labor by highlighting vocational passion’s ideological continuities, logical inconsistencies, and affective ambivalences. This article contributes to critical understandings of the new economy by specifying how discourses about vocational fervor are products not just of technological innovation, economic transformation, and corporate culture, but also of entrenched ideas about productivity, flexibility, and leisure. Future research could examine whether gendered inflections of vocational passion in fashion and lifestyle sectors of the creative industry (Duffy 2017; McRobbie 2016) extend to different roles in game development.

Two metaphors coil around the laboring subjectivity of vocational passion: love and exchange interweave to form individual binds, or collective lifelines. Extending the metaphor of vocational passion’s inequitable compromises and duplicitous promises is a step toward cultivating reflexivity in attitudes and practices around hobbies and their professionalization. Instead of individualizing strategies that dominate neoliberal entrepreneurialism, public narratives are needed to reflect upon what hobbies and jobs could and should mean beyond industrial-era notions of productivity. This discursive strategy can augment resistance through the framework of labor rights to steer popular culture toward more inclusive and sustainable interpretations of productivity. The alternative to DWYL and passionate labor will not be found in the absence of passion but rather in its redirection (Sandoval 2018). By teasing out the threads of fervor, devotion, and intoxication on one hand and compensation, justice, and balance on the other, this analysis offers discursive resources to interrogate our desires, to question employment structures, and to reconfigure the moral calculus between productive leisure and purposeful livelihood.