Digital labor turn: the impact of assetization in digital games

Labor practices in digital games have been conceptualized as playbor, highlighting their exploited yet voluntary nature. As digital play increasingly converges with assetization, it is becoming more closely associated with labor activities. This article investigates emergent player labor practices in the digital game World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment). It focuses on the practice of "boosting," in which a player hires an organization to complete difficult team-based gameplay. Semi-structured interviews of players from the boosting organization Huokan reveal a highly optimized form of segregated work that has emerged from the game economy design. As a response, players adopt technological affordances of game-adjacent platforms to automate and "resist" gameplay perceived as toil. To push digital games as assets, they are increasingly made "tedious by design" through artificial barriers to prolong player retention. This approach marks a pivotal labor turn in digital games.