A Research On Immaterial Labor Of Game Worker In New Media Context

The development of new media and the advent of the information age have given birth to new forms of labor.With the gradual rise of knowledge workers,the shift from material labor to immaterial labor has emerged in western developed countries and gradually started to spread in developing countries.As knowledge worker in the new media age,game workers are engaged in the immaterial work of producing cultural products,and their working methods are becoming more technical,creative and collaborative.As an important medium of communication,online games play a very important role in the social communication system.This paper focuses on the production of online games,combined with the theory of immaterial labor and the theory of communication political economy,take the mobile game workers as the research object,and study their immaterial labor process through the qualitative research methods of depth interviews,to explore the current Chinese game practitioners of the real labor status and labor characteristics,as well as the development difficulties encountered at this stage.This thesis found that,as an immaterial labor who produce cultural products,mobile game workers face a relatively unstable state of labor control,which came from capital,markets and corporate governance.At the same time,game workers are dominated by labor under flexible production,with the line between play and work disappearing,replaced by the extension of working hours and the occupation of private space by work.In addition,the production methods based on informatization makes it necessary to continuously learn the skills and abilities of cross-types of work,and the bottom practitioners face the danger of their own creativeness being gradually deprived of their own,or even becoming "passers-by" in the production line of gaming products,having to engage in a large number of repetitions Sexual work.The author attempts to think through the existing problems of Chinese game industry in treating practitioners and hopes to open more space for the future development of non-material laborers.At the same time,I also hope that by exploring the relationship between communication and labor,we can provide some reference for the dissemination of immaterial labor studies in Communication.