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Martin Zeilinger: (Dis-)Continuities of Labor Exploitation in ›Arbeiterliteratur‹ and Video Games

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).


This kind of labor appears as ancillary because it tends to be non-interactive and does not impact players directly, but it is also ›system-critical‹ as it is essential for establishing a coherent vision of work within the game world. Importantly, the labor of NPCs frequently also appears as exploitative, in that it is uncompensated, repetitive, and inconsequential. In literary contexts, traditions of Arbeiterliteratur have produced significant critical frameworks for examining the socio-political dimensions of how labor is represented, but no comparable frameworks have been formalised for the context of video games so far. Bridging literary studies, critical theory, game studies, and media theory, the research begins to close this gap by tracing both continuities in narrative representations and medium-specific discontinuities introduced by interactivity and computational logic. What insights might we draw about contemporary attitudes to work by examining the socio-political valences of how it is represented through the futile and repetitive labor performed by NPCs?