TY - GEN
T1 - The rise and fall of moral labor in an online game community
AU - Kou, Yubo
AU - Gui, Xinning
PY - 2017/2/25
Y1 - 2017/2/25
N2 - In this study we use moral labor to denote a particular form of work primarily driven by moral sense - people believe it is right to do so and such work is utilized to improve commercial product. We examine moral labor in League of Legends, a popular online game. The game's developer, Riot Games, built a crowdsourcing platform that solicited free labor from players to deal with massive toxic behaviors including trolling, griefing, and bullying. Our ethnographic study of the game revealed how players willingly contributed their moral labor to improve the game regardless of rewards. We also found inherent tensions between players' moral sense and Riot's corporate agenda, manifested in the differences and similarities between the narrative of players and that from Riot, which evolved along the release, maintenance, and closure of the system. We consider future research directions on the relation of moral labor to online community.
AB - In this study we use moral labor to denote a particular form of work primarily driven by moral sense - people believe it is right to do so and such work is utilized to improve commercial product. We examine moral labor in League of Legends, a popular online game. The game's developer, Riot Games, built a crowdsourcing platform that solicited free labor from players to deal with massive toxic behaviors including trolling, griefing, and bullying. Our ethnographic study of the game revealed how players willingly contributed their moral labor to improve the game regardless of rewards. We also found inherent tensions between players' moral sense and Riot's corporate agenda, manifested in the differences and similarities between the narrative of players and that from Riot, which evolved along the release, maintenance, and closure of the system. We consider future research directions on the relation of moral labor to online community.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85016044611&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85016044611&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3022198.3026312
DO - 10.1145/3022198.3026312
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85016044611
T3 - CSCW 2017 - Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
SP - 223
EP - 226
BT - CSCW 2017 - Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017
Y2 - 25 February 2017 through 1 March 2017
ER -