Designing for the Moral Economy of Co-Creation and Games

Dave Jones

Extended Abstract

This paper argues for incorporating research into the potential moral economies of co-creative practices as a fundamental issue in game design, particularly those that foster and commodify social networking activities. The popularity of internet-based social networking systems like Facebook has helped push computer games to become explicit sites for online social networking activities. Well-known examples, such as World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) and Farmville (Zynga, 2009), have been the high-profile public face of this movement. Console-based games have moved further in this direction, as well, expanding beyond first-person shooters like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2008) and into games like Little Big Planet (Media Molecule, 2008) as both Sony and Microsoft have taken steps to concretize their online gaming networks into full-blown social networks.

One of the major outcomes of this push has been the emergence of co-creation as a central element of game design and marketing, and has most notably become one of the central means of generating revenue. Co-creation is the practice by which game developers utilize feedback and content generated by players as the basis for developing a game, or for extending the game's shelf life by adding new content. Farmville harvests players' personal information as marketing data sold to various companies. Both World of Warcraft and Little Big Planet allow players to create content for the games that then becomes the property of the developers and distributers. In other words, games are sometimes commoditizing play. Developers and publishers are replacing expensive, resource-intensive work with the efforts of players who work because they want to - and for free. Players are often not compensated by game developers in tangible or monetary fashion, raising questions concerning whether co-creative practices are a form of labor exploitation (Banks and Deuze, 2009; Kucklich, 2005; Postigo, 2007, 2008; Terranova, 2000, 2004). In Banks and Potts's (2010) view, co-creation should be read not as a rigid system of exploitative labor practices in which developers exploit players' affinities and expertise with media experiences (Terranova, 2000 & 2004; Kuchlick, 2005), but as a "co-evolution" of "economic and cultural factors" situated in a "dynamic open relationship" that is "based on extrinsically-motivated exchange relations and culturally-shaped intrinsically-motivated production relations" (p. 260). Compensation and labor in co-creative relationships should be read along different lines than those of industrial capital.

I examine this debate using Little Big Planet as a case study and exploring co-creation in light of what Green and Jenkins call a "moral economy." A moral economy attempts to reasonably align profit motives of developers with the creative and social motives generally attributed to players. As the creative relationships between media companies and audiences have grown more complex and sophisticated, there is an escalating need to explicate a mutual understanding of the (sometimes divergent) needs and desires of different sides of the co-creative relationship. Consumption is transformed into a "social rather than individualizing practice" (p. 216), interlocking media corporations, content creators, audiences, and technologies into mutually constructed, if fragile, creative relationships that "require trust" (p. 218) to develop amidst "the social expectations, emotional investments, and cultural transactions that create a shared understanding between all participants within an economic exchange" (p. 214). Borrowing from activity theory in professional communication (Kaptelinen and Nardi, 2006; Spinuzzi, 2008), I propose a framework through which game designers can anticipate and work with the moral economy of co-creation as a situated activity that sits at the intersection of design and play objectives.