[Commlist] CFP ICA post conference - Labor and Play in Platform Society

- Event: ICA post conference
- Theme: Labor and Play in Platform Society
- Place: Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (hybrid)
- Dates: June 18, 2025
- Registration: Free
- Deadline: February 7, 2025

In this post conference, we will address the various forms of platform 
labor that take shape in the context of games and play.
Scholarship on ‘creator culture’ (Cunningham & Craig, 2021) and digital 
labor on social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok has 
shown how platforms infrastructure and governance condition the work of 
content creators (Bishop, 2018; Gregersen & Ørmen, 2021; Kumar, 2019). 
For example, while YouTube videos prioritize followers and TikTok 
prioritizes content, advertisements, and subscriptions (subbing) all 
determine how content creators work and broadcast, underlining the 
ideological nature of these platforms by pushing the exploitation of 
laboring bodies further.
On streaming services such as Twitch and YouTube, content creators’ 
ability to build a following has been referred to as viewer or audience 
engagement. These strategies can range from streamers actively 
encouraging emotional engagement by using humor, adapting to viewer 
wishes, or responsivity in rapid succession on the side of the content 
creator. Media scholars perceive this as aspirational (Duffy, 2022), 
hope (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013), or relational labor (Baym, 2018) that can 
be both physically and emotionally taxing. For game scholars, this is 
also the platform convergence of labor and play, as in the pursuit of 
interactivity with an audience, creators find themselves increasingly 
engaged in a mode of gamification (Deterding et al., 2011), such as 
setting donation targets sometimes in competition with other streamers 
(Johnson & Woodcock, 2019). These strategies can be viewed as 
monetization attempts or seen as ‘gamification-from-below’ where 
creators gamify their lives to make it through. But one of the most 
pressing questions is, how does this configuration of play and labor 
constitute working? What existing worker vocabulary, such as gig-work, 
freelancing, entrepreneur, or platform work akin to annotation or Amazon 
Mechanical Turk workers adequately describe digital workers at the 
intersection of play and labor?
This preconference invites scholars to reflect and discuss the 
configuration of labor, games, and play in a contemporary platform 
society defined by neoliberal markets and global exchanges of capital 
and labor.
While the outline above uses streaming services as an example, we 
welcome submissions addressing all kinds of work that addresses labor 
and/or play in, while not limited to, the context of games

Paper topics could include (but are not limited to):
- Platform monetization strategies
- Gamification of digital labor
- Laborification of play
- Labor in creator culture
- Platform governance
- Exploitation of Digital Labor
- Platform algorithms
- Platform policies and creator autonomy

Submission instructions:
Please submit an abstract of 250-500 words that provides an overview of 
the presentation’s topic and includes a title, and reference list. 
Submissions should include names, institutions, contact details of all 
authors, and indicate whether the submission is for remote or in-person 
attendance.
Submission deadline: February 7, 2025
Submissions sent to: (daniel.nielsen /at/ fsv.cuni.cz) 
<mailto:(daniel.nielsen /at/ fsv.cuni.cz)>

Organizers:

  * Alessandro Gandini, Milan University
  * Gaia Casagrande, Milan University
  * Anne Mette Thorhauge, Copenhagen University
  * Daniel Nielsen, Charles University, in Prague

References
Baym, N. (2018). Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the 
Intimate Work of Connection. 
https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479896165.001.0001 
<https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479896165.001.0001>
Bishop, S. (2018). Anxiety, panic and self-optimization: Inequalities 
and the YouTube algorithm. Convergence, 24(1), 69–84. 
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517736978 
<https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517736978>
Cunningham, S., & Craig, D. (2021). Creator Culture: An Introduction to 
Global Social Media Entertainment. NYU Press.
Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., & Nacke, L. (2011). From game 
design elements to gamefulness: Defining “gamification.” Proceedings of 
the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future 
Media Environments, 9–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/2181037.2181040 
<https://doi.org/10.1145/2181037.2181040>
Duffy, B. E. (2022). (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender and 
Aspirational Labor in the Social Media Economy. Yale University Press.
Gregersen, A., & Ørmen, J. (2021). The output imperative: Productivity 
and precarity on YouTube. Information, Communication & Society, 0(0), 
1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.2006745 
<https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.2006745>
Johnson, M. R., & Woodcock, J. (2019). “And Today’s Top Donator is”: How 
Live Streamers on Twitch.tv Monetize and Gamify Their Broadcasts. Social 
Media + Society, 5(4), 2056305119881694. 
https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119881694 
<https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119881694>
Kuehn, K., & Corrigan, T. F. (2013). Hope Labor: The Role of Employment 
Prospects in Online Social Production. The Political Economy of 
Communication, 1(1), Article 1. 
https://www.polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/9 
<https://www.polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/view/9>
Kumar, S. (2019). The algorithmic dance: YouTube’s Adpocalypse and the 
gatekeeping of cultural content on digital platforms. Internet Policy 
Review, 8(2).
https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/algorithmic-dance-youtubes-adpocalypse-and-gatekeeping-cultural-content-digital 
<https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/algorithmic-dance-youtubes-adpocalypse-and-gatekeeping-cultural-content-digital>


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