What is clear is that computer gaming
has changed and is changing as the result of greater interaction and
multiplayer formats. It is likely that games like World of
Warcraft, Sims, Second Life and so on drove greater
demand for interaction through social media like YouTube – for
example, WoW came out in 2004 and the first
lets play (LP) video was supposedly created in 2007. The growth
in gaming itself, whether online, on smart devices, etc. has no doubt
contributed to the emergence and growth of LPs as well. One
particularly important gaming development, in my mind at least, was
the (full) release of Minecraft
in 2011. For those living in the desert for the last three
years, Minecraft is a
sandbox, survival game. You start in a world and then collect
resources and build things; there is no real goal to the game or
limits on what you can do within it, which makes it totally different
from most other games out there. It is, moreover, rather ugly –
blocky, pixelly, etc. However, the freedom it allows players has
meant that people can create their own worlds – in creative mode –
and then play games in them with other players online. As I mentioned
in the last post, one popular Minecraft
game is a version of Hunger Games.
Anyway,
alongside the social aspects of LPs (and other online gaming), there
is an economic
aspect to them as well – especially on YouTube. What YouTube allows
players to do is monetize
their videos – i.e. videos of themselves playings computer
games. Any YouTuber can do it, not just gamers. The basic dynamics
are as follows – also see video by LPer NovaWar
on whole process:
- You start a YouTube account and start uploading videos (of whatever);
- Once your videos start getting 10k views, YouTube invites you to become a 'partner';
- Once you become a partner, you can monetize your videos (through account settings);
- Monetization basically means attaching various types of adverts to your videos (e.g. before it starts, as a transparent overlay, alongside);
- You get revenue from advertising per 1000 views (or similar);
- YouTube gets 45% of revenues from these adverts, which is how it makes its money;
- ... that's basically it.
All this might sound wonderful – “money for nothing”. Videos of cute things – e.g. animals (especially fluffy ones), babies, etc. - can make a mint; an example of this is the video of the stoned kid coming back from a trip to the dentist. But not everything is rosy in the garden. Advertising revenues on YouTube, for example, are declining and there is growing competition from other YouTubers. These things aside ...
Making money, as is probably obvious,
depends on how popular your videos are, which is based on how popular
you are, how popular what you do is, and also (probably) has a lot to
do with how interactive you are (i.e. making comments) on YouTube and
other social media formats (e.g. Twitter).
Ok, let's get “academic” about this
then – not
that I'm first to do this, obviously!
To me LPs represent a great example of
what autonomist Marxists call 'cognitive capitalism' (Yann
Moulier Boutang), 'immaterial labour' (Maurizio
Lazzarato), 'affective economies' (Christian
Marazzi), etc. Basically, what these thinkers are highlighting is
that activities, relationships, emotions, behaviours, tastes,
personalities, etc. can all be exploited like physical labour in
capitalism. So, when it comes to shopping, we are putting in work
as arbiters of taste (e.g. buying fashion magazines, following
trends, etc.) as much as labourers in factories somewhere overseas –
we are “prosumers”; when it comes to something like social media,
we are putting in work through our emotional and social
connections to friends and families – Facebook can exploit these
links through selling advertising but only because we manage these
relationships; when it comes to something like YouTube, we are
putting in work as
personalities – we are being funny, interesting, etc. in order to
monetize our videos. While most LPers are not necessarily doing this –
most seem to need to continue in other forms of work – this form of
(cognitive, immaterial, affective) work represents both a possibility
for liberation from capitalist imperatives and the subsumption of our
personalities, emotions, relationships, etc. to those imperatives.
There you go, the end of something
different ...
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