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

Please see below the CfP for the ICA post conference: Labor and Play in 
Platform Society


Location: Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (hybrid)

Date: June 18, 2025
Registration: Free
Deadline: February 7, 2025

In this ICA 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)>
<mailto:(daniel.nielsen /at/ fsv.cuni.cz) <mailto:(daniel.nielsen /at/ fsv.cuni.cz)>>

Organizers:

    * Alessandro Gandini, University of Milan
    * Gaia Casagrande, University of Milan
    * 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. /New York University Press.

Bishop, S. (2018). Anxiety, panic and self-optimization: 
Inequalities and the YouTube algorithm. /Convergence/, 24(1), 69–84.
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

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/, 2/6/(7), 1363-1380.

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.
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.

Kumar, S. (2019). The algorithmic dance: YouTube’s Adpocalypse and 
the gatekeeping of cultural content on digital platforms. /Internet 
Policy Review/, 8(2).

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