Here's an idea, all work and no play
is exactly what happens, because everything you do that's play
is also work.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Over the past couple weeks I have
been playing Witcher 3, which is a massive, well designed,
beautiful, story driven game that I hate and dread playing.
[BREATHING DEEPLY] Feels good to get that out.
OK, OK, OK.
I don't really hate the Witcher, though to be perfectly honest,
I might not like Geralt very much.
He is very stern, and all he does is grumble.
There's just, there's so much grumbling.
[GRUMBLING]
Damn doublets chafing my armpits.
Really what I hate is the fact that the Witcher is a 100 plus
hour game that all of my friends are playing and talking
about at the same time they're talking about the new season
of "Orange is the New Black" and "Jurassic World" and "Sense8"
and now that the Martian movie got announced everybody's
like, dude you gotta read "The Martian,"
and I am just one man.
Just one man, there are only so many hours in the day.
It's 24, in case you're wondering.
Of course, I am one man in the rather particular position
of talking about all of these kinds of things for a job,
but I have had this conversation with you
know, normal people, though particularly
people over the age of 18.
So if you are in high school or younger
I would be curious to know what you think about this idea
that the things that we are supposed
to be doing for fun increasingly resemble drudgery.
Regardless of your age and set of responsibilities though,
if you are an active member of the culture that
produces all of this "entertainment,"
you are no doubt experiencing the onslaught of stuff at which
you might point your eyeballs.
And if you spend any amount of time on the internet,
the expectation that you be at least familiar
with a fair amount of it is always present.
The question isn't, I don't think, is it just too much?
There have been more consumables than hours in a lifetime
for quite awhile, and we haven't all collectively lost it.
Or if we have, having lost it replaced still totally
got it a very long time ago.
The question, I think, is what is
the best attitude to have towards this glut of fun?
The two guys we talked about in the remakes episode, Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkeimer, have one
particularly cantankerous perspective.
They say that the culture industry, which
remember they say exists because of capitalism's
influence on the economy of creative works,
collapses the space between leisure and labor.
They write, "capitalist production so confines
consumers, body and soul, that they
fall helpless victim to whatever is offered them," end quote.
They talk about how the economic machinery that produces culture
both sustains and commands the masses, quote, "whether at work
or at leisure, which is akin to work."
Their theories rely heavily on the idea
that much of popular culture is hegemonic,
made by one set of people and handed down to the masses
in such a way that it organizes a hierarchy of power
and influence.
Producers here with power, and consumers here without.
Producers need consumers to work in the form of spending
their free time and hard earned scrilla on entertainment
so that the producers can profit.
Ultimately though, this means that consumers have the power,
so it's up to the producers to make sure
that they don't know that.
So producers create a situation where
it feels like consumers have to spend their money
to see these things or else they are an outsider,
they don't belong, they're missing out.
And so consuming the culture that is made for them
becomes not unlike a responsibility.
Jonathon Crary channels a similar idea in his book
"24/7," where he talks about how until recently, it was only
while sleeping that one was not laboring, even passively,
through things like having eyeballs
that see advertisements.
WOMAN (VOICEOVER): It's better in a bacon bowl.
But now with the pervasiveness of the internet
and all of the content that we create and curate,
not to mention all the data that we track, record, and store,
it is all generating profits 24/7.
TV stations used to go off the air.
Radio stations would stop broadcasting.
The presses would cease for the night,
but Idea Channel is always available.
Thanks capitalism.
The counter to this is that even if we
do feel some responsibility, for whatever reason,
to consume things, there is ultimately
a continuum of investment in our own culture.
We can choose to be more or less invested in certain things.
The media police won't come to your house
and wreck up the place if you didn't watch the most
recent episode of "True Detective" or the most
recent smosh video.
Though embeds are starting to auto play on Twitter, Tumblr,
and Facebook, so who knows what's next.
WOMAN (VOICEOVER): Now everything's--
Advertisements that stop playing if you shut your eyes?
WOMAN (VOICEOVER): --in a bacon bowl.
I unplug my Kinect when I'm not using it.
I think it's terrifying.
The things we do watch, read, or play,
ideally we stick with them because they
give us a sense of accomplishment,
because they are cathartic, fulfilling, entertaining,
challenging.
Reading "Homestuck," binging on Netflix,
and playing massive open world games
can sometimes feel like work, but ultimately they
are not labor because we are in control
and they are finite tasks.
They have an ending.
We determine our own level of involvement and why.
But sometimes I do feel like I can't or at least shouldn't
skip things like the new season of "Orange is the New Black"
or "Sense8" or Witcher 3, for that matter.
Which makes them at least a little bit like work.
Which OK, you could argue that that is my problem,
and if I wasn't who I am in several senses that
wouldn't be the case.
But for me, Witcher 3 really does
solidify that there might be something to this play
is work tension, because the game is about jobs.
You take contracts.
You haggle.
That settles it then.
And after only a few hours of playing
through the main narrative, the players level
lags behind what is recommended.
So if you want to continue you have to go find work.
Witcher, of course, is not alone at this party.
The GTA games, Skyrim, Fable, Mass Effect,
Red Dead Redemption-- which I took
to calling Red Dead Errands not long before I
stopped playing it-- are all varyingly about work.
And I understand the common refrain
that we want our money's worth for the expensive games
that we are buying.
And one of the ways that we understand culturally
to provide optional additional side quests
is by taking on contracts, optional contracts.
But the question I'm asking is not if games are too long,
which is a great question that Jamin asked in his video titled
just exactly that, but rather whether or not work is the best
way to frame that length.
Never taken on a pan contract.
Witcher 3 was really just the wolfsbane
that broke the horses back.
And yes, I had saddle bags.
It cemented for me a thing I was hoping it would disapprove,
a thing that is true of video games,
especially by virtue of the possibility of their scope
and audience, but which exists in shades across much
of popular, big budget media.
That if you want to become intimately involved
in modern popular culture, you're
going to have to work for it, maybe in more ways than one.
What do you guys think?
How much work do you feel like you have to invest in play?
Let us know in the comments and I
will respond to some in next week's comment response video.
This week's comment response video is about your thoughts
on accuracy in movies.
You can see that by clicking right here.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these laboring Witchers.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit.
Links in the doobly doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from Evan Maltby
who points us towards an art project
where a woman made a billboard displaying
just a single word that she wanted to be the only person
to use.
It's really good.
[MUSIC PLAYING]