Can We Build A Player Culture Built on Cooperative Principles?
As someone looking to disrupt centralized platforms, there’s a lot to learn from the literature of Platform Cooperativism.
One key learning is we need to have a strong narrative for a movement to gain momentum. Dr. Scholz describes how the gig economy plays this card masterfully :
The narrative of the sharing economy is just so huggable: neighbors can sell the fruit from the trees in their gardens, you can rent an apartment in Rome, a tree house or yurt in Redwood Forest. In Berkeley, you can pay your neighbor to cook you a wholesome dinner, and now you can even listen to your own Spotify account in an Uber taxi. It is just all so convenient.
Narratives frame how people perceive a movement, and affect how a culture is built around that movement. The gig economy “culture” is about freelancers having control over their time, being their own boss, being a more realized human. If we look deeper though we can see this is just a narrative, and there’s a significant percentage that are actually being exploited by these platforms— working long hours and making less than minimum wage.
What are the narratives in the game industry that shape the culture? Games have become mainstream, and there are a lot of stories we can draw from.
We can take a look at e-sports, at multi-million dollar tournaments such as DOTA2’s the International. Players can earn more than an NBA player just by playing video games that they love!
The challenge with video games is, as e-sports has shown, it they have traditionally been built around competition. Competition, the polar opposite of cooperation.
How realistic is it to build a cooperative culture around games if the dominant narratives are in stark contrast to cooperative principles?
It’s a difficult problem, but it’s definitely not insurmountable. As Dr. Scholz says in Uberworked and Underpaid:
Our inability to imagine a different life would be capital's triumph.
Open-source was a “pie in the sky” idea just 20 years ago. And now it’s taken over software. Microsoft used to be the anti-open-source company, and now they embrace it as part of their culture.
We are currently in a mature cycle in the video game industry, where power has centralized around attention. Our attention is exploited by monolithic, soulless platforms such as app stores, social networks and ad networks.
What if we were able to remap the incentives, such that developers and players are incentivized to cooperate with each other, instead of extracting value from the other? Instead of using free-to-play monetization strategies, where the goals are to retain and monetize via ads or in-app purchases, what if each player is a citizen in a virtual economy, empowered by voting rights and true ownership?
It will be difficult to balance such a system. But platform coops, which have proven to be more resilient and adaptable to social innovation, may help us find that balance.