Play to Submission

“In her fascinating book, Play to Submission, Tongyu Wu takes the theory and practice of the organization of games in the creative workplace to an entirely new level. She shows how the increasingly popular ‘gamification’ of work can have very different implications for manager-worker relations, relations among workers themselves, and worker commitment. A must-read for anyone interested in the future of work.”—Michael Burawoy, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Public Sociology: Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia

“Rooted in rich ethnographic research, Play to Submission is an insightful critical investigation of the gamification of the labor process of software engineers at a corporate center of digital capitalism. Beyond detailing how tech work is comprehensively gamified in a bid to mobilize engineers’ commitment, cooperation, and competition, Wu’s study of the gamified workplace shows how capacities developed in consumption—video game play—are put to work as a labor-control strategy in production.”—Greig de Peuter, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and coauthor of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games