The well constructed and designed virtual world of Second Life may appear fascinating to the players of the game. In most cases, these players are unaware of the hours spent on coding and decoding done to construct such a fascinating virtual world. When discussing the labour system in the gaming industry, it is helpful to understand the notion of immaterial labour. Immaterial labour is labour that produces intangible products such as “knowledge, information, communication…, a relationship [or even] an emotional [response]” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108). Hardt and Negri suggested that there are two forms of immaterial labour (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108). The first form of immaterial labour is labour that creates “ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images and other such products” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108). The second form of immaterial labour is also known as affective labour. Affective labour is a form of labour that generates good feelings such as excitement and satisfaction. Labour in the gaming industry could be classified as immaterial labour. Although there are some tangible aspects of the production such as consoles and disks, the satisfaction of the consumers comes from engagement with the virtual world, which is the intangible aspect of the game. Consumer’s engagement with the virtual world is often recognised as the practice of “play” and therefore, video game consumers are called “players” (Klein, 2003: 197).
Major gaming corporations recognised the close association between the game industries and the practice of play (Klein, 2003: 197). Gaming corporations, thus, incorporated this association in their recruitment strategies. As a result, working in gaming corporations is seen as playing and this has attracted many game players to pursue a future career in game developing. In reality, the working condition in gaming corporation is a far cry from this perception. In his essay, Thompson described that workers of the gaming industry suffered from long working hours, “near zero” job securities and lower average salary in comparison to salary standard in other media corporations (cited in Klein, 2003: 201). Apart from paid workers, gaming corporations utilize unpaid voluntary labour (Klein, 2003: 202). Gaming corporations realise that the without the game players buying the game, there will be no income for the corporations. This is why gaming corporations have always been supportive to fan productions and contributions. Some of the successful strategies implemented by gaming corporations are by providing game players with access to new games or beta versions before the games were released (Klein, 2003: 213). In return, game players would provide gaming corporations with useful feedbacks to improve the games.
