Gamification as the Post-Modern Phalanstère - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 186

impossible to render content into the other without the latter contaminat-
ing the former; “natural gamifi cation” introduces a mimesis of life that is
not actual life and corrupts it through a simulacrum model that attempts to
transform the events of everyday life into simple patterns and rules in a sort
of everyday life game. Video games synthesize that structuring and make
it come back to us, exerting an infl uence on us, so that we carry out that
synthesis in our own lives and, thus, the cycle continues, like in a game of
SIMS where the barrier of the screen becomes increasingly dif use.
It is also interesting to mention another very recent phenomenon on the
fringes of “gamifi cation”: “gold farming—a term covering the gray mar-
ket sale of in-game gold, items or services for real currency—most likely
started in South Korea a decade ago” (Lindsay 2011). Gold farming has
transformed the original relationship between work and game, creating a
perverse link between both concepts. Whereas Huizinga (1938) and Cail-
lois (1958) highlighted that the game is a non-productive activity, in this
case exactly the opposite happens: Asian players follow strict gaming pat-
terns that increase the level of a World of Warcraft character (or of any
other massive online game) in a fi xed minimum time in order to sell those
characters for tens or hundreds of dollars (depending on the price list).
Consequently, the production of goods (intangible like these video game
characters) consists nowhere but in playing, in other words, carrying out an
activity that, thus far, was considered unproductive, incapable of generat-
ing consumer goods, in something that now can do (for more information
about this issue I recommend Ge-Jin's documentary Chinese Goldfarmers ;
see http://chinesegoldfarmers.com/).
Alex Galloway has also contributed to the understanding of this perver-
sion of work and game, commenting that “the most curious part of the
upheaval is, to borrow what Critical Art Ensemble said once about hackers,
that the most important cultural workers today are children” (2006), where
we should substitute video game players for children. There is a transition
from a consumer industrial society based on factory work and demand, to a
post-industrial (service) society where leisure acquires much more relevance
and cultural production is a highly valued and, of course, commercialized
good. Here lies an explanation for the huge production capacities of video
game players, who are also a powerful workforce capable of increasing the
value of those video games that take advantage of that participation under
the form of new levels, modding (for more information about modding,
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_%28video_gaming%29) avatar evo-
lution, etc. Gamers interpret their realities and generate culture through
game modifi cation or creating their own video games, making use of more
accessible tools recently available, intensifying the infl uence video games
exert on reality. In this respect, we can mention the case perhaps no longer
so extreme of the U.S. Army and the interest it shows in promoting the syn-
ergy between the game world and the new weaponry systems; a remarkable
concrete case is that of the fi ghter aircraft F-22 Raptor, whose designers