Observing this Got Game? book from Harvard Business Press with a slightly gory fascination. I kinda accept that gamers might well have the kind of team-and-contest mentality that could add to the bottom line of the standard corporation, if their managers could but see past their pizza-stained unkemptness. From an author interview:
Q: How have video games changed the way this generation views the business world?
A: Gamers approach the business world a bit more like a game. They see the different companies—and maybe the people they work with—as "players." They're way more competitive and are very passionate about "winning." They are both more optimistic and more determined about solving any kind of problem you can imagine; they think there's always going to be some combination of moves that will result in success. That drives them to be incredibly creative. They're a bit suspicious of company leaders: The game world is not big on following hierarchy. Plus, they are very confident. Like entrepreneurs, they would rather rely on their own abilities to succeed or fail. They're also more comfortable with risks, but aren't reckless.
Q: What traits mark the gamer generation that could make them especially good managers, and what traits work against them?
A: Gamers are ready to be great leaders, so they're motivated to contribute and to earn their way through whatever hurdles it takes to get to the (pretty elevated) place they believe they should be. Gamers are also resilient. They know failure is survivable, because they have each failed literally thousands of times on the way to whatever success they have had with games. (The failure hasn't been "real," of course, but it has felt as real to them as the success has.) They're also savvy—it's tough to pull one over on them. They may be a little overconfident in their own abilities, and they may not believe something doesn't work until they actually see it fail themselves. But with some guidance, managers should be able to marshal their best instinct, which is their love of being the hero.
But I'm also reading McKenzie Wark's Hacker Manifesto on and off various flights at the moment, and something he says about the 'co-optation of the hacker class' is niggling me. From this recent interview with Wark:
I see the formation of a hacker sensibility and ethic as an expression of this new level of conflict over the enclosure of the commons and the subordination of free productivity to the commodity form...So while writers, programmers, biologists, or musicians tend to see themselves as separate cultures with specialized ways of thinking, I think there is an over–arching class interest there as well. An interest in preserving the autonomy of the way we labor that farmers and workers have already lost. We are the new front line in a very long struggle.
Is this what I meant by the 'soulitariat'? Maybe so...
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