Work online, work like a MMOG
The article was published in December 2005 on www.e-xecutive.ru Relevance has not yet lost. By the way, this same relevance at the same time and potent. I think it will still be useful for someone. So:
Volodymyr Khupova, Valery Shlykov, Ukrainian CORRECT Group
Work online, work like a MMOG.
')
1. Reality online
2. Our whole life is a game. MMOG phenomenon
3. Labor yesterday and today. Labor as a MMOG
Work in exchange for money? Labor time and rest time? Positive emotions belong exclusively to family and leisure? These theses already belong to the past. The future is for emotional work that brings satisfaction, for work that does not compete with family, rest and leisure, because it has absorbed it all in itself, for relaxed and intense activity, which is needed primarily because it gives a sense of freedom, self-expression and self-invention. A company that understands this first among its competitors, who will be able to convince its employees that they do not work “for an uncle” or for the worthy future of their children, but live a full, emotionally attractive life, communicating, having fun and creating, such a company will be stronger . The company of the future is a clan, united not by a building, not by goods and services, but by ideas and history, together with friendly rivalry, making it a single and living organism. Two main conditions are necessary for what can be said to be tangible: the liberation of a person from caring for the satisfaction of his immediate needs and the virtualization of his own self. The first condition achieved in the course of NTP allows us to live in order to create, not work to survive, the second frees us from primitive and therefore outdated self-preservation instincts that limit our courage, our risk, our freedom. In the virtual world everything is possible, not going beyond the conventional rules of the game; the virtual world becomes that all, eliminating the distinction between work and rest, work and home, game and earnestness. If you are ready to receive satisfaction from work, bordering on excitement and passion; if you perceive your superiors not as people who owe you money, but as top-rated leaders who help you get it; if success for you is inseparable from a team game, and a team game is an exciting adventure for your virtual (and most likely several), then you are already in a game in a game called Reality Online.
1. Reality online
What is meant by "reality on-line" (RO)? First of all, the Internet and the total presence of computer equipment (gadgets). This reality is characterized by numerous epithets hinting at its network and electronic status: "cyber-", "no-", "online-", "WEB-", "network". However, virtual reality with the prefix “cyber” is not only the “Lawnmower” S. King or “Neuromant” by W. Gibson, but already a completely “real” communication field in which things are replaced by images, information is no longer advertising the product, but It requires advertising itself, the senses interact with electronic devices, and without them, they (for example, the sense of smell) are superfluous. The famous cyborg professor Steve Mann, looking at the world through electronic eyes-video cameras and having adapted to cyberspace for 20 years so that a temporary outage led to loss of orientation and injury; his cyber-colleague Kevin Warwick, who implanted himself a silicone chip transmitter, which allowed him to “open doors, call elevators, turn on the computer from a distance”, and now he plans to do the same thing only with connecting the chip to the nerve; techno-nomad Stephen Roberts, whose bike is computerized to clean the Shuttle - all these are the pioneers of cyber-reality, today giving the opportunity to imagine the metamorphosis that await us all tomorrow.
What is the nature of such a reality? First of all, a special perception of time and space. The virtual space of the Network is multimedia: this means that instead of three dimensions of physical space, we are dealing with an unmeasured stream of pure perception, which does not have a strict grid of coordinates, but has a branching structure of hyperlinks, links and combinations that permeate it. In modern cosmology, there is a similar theory of superstrings, in the postmodern philosophy they talk about rhizome and hypertext, theorists of modern economics talk about the pluralism of netocrats. All this is easily incorporated into the general concept of virtualization of a “hard” reality, more precisely, the derealization of reality in general, reality as such. Along with space, the perception of time is also subject to qualitative metamorphosis. From “on-air time” (air time, that is, linearly and irreversibly current), it turns into “on-line time” with a non-linear speed known for reversibility (save / load), unstable variability, branching and dead-end processes. This perception of space and time allows you to go beyond some of the strict limitations of the physical continuum, and find yourself in the region of fundamental lack of rigor, variability, convention, which can be characterized by the classical concept of "game".
Finally, the person himself is also undergoing changes, or rather his personal component, which accounts for the maximum load in the RO, while his body, according to the apt remark of one of the philosophers, “hangs on a hanger” at this time. A person acquires an independent and even self-sufficient character, becomes interested in overcoming, blurring the external boundaries, in mastering the circumstances that in the “real world” dictate formal rules and norms. “The Internet forms a completely new, global type of human communities - according to spiritual and cultural affinity, and not according to the principle of“ neighbors and colleagues ”. Thus, one of the founders of the Runet, Evgeny Gorny, in the work “The ontology of a virtual personality” lists its characteristic features:
1) Incorporeality, the reduction of the individual to its semiotic manifestations (ie, to the texts in the broadest sense);
2) Anonymity, at least, the possibility of such (cf. popular aphorism, dating back to a caricature in the magazine New Yorker: "no one in the Internet knows that you are a dog"); anonymity in this case should be understood not as the absence of a name, but as concealing a real name or, to put it semiotically, as an arbitrary connection between “real” and “online” personalities;
3) Extended identification capabilities, the freedom to endow a virtual person with any set of characteristics;
4) Plurality, the ability to have a number of different virtual personalities simultaneously or sequentially;
5) Automation, the ability to fully or partially simulate the activity of a virtual personality using computer programs (which links the virtual personality with artificial intelligence and robotics).
Thus, “a virtual person has two fundamental qualities: his own name and ability to act autonomously, and is a form of realization of a poetic strategy of self-invention”. Such a person can not not play in reality and in itself.
2. Our whole life is a game. MMOG phenomenon
The phrases of the classics are known to everyone since childhood. The Dutch historian and culturologist J. Huizinga in the book Homo Ludens (The Man of the Game) substantiated a deep look at the game component of human life, in fact having expanded it to the limits of life in general. Everyone plays and always, not always only, perhaps realizing this, and this is directly related to the most important function of the game: giving meaning to everything that happens, which otherwise is or is observed extremely rarely. In psychology, such meaningful and role-playing functions of the game in society are also studied very thoroughly (Bern, Fromm, Jung).
With the advent of online reality with its fundamental instability and lack of rigor, it is incredible not to notice its total playful character. To the greatest extent, this character is manifested in the MMOG phenomenon, as the massive multiplayer online game is called “a kind of online games that allows thousands of people to play simultaneously in a changing virtual world via the Internet.” The MMOG market is experiencing an incredible boom today: according to experts, up to 400 game projects are running simultaneously on the Web, which in total include about 40 million users, giving an average of 3 hours per game to the game. More games are being developed. So, at the state level, China adopted a program to support national MMOGs, allocating about 1.8 billion US dollars for it, which will lead to an increase in the already rather big online market in China 3 times. In South Korea and the United States, up to 60% of the population is already covered by online games, and many spend their days on end. At the same time, about a dozen cases of player deaths, either from exhaustion, or violent, associated with virtual relationships are known. All this prompts medical professionals to sound the alarm, introducing a new concept of Internet addiction, and for governments to take technological and clinical measures.
Meanwhile, the most popular MMOGs (World of Warcraft, Lineage, Ultima Online) have up to 4 million people in their ranks, which is comparable to the population of Ireland or Norway, and “the annual turnover of virtual things in online games has grown to $ 880 million. Almost A billion real dollars are spent by players each year to buy virtual artifacts - this amount does not include the cost of paying for the game account itself (usually around $ 10 per month). Many players are quite profitable business in the game, consistently earning a few thousand dollars a month to trade in virtual goods. The NYTimes newspaper cites the example of 36-year-old Jason Ainsworth (Jason Ainsworth), who has a thriving virtual real estate agency in the game Second Life. Renting virtual space to 50 "tenants", he earns about $ 1,800 a month, which is enough to pay for a real house in Las Vegas, where Jason himself lives. " A whole new direction has emerged - virtual economics - the pioneer of which, Edward Castronova, professor of economics at the University of California, Fullerton, will probably go down in history as the first scientist who studied the economics of a virtual state. His work on the economy of the state of Norrath (from MMOG Everquest) came out at the end of 2001, and there was perhaps no newspaper or magazine that did not mention the sensational news contained in this report: “in terms of GNP per capita - 2266 dollars in 2001 - Norrath is ahead of China and India. If Norrath had participated in the World Bank's cross-country comparison program, he would have taken the 77th place in the ranking of countries according to this indicator, having settled between Russia and Bulgaria. ” Recently, Kastronov published a whole book: Synthetic Worlds, which reviewed the impressive phenomenon of synthetic worlds and the global virtual economy.
According to what laws live "synthetic worlds"? On the one hand, they are extremely similar to the laws and rules of "real" society with its monetary relations, business models and all sorts of activities. So, in almost every MMOG, there is a currency of its own, which, legally or illegally, can be exchanged in Internet points for the “paper” currency of “real” countries. Moreover, for “real” dollars, “virtual” things and services are more and more often bought: before the sensation around MMOG Project Entropia bought for 26,500 dollars, the sensation of buying a virtual space station for 100 thousand dollars! Of course, the new owners intend at least to recapture their money, and at the most receive a stable rent. They write about the appearance of a new profession - Farmers, usually immigrants from the Far East and Russia, who spend hours searching for rare things to sell in the most popular MMOGs or pumping characters to order. Their earnings from the sale of things range from $ 5-10 per day to $ 100 per week, and a “ready account with an already swung character, dressed in decent gear and having good savings” can be created in a couple of weeks and sold for $ 100-200 . To simplify these processes and create additional protection for players against loss of accumulated experience, entire communities and clans with their leaders and internal rules are created within the MMOG. On the other hand, their fundamentally playful, reckless, character that gives rise to strong impressions and emotions is noticeably different from the sluggish daily routine of physical reality. A game in which almost everything depends on you, except for conditional rules, which is more attractive than a “life”, which almost does not offer any choice. This gives rise to seemingly paradoxical cases when the game, which outwardly practically copies the “ordinary” reality, becomes incredibly popular (Recall the Sims super-bestseller and its continuation Sims Online; or the Russian simulator Ripablik-dot-ru). You can also explain with escapism the fact that some “sales manager, having come from work, reincarnates into a battle mage and nails his face with chain lightning, resting his mind and body. But how to explain, if having plowed a shift at his native enterprise, the manager enters the virtual office, sits at the virtual table and starts all the jihad on a new one, but already in the role of human resources manager? ” And isn't this behavior a symptom of some qualitative changes that threaten to blow up all our traditional ideas about work, work and everyday money making?
3. Work online. Labor as a MMOG
Modern society is a society of blurred boundaries. Along with the erosion of national, racial, class, intellectual interfacial boundaries in the labor sphere are also blurred. The authors of the famous book “Funky Business” rhetorically ask: “If 70 or 80% of the work that people do in modern organizations is mental work, isn't it a process that lasts 168 hours a week? People don't stop thinking right after they leave the office. Many work even when they sleep. Ideas can be born in a dream. These processes make the distinction between our home and office little significant. In a society with blurred boundaries, work is no longer a place, it is an activity. ” On the other hand, analysts have long noted the fact that "the raw material component of most goods and services is constantly decreasing, while the value of intangible products - ideas, design - is growing at a space velocity." All this leads to the fact that the creative activity of creating “virtual content” abolishes the traditional opposition “work / rest”, “work / house”, “game / earnestness”. If a virtual office is located where the laptop is currently on its lap, then virtual work is carried out when an employee is absorbed in an idea or a problem, often solving it non-stop. Of course, this was impossible in the former conditions of regulated labor, formalized reporting, clear specialization and structural hierarchy, which created the image of labor as a serious and necessary activity for society, in which each employee was something different from his private duties and interests. “For absolutely most part of human history,“ labor takes up all or almost all the time of the vast majority of members of society ”(F. Engels), and free time acts as a“ measure of social wealth ”(K. Marx). And only before our eyes, the situation changes to almost the opposite. " Work online, gradually turning into a permanent game situation, immerses the worker in the total space of information communications, where he solves joint intellectual problems, communicates, argues, enjoys new ideas, competes in teams and individually, and continues to feel free, liberated and fun. As one of the researchers of BP writes: “a man of the postmodern era, immersed in virtual reality, enthusiastically“ lives ”in it, conscious of its conventionality, controllability of its parameters and the possibility of escaping from it”.
Therefore, online labor is almost indistinguishable from an online game, i.e. MMOG. If, according to the classics, labor created man, then online labor creates a virtual person whose creative and free expression in collaboration with similar virtual personalities makes it possible to achieve incredible results from the point of view of traditional labor. From this point of view, it is easy to predict the death of trade unions, the gradual weakening of the material relations of corporations with their employees while simultaneously strengthening the virtual connections, the revolution in the labor market, which can be described by the formula “not a person looking for work, but a person’s work”. Various organizations, like the MMOG clans, will compete for “players” of a certain level, who may not even know which of the clans they are “playing” for.
Thus, it can be argued that the efficiency of labor online, in the totality of which in the near future, we have no doubt, will be determined by the following factors: involvement, excitement and thrills, freedom of action and individualism, the presence of such virtual characteristics and experience, whose connection with physical condition will be almost absent. Under these conditions, the organization that will be able to “convince” its workers will win, that they are not workers at all, that they do not work, but play and have fun, that they have such freedom of expression that does not impair their autonomy and, at the same time, that is extremely important, creates an ideal field for self-expression and self-invention. It may seem that in this case we expect irresponsibility and anarchy associated with the lack of traditional accounting and control,however, the examples we gave above allow us to draw a more optimistic picture. The world in which you work, wherever you are, in which your activity is connected with competition and risk, however, representing a danger only for a virtual character, a world in which everything contributes (or seems to contribute) to your desires, creative fantasies and hobbies, this is the world of online work, work like a MMOG.labor like a MMOG.labor like a MMOG.
Volodymyr Khupova, Valery Shlykov, Ukrainian CORRECT Group
Work online, work like a MMOG.
')
1. Reality online
2. Our whole life is a game. MMOG phenomenon
3. Labor yesterday and today. Labor as a MMOG
Work in exchange for money? Labor time and rest time? Positive emotions belong exclusively to family and leisure? These theses already belong to the past. The future is for emotional work that brings satisfaction, for work that does not compete with family, rest and leisure, because it has absorbed it all in itself, for relaxed and intense activity, which is needed primarily because it gives a sense of freedom, self-expression and self-invention. A company that understands this first among its competitors, who will be able to convince its employees that they do not work “for an uncle” or for the worthy future of their children, but live a full, emotionally attractive life, communicating, having fun and creating, such a company will be stronger . The company of the future is a clan, united not by a building, not by goods and services, but by ideas and history, together with friendly rivalry, making it a single and living organism. Two main conditions are necessary for what can be said to be tangible: the liberation of a person from caring for the satisfaction of his immediate needs and the virtualization of his own self. The first condition achieved in the course of NTP allows us to live in order to create, not work to survive, the second frees us from primitive and therefore outdated self-preservation instincts that limit our courage, our risk, our freedom. In the virtual world everything is possible, not going beyond the conventional rules of the game; the virtual world becomes that all, eliminating the distinction between work and rest, work and home, game and earnestness. If you are ready to receive satisfaction from work, bordering on excitement and passion; if you perceive your superiors not as people who owe you money, but as top-rated leaders who help you get it; if success for you is inseparable from a team game, and a team game is an exciting adventure for your virtual (and most likely several), then you are already in a game in a game called Reality Online.
1. Reality online
What is meant by "reality on-line" (RO)? First of all, the Internet and the total presence of computer equipment (gadgets). This reality is characterized by numerous epithets hinting at its network and electronic status: "cyber-", "no-", "online-", "WEB-", "network". However, virtual reality with the prefix “cyber” is not only the “Lawnmower” S. King or “Neuromant” by W. Gibson, but already a completely “real” communication field in which things are replaced by images, information is no longer advertising the product, but It requires advertising itself, the senses interact with electronic devices, and without them, they (for example, the sense of smell) are superfluous. The famous cyborg professor Steve Mann, looking at the world through electronic eyes-video cameras and having adapted to cyberspace for 20 years so that a temporary outage led to loss of orientation and injury; his cyber-colleague Kevin Warwick, who implanted himself a silicone chip transmitter, which allowed him to “open doors, call elevators, turn on the computer from a distance”, and now he plans to do the same thing only with connecting the chip to the nerve; techno-nomad Stephen Roberts, whose bike is computerized to clean the Shuttle - all these are the pioneers of cyber-reality, today giving the opportunity to imagine the metamorphosis that await us all tomorrow.
What is the nature of such a reality? First of all, a special perception of time and space. The virtual space of the Network is multimedia: this means that instead of three dimensions of physical space, we are dealing with an unmeasured stream of pure perception, which does not have a strict grid of coordinates, but has a branching structure of hyperlinks, links and combinations that permeate it. In modern cosmology, there is a similar theory of superstrings, in the postmodern philosophy they talk about rhizome and hypertext, theorists of modern economics talk about the pluralism of netocrats. All this is easily incorporated into the general concept of virtualization of a “hard” reality, more precisely, the derealization of reality in general, reality as such. Along with space, the perception of time is also subject to qualitative metamorphosis. From “on-air time” (air time, that is, linearly and irreversibly current), it turns into “on-line time” with a non-linear speed known for reversibility (save / load), unstable variability, branching and dead-end processes. This perception of space and time allows you to go beyond some of the strict limitations of the physical continuum, and find yourself in the region of fundamental lack of rigor, variability, convention, which can be characterized by the classical concept of "game".
Finally, the person himself is also undergoing changes, or rather his personal component, which accounts for the maximum load in the RO, while his body, according to the apt remark of one of the philosophers, “hangs on a hanger” at this time. A person acquires an independent and even self-sufficient character, becomes interested in overcoming, blurring the external boundaries, in mastering the circumstances that in the “real world” dictate formal rules and norms. “The Internet forms a completely new, global type of human communities - according to spiritual and cultural affinity, and not according to the principle of“ neighbors and colleagues ”. Thus, one of the founders of the Runet, Evgeny Gorny, in the work “The ontology of a virtual personality” lists its characteristic features:
1) Incorporeality, the reduction of the individual to its semiotic manifestations (ie, to the texts in the broadest sense);
2) Anonymity, at least, the possibility of such (cf. popular aphorism, dating back to a caricature in the magazine New Yorker: "no one in the Internet knows that you are a dog"); anonymity in this case should be understood not as the absence of a name, but as concealing a real name or, to put it semiotically, as an arbitrary connection between “real” and “online” personalities;
3) Extended identification capabilities, the freedom to endow a virtual person with any set of characteristics;
4) Plurality, the ability to have a number of different virtual personalities simultaneously or sequentially;
5) Automation, the ability to fully or partially simulate the activity of a virtual personality using computer programs (which links the virtual personality with artificial intelligence and robotics).
Thus, “a virtual person has two fundamental qualities: his own name and ability to act autonomously, and is a form of realization of a poetic strategy of self-invention”. Such a person can not not play in reality and in itself.
2. Our whole life is a game. MMOG phenomenon
The phrases of the classics are known to everyone since childhood. The Dutch historian and culturologist J. Huizinga in the book Homo Ludens (The Man of the Game) substantiated a deep look at the game component of human life, in fact having expanded it to the limits of life in general. Everyone plays and always, not always only, perhaps realizing this, and this is directly related to the most important function of the game: giving meaning to everything that happens, which otherwise is or is observed extremely rarely. In psychology, such meaningful and role-playing functions of the game in society are also studied very thoroughly (Bern, Fromm, Jung).
With the advent of online reality with its fundamental instability and lack of rigor, it is incredible not to notice its total playful character. To the greatest extent, this character is manifested in the MMOG phenomenon, as the massive multiplayer online game is called “a kind of online games that allows thousands of people to play simultaneously in a changing virtual world via the Internet.” The MMOG market is experiencing an incredible boom today: according to experts, up to 400 game projects are running simultaneously on the Web, which in total include about 40 million users, giving an average of 3 hours per game to the game. More games are being developed. So, at the state level, China adopted a program to support national MMOGs, allocating about 1.8 billion US dollars for it, which will lead to an increase in the already rather big online market in China 3 times. In South Korea and the United States, up to 60% of the population is already covered by online games, and many spend their days on end. At the same time, about a dozen cases of player deaths, either from exhaustion, or violent, associated with virtual relationships are known. All this prompts medical professionals to sound the alarm, introducing a new concept of Internet addiction, and for governments to take technological and clinical measures.
Meanwhile, the most popular MMOGs (World of Warcraft, Lineage, Ultima Online) have up to 4 million people in their ranks, which is comparable to the population of Ireland or Norway, and “the annual turnover of virtual things in online games has grown to $ 880 million. Almost A billion real dollars are spent by players each year to buy virtual artifacts - this amount does not include the cost of paying for the game account itself (usually around $ 10 per month). Many players are quite profitable business in the game, consistently earning a few thousand dollars a month to trade in virtual goods. The NYTimes newspaper cites the example of 36-year-old Jason Ainsworth (Jason Ainsworth), who has a thriving virtual real estate agency in the game Second Life. Renting virtual space to 50 "tenants", he earns about $ 1,800 a month, which is enough to pay for a real house in Las Vegas, where Jason himself lives. " A whole new direction has emerged - virtual economics - the pioneer of which, Edward Castronova, professor of economics at the University of California, Fullerton, will probably go down in history as the first scientist who studied the economics of a virtual state. His work on the economy of the state of Norrath (from MMOG Everquest) came out at the end of 2001, and there was perhaps no newspaper or magazine that did not mention the sensational news contained in this report: “in terms of GNP per capita - 2266 dollars in 2001 - Norrath is ahead of China and India. If Norrath had participated in the World Bank's cross-country comparison program, he would have taken the 77th place in the ranking of countries according to this indicator, having settled between Russia and Bulgaria. ” Recently, Kastronov published a whole book: Synthetic Worlds, which reviewed the impressive phenomenon of synthetic worlds and the global virtual economy.
According to what laws live "synthetic worlds"? On the one hand, they are extremely similar to the laws and rules of "real" society with its monetary relations, business models and all sorts of activities. So, in almost every MMOG, there is a currency of its own, which, legally or illegally, can be exchanged in Internet points for the “paper” currency of “real” countries. Moreover, for “real” dollars, “virtual” things and services are more and more often bought: before the sensation around MMOG Project Entropia bought for 26,500 dollars, the sensation of buying a virtual space station for 100 thousand dollars! Of course, the new owners intend at least to recapture their money, and at the most receive a stable rent. They write about the appearance of a new profession - Farmers, usually immigrants from the Far East and Russia, who spend hours searching for rare things to sell in the most popular MMOGs or pumping characters to order. Their earnings from the sale of things range from $ 5-10 per day to $ 100 per week, and a “ready account with an already swung character, dressed in decent gear and having good savings” can be created in a couple of weeks and sold for $ 100-200 . To simplify these processes and create additional protection for players against loss of accumulated experience, entire communities and clans with their leaders and internal rules are created within the MMOG. On the other hand, their fundamentally playful, reckless, character that gives rise to strong impressions and emotions is noticeably different from the sluggish daily routine of physical reality. A game in which almost everything depends on you, except for conditional rules, which is more attractive than a “life”, which almost does not offer any choice. This gives rise to seemingly paradoxical cases when the game, which outwardly practically copies the “ordinary” reality, becomes incredibly popular (Recall the Sims super-bestseller and its continuation Sims Online; or the Russian simulator Ripablik-dot-ru). You can also explain with escapism the fact that some “sales manager, having come from work, reincarnates into a battle mage and nails his face with chain lightning, resting his mind and body. But how to explain, if having plowed a shift at his native enterprise, the manager enters the virtual office, sits at the virtual table and starts all the jihad on a new one, but already in the role of human resources manager? ” And isn't this behavior a symptom of some qualitative changes that threaten to blow up all our traditional ideas about work, work and everyday money making?
3. Work online. Labor as a MMOG
Modern society is a society of blurred boundaries. Along with the erosion of national, racial, class, intellectual interfacial boundaries in the labor sphere are also blurred. The authors of the famous book “Funky Business” rhetorically ask: “If 70 or 80% of the work that people do in modern organizations is mental work, isn't it a process that lasts 168 hours a week? People don't stop thinking right after they leave the office. Many work even when they sleep. Ideas can be born in a dream. These processes make the distinction between our home and office little significant. In a society with blurred boundaries, work is no longer a place, it is an activity. ” On the other hand, analysts have long noted the fact that "the raw material component of most goods and services is constantly decreasing, while the value of intangible products - ideas, design - is growing at a space velocity." All this leads to the fact that the creative activity of creating “virtual content” abolishes the traditional opposition “work / rest”, “work / house”, “game / earnestness”. If a virtual office is located where the laptop is currently on its lap, then virtual work is carried out when an employee is absorbed in an idea or a problem, often solving it non-stop. Of course, this was impossible in the former conditions of regulated labor, formalized reporting, clear specialization and structural hierarchy, which created the image of labor as a serious and necessary activity for society, in which each employee was something different from his private duties and interests. “For absolutely most part of human history,“ labor takes up all or almost all the time of the vast majority of members of society ”(F. Engels), and free time acts as a“ measure of social wealth ”(K. Marx). And only before our eyes, the situation changes to almost the opposite. " Work online, gradually turning into a permanent game situation, immerses the worker in the total space of information communications, where he solves joint intellectual problems, communicates, argues, enjoys new ideas, competes in teams and individually, and continues to feel free, liberated and fun. As one of the researchers of BP writes: “a man of the postmodern era, immersed in virtual reality, enthusiastically“ lives ”in it, conscious of its conventionality, controllability of its parameters and the possibility of escaping from it”.
Therefore, online labor is almost indistinguishable from an online game, i.e. MMOG. If, according to the classics, labor created man, then online labor creates a virtual person whose creative and free expression in collaboration with similar virtual personalities makes it possible to achieve incredible results from the point of view of traditional labor. From this point of view, it is easy to predict the death of trade unions, the gradual weakening of the material relations of corporations with their employees while simultaneously strengthening the virtual connections, the revolution in the labor market, which can be described by the formula “not a person looking for work, but a person’s work”. Various organizations, like the MMOG clans, will compete for “players” of a certain level, who may not even know which of the clans they are “playing” for.
Thus, it can be argued that the efficiency of labor online, in the totality of which in the near future, we have no doubt, will be determined by the following factors: involvement, excitement and thrills, freedom of action and individualism, the presence of such virtual characteristics and experience, whose connection with physical condition will be almost absent. Under these conditions, the organization that will be able to “convince” its workers will win, that they are not workers at all, that they do not work, but play and have fun, that they have such freedom of expression that does not impair their autonomy and, at the same time, that is extremely important, creates an ideal field for self-expression and self-invention. It may seem that in this case we expect irresponsibility and anarchy associated with the lack of traditional accounting and control,however, the examples we gave above allow us to draw a more optimistic picture. The world in which you work, wherever you are, in which your activity is connected with competition and risk, however, representing a danger only for a virtual character, a world in which everything contributes (or seems to contribute) to your desires, creative fantasies and hobbies, this is the world of online work, work like a MMOG.labor like a MMOG.labor like a MMOG.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/8201/
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