English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

In this paper, I examine video game testing as a lens through which exploring broader aspects of digital economy such as the intersection of different kind productive practices—working, labouring, playing and gaming—as well as the tendency to conceal the labour associated with them. Drawing on Lund’s (2014) distinction between the creative aspects of “work-playing” and the constraining/instrumental aspects of “game-labouring”, I claim that video game testing is buried under several layers of invisibility. Ideologically, the “playful”, “carnivalesque”, quasi-subversive facets of this job are rejected because of their resistance to be easily subsumed by the logic of capitalism. Practically, a fetishist process of hiding human relations behind relations among things (elements in the video game environment) reaches its paradoxical apex in the quality assurance task of this profession: the more the game tester succeeds in debugging games higher is the fetishization of his/her activity.

Invisible Play and Invisible Game: Video Game Testers or The Unsung Heroes of Knowledge Working