PROFESSIONALS, STREAMERS AND AMATEUR PLAYERS: AN ETHNOGRAPHY FOR EXPLORING ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOURS IN DIFFERENT WORK-PLAY CONDITIONS

"In recent decades, work has been going through a series of transformations leading to the rise of virtual organizations and to the spread of gamification practices. On the other side, also play activities have been going through a process of “workification”, with the rise of phenomena such as “grinding” in video games. Nowadays, the boundaries between work and play are blurred, so that the old dichotomies between game and labour do not hold anymore. This entanglement between work and play might shape the organizations and the dynamics of their members, radically. To understand how, we investigate organizational dynamics occurring in a multiplayer video game, as virtual gaming worlds are often designed to replicate complex social structures and serious work ecosystems. We involve Esports professionals, streamers, and amateur players as they differently intertwine “playing” and “working” practices during the gaming activity. Professionals have problems that are typical of workers, like pursuing a remunerated career in the area; streamers invest an emotional labour during live performances in order to attract spectators who economically sustain them; amateur players could perceive their activity as a “second work”. An ethnographic study within an Italian gaming community is in progress. We focus on “Call of Duty: Warzone”, a First-Person Shooter Battle Royale game which requires players to enact organizational efforts in order to reach the in-game objectives (e.g., defeat the enemy team). The study uses i) semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted in the game environment played by the amateurs, ii-iii) observation of gaming sessions, analysis of online content and semi-structured interviews with reference to streamers and professional, iv) analysis of communication exchanges of all three types of players during the gaming sessions. We expect that players belonging to different categories will enact distinct organizational behaviours and give rise to various organizational structures. A cross-comparison between them, which is missing in current literature, would clarify how different modalities of combining work and play impact on organizational behaviours and dynamics; it could also help both academic and practitioners address the issues faced by current working virtual organizations, by providing insights on how to effectively organize people collaborating from a distance through “best practices” that can be found in games. Preliminary results will be presented at the conference. Since the study is targeted to the Italian context, generalization of the results might be difficult; however, we expect to provide rich insights through the adoption of a qualitative ethnographic approach."