Study On The Alienation Of College Students’ Online Game Players From The Perspective Of Digital Labor

In the Internet era,online games have become an important industry.Game companies incorporate players into the labor production process through the operation mode of digital capital,and rely on players to realize the added value of their products.From the console to the PC and then to the mobile terminal,the threshold of games is getting lower and lower,and the scale of players is expanding constantly.Online games have become an important tool for leisure,social interaction and self-realization.However,this kind of appearance hides the economic and commercial attributes of online games.Compared with the workers in traditional factories,game players work under the non-employment system.They not only pay time to work,but also bear the cost,and the degree of exploitation and alienation is further deepened.College students,as the main force of online games,are embedded in the game industry chain for digital labor,and become free producers and porters.Based on the perspective of communication political economy,this study takes college students online game players as the research object,mainly adopts the method of questionnaire survey,interview and other research methods,places digital labor in China’s special economic and social context,and discusses the problem of college students’ alienation in online games.This paper consists of five chapters.The first chapter mainly introduces the basis for selecting college students as the research object,and sorts out the previous domestic and foreign studies on digital labor and alienation.The second chapter,based on the research perspective of the audience view of the critical school of communication political economy,discusses how the digital labor group in online games is born,and then analyzes the control mechanism and exploitation logic of game platform for digital labor.The third chapter analyzes the control and exploitation of digital labor in online games of college students on the basis of analyzing the causes,forms and characteristics of alienated labor by investigating online game players of college students.The fourth chapter returns to the foothold of this paper,combining with Marx’s theory of labor alienation,to interpret the alienated labor of college students’ digital labor in online games.The fifth chapter summarizes and puts forward some guiding strategies for the struggle against alienated labor.The research finds that the boundary between work and entertainment in digital labor is broken.Compared with the traditional labor,the digital labor in online games of college students is not only under individual control,but also shows new characteristics of labor exploitation and alienation.On the surface,players enjoy leisure entertainment,but in fact they become free laborers of the game platform.Under the discipline of the game platform,they take the initiative to use their leisure time for labor production,resulting in the dissolution of individual subjectivity and alienation of interpersonal relations.Participatory digital labor under the appearance of entertainment needs to arouse vigilance and reflection.