Comments on: GDC Notes: Clark/Zimmerman, The Fantasy of Labor: How Social Games Create Meaning

By: GDC 2011: Day 0 and Day 1 « Here is a thing.

GDC 2011: Day 0 and Day 1 « Here is a thing. — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:01:18 +0000

[...] Session: The Fantasy of Labor: How Social Games Create Meaning (Eric Zimmerman, Naomi Clark) Games work not by fulfilling desire but by frustrating desire – the friction of not getting a pleasurable objective right away. Idealized/unreal version/concept of something is much more desirable than the actual thing – this works as goal formation in games. Eg: when racing, you wait for the starting gun because the reward of waiting to run and winning is more desirable than starting to run before everyone else. Fantasy of labor in games is the idea that if you keep working hard eventually you’ll earn a reward. The gap between the reality of labor and its fantasy reward is what makes games of labor work. Desire creates its own objects that are tied to reality but not realistic. This was one of those fantastic talks where every idea presented was articulating ideas that I’d kind of had floating around amorphously in my head, but was not at all capable of expressing. So everything made sense, I was able to follow along, but basically every sentence Zimmerman and Clark said was giving me the, “oh yeah!” lightbulb moment. So my notes on this are woefully incomplete, because I was too busy learning and thinking and being excited to be in a room with very, very smart people. (Darius Kazemi took much more detailed notes of this session, which you can read here.) [...]

By: GDC 2011: Social Games Panels | Third Helix

GDC 2011: Social Games Panels | Third Helix — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 15:03:00 +0000

[...] was actually the subject of a GDC talk I did not attend, but which was written up by Darius Kazemi here. Share [...]

By: GDC 2011 wrap-up « being playful

GDC 2011 wrap-up « being playful — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:51:06 +0000

[...] lecture on desire, labor, and game design. Developer and game design gadfly Darius Kazemi gave it a wonderfully detailed writeup. Despite the highly theoretical talk, we had a good audience that stayed through the end to ask [...]

By: Lucas

Lucas — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:26:42 +0000

—though not in as much detail. Thanks for taking and sharing these notes. (Please pardon the terseness of my first comment.)

By: Lucas

Lucas — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:03:54 +0000

Naomi Clark discussed this in an interview on the Another Castle podcast.