The Work of Others. Exploring Marginalized Representations of Labor in Video Games
This interdisciplinary research project seeks to extend established critical perspectives on Arbeiterliteratur from literary studies to the representation of work and labor exploitation within the popular medium of video games. The key focus is on the marginalized labor of non-player characters (NPCs), which serves to establish coherent visions of work within game worlds. While the interactive and non-linear nature of video games enables the emergence of novel medium-specific representations of labor, game studies has yet to develop a critical framework comparable to those found in literary studies and critical theory. This project aims to adapt and refine such theoretical insights for application in media theory and game studies. By analyzing virtual representations of work, labor exploitation, and servitude, the research project traces key continuities and discontinuities across literary and ludic genres, and formalizes an approach for interpreting the socio-political attitudes toward labor that are encoded narratively and structurally in video games.
Martin Zeilinger is an Austrian researcher and curator based in Scotland. He currently serves as Reader in Computational Arts & Technology at Abertay University (Dundee/GB), and as Associate Researcher at the Orpheus Institute for Advanced Studies & Research in Music (Ghent/BE). His interdisciplinary research explores artistic experimentation with emerging technologies, and contributes to wide-ranging fields including media theory, socio-legal studies, digital art, critical finance studies, music and sound studies, and game studies. He is the author of Tactical Entanglements, a 2021 monograph examining AI art, creative agency, and intellectual property issues. His scholarship and art criticism appears in leading journals including Leonardo and Philosophy & Technology, and has been translated into several languages. From 2014 to 2021, he co-curated the Toronto-based Vector Festival, where he helped pioneer curatorial practices bridging media art and video games.
»Smart Contracts and the Becoming-Curatorial of Digital Works of Art«, in: DATA Browser, Vol. 10: Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver (eds.), Curating Superintelligences: A Reader on AI and Future Curating, London: Open Humanities Press 2025 (forthcoming).
»Structures of Belonging«, in: The PostscriptUM Anthology (2010–2023), Ljubljana: Aksioma 2023, pp. 274 ff.
»The Politics of Visual Indeterminacy in Abstract AI Art.«, in: Leonardo 56 (1), 2022: pp. 76–80.
Tactical Entanglements: AI Art, Creative Agency, and the Limits of Intellectual Property, Lüneburg: meson press 2021.
»Survival Interventions in GTA: on the Limits of Performance in Virtual Environments,« in: Video Game Art Reader, Vol. 2 (1), 2019, pp. 15–27.
This lecture presents ongoing research on the representation of labor relations in video games. It focuses in particular on work that occurs in the background of narrative action, and which is carried out by ›non-player characters‹ (NPCs).