CSM 2017 - Stream Proposal
Playing games: ethics and emotions at work
Description
Huizinga suggests that games and play are primordial. From the ‘simulation’ of a hunt on the
walls of a cave at Lascaux or Altamira to the millions assiduously chasing a Tauros in the game of
Pokemon GO, we see a myriad of manifestations and purposes of play. Playfulness is advanced as a
fundamental aspect of creativity. The phrase ‘playing games’ can assume meanings from light-hearted
social trivia to the darker aspects of human behaviour in corporate politics. Roy and Burawoy have
offered an interpretation of game playing at work as a subtle means of resistance on the part of piece
workers, but one where the rules of the game being played are a tool of control on the part of
management.
The past 20 years have seen an explosion in game playing across society. Field sports like
football occupy a growing part of media reportage, sometimes to the exclusion of standard news
reports. We have seen the growth of a massive video game industry as the technologies developed to
support it. More recently, beginning with the German inspired genre of ‘Eurogame’, there has been a
remarkable resurgence of invention in ‘traditional’ physical board games. This is exemplified by the
recent opening in many cities of board game cafes, where families and friends meet to socialise and
play. Both of these developments parallel, but are separate from, the idea of ‘gamification’ that has
appeared in the educational community as an addition to the tools and methods of teaching and
learning.
Firms have begun to appear, like Uber or Deliveroo, that have little more apparent substance
than an app on a smartphone, that own no infrastructure or traditional assets, and have little
relationship, personal or legal, with the people who work for them. The financial industry must now
consider the potential of a peer to peer ledger technology (as currently exemplified by Bitcoin) that
some predictions say will entirely revolutionise that industry and render banks (as physical structures)
redundant within twenty years. The more the physical infrastructure disappears the more we seem to
inhabit a virtual game-like world. Does the playful term ‘gig economy’ fully capture its implications?
How far may this process proceed, and what kind of effects might it have on our society?
This thread offers the opportunity to consider aspects of the study of human relations and
organisation studies from a perspective that the discipline has largely ignored: that of play, the
purpose of play, and games. Metaphors of game and play abound in the literature, yet the deeper
implications of the use of these terms—social, ethical or political—have either been dismissed or only
superficially explored.
Suggested topics and areas of interest
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Traditional distinctions between work and non-work (play/games)
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Organisations like Google that integrate games and play into the work context
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The ethics of games. Games have there own ethic – e.g. bluffing is okay in poker – while
more general ethical concepts can be seen as emergent phenomena that emerge through gameplaying but transcend particular games
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The link between games and theory
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Games and money/currencies; Bitcoin as a game
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Affect and emotion as central to games; ways to bed these deeper into organisation studies
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Games in teaching (role-playing games)
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Academic games
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Casino capitalism
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Games and the carnivalesque
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Gamification as a phenomenon of interest
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Games and temporality - the construction of time through game; long and short games
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The performativity of games
The proposed theme of this stream is relatively novel (and open) and this makes it difficult to predict
the scale of responses. However, the subject matter is current and important, and the subthemes it
embraces highly relevant to the future of our discipline. We anticipate that it is likely to prove of
particular interest to doctoral students, to technology graduates and to scholars working in the area of
change and innovation.
Indicative Bibliography
Burawoy, Michael (1979) Manufacturing consent: Changes in the labor process under monopoly
capitalism. University of Chicago Press.
Caillois, Roger and Barash, Meyer (1961/2001) Man, play, and games. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella Selega (1975) Beyond boredom and anxiety:
The experience of play in work and games. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Flanagan, Mary and Nissenbaum, Helen Fay (2014) Values at play in digital games. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Huizinga, Johan (1955) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston, MA: The
Beacon Press.
Juul, Jesper (2005) Half-real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Kavanagh, Donncha, Keohane, Kieran and Kuhling, Carmen (2011) Organization in Play. Oxford:
Peter Lang.
Malaby, Thomas (2007) 'Beyond play: A new approach to games', Games and culture, 2(2): 95-113.
Mollick, Ethan and Werbach, Kevin (2014) 'Gamification and the Enterprise', in S. P. Walz and S.
Deterding (eds.) The gameful world : approaches, issues, applications. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Roy, D. (1958) 'Banana Time', Human Organization, 18: 158–168.
Sutton-Smith, Brian (1976) The psychology of play. New York: Arno Press.
Schell, Jesse (2008) The art of game design: a book of lenses. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Sicart, Miguel (2009) The ethics of computer games. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Sicart, Miguel (2013) Beyond choices : the design of ethical gameplay. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Walz, Steffen P. and Deterding, Sebastian (eds.) (2014) The gameful world : approaches, issues,
applications. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Zimmerman, Eric (2015) 'Manifesto for a Ludic Century', in S. P. Walz and S. Deterding (eds.) The
gameful world : approaches, issues, applications. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stream convenors
Kevin Scally is a lecturer in creativity, design and innovation in the Cork University Business School,
Cork, Ireland. His research interests include information protection, property, copyright, patents,
creativity, theatre, games, and the design process. His career includes working as a graphic designer
for English National Opera and the National Theatre in London, and as a software interface designer
for Adobe Systems in the US.
Email: [email protected]
Donncha Kavanagh is Professor of Information & Organisation in the Business School at University
College Dublin, Ireland. His research interests include the sociology of knowledge and technology,
temporality, phronesis, the history and philosophy of management thought, pre-modern modes of
organizing, money, play and creativity. He has published widely in the fields of information and
organization, management, marketing, organization studies, and engineering.
Further details at
http://donnchakavanagh.com
Anthony O’Tierney is a lecturer in the University of Leicester, Leicester, UK. His research interests
include: Securitization, Derivatives Trading, Mortgage Markets, Regulation, Banking, Commercial
Law, International Law and Natural Law.
Email: [email protected]