Play to Submission

Tongyu Wu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University in China.

“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 "Through a series of vivid storytelling and theoretical interventions, Wu explores how gaming culture-especially the sociality of competitive online games-not only shapes worker interactions but also indirectly influences labor control and labor power extraction through various 'work games'.... Beyond its value as a robust and captivating ethnography, Play to Submission offers a historical lens on the accumulation and iteration of informational capitalism."-Social Forces "[T]his is a remarkable book for those who want to better understand what happens at the core of the Behemoths of Big Tech. It should be of interest not only to researchers in labor studies but to anyone interested in delving into how the most socially prized products today are produced. Play to Submission offers robust fieldwork, an engaging and enjoyable narrative, and a fascinating analysis and conceptualization of Tongyu Wu’s findings."-ILR Review "Play to Submission's focus on a field of games extends traditional labor game research to new contexts and provides a useful perspective for investigating labor control in creative, immaterial industries.... Wu is attentive to workers’ forms of resistance throughout her book.... [Play to Submission] will therefore be important reading for scholars in game production studies and in broader studies of creative and immaterial labor."-Work and Occupations