Labour and Gaming

Should we consider the gamer as a worker?


Photo by John Sting on Unsplash
There are some abstract thoughts on my mind regarding labour and gaming. Gaming would have never been considered as work until recently, since it had always to do with pleasure and fun without any financial reward.

Recently though, there has been examples such as the Auction House in the PC version of Diablo 3, where someone could sell items to other players exchanging real money. This was the only — so far — legal and transparent case of exchanging real money between players on a virtual community. In most of the popular MMORPGs there have been reported cases where players have sold items or even their whole accounts exchanging real money but all these exchanges took place outside the virtual community “illegally”!

Thing is of course that in both cases people use a software to generate content based on the tools provided within the terms of the software, similar though to any other business application!

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