Immaterial Labours (Our Market Reflection)

Immaterial labours is the concept of exchanging work or experience without exchanging physical goods. For the overall market, our class decided on having no currency exchanged, and emphasising experience over handing out products. For our stall specifically, we went with an "exchange of information and knowledges", as defined by Michael Hardt (1999). Our stall was an interactive story designed to give the player an assessment of their personality as well as entertaining them. The stall also included mini games to make the player physically interact for the ending they wanted. In return, we asked players to fill out a survey and tell us what they thought we were like based on how we presented ourselves at the stall.

The game ran rather smoothly, with one person behind the computer controlling the choices and one upfront narrating and running the games. We had buttons that let the controller quickly know the choices and click links accordingly. Lots of people were happy to get invested in the story and fill out the survey afterwards. Having two set ups allowed us to let more people play without having to wait around or us having to hurry them. It did mean that we needed all 4 of us at the stall at all times, so we didn’t get to experience the rest of the market.

We did have a few technical issues on the day; the monitors the organizational group gave to us were stuck in place on the table and did not come with the correct wires, and there were some missed typos in our script. However, we managed to get the monitors working for us and participants were understanding of our other small issues. 

If we did this again, it would be good to test the game more with people outside the group to get more feedback about the choices and story direction. Some of the mini games we had set aside never got used at all simply because no one made the choices that led to them. Our set up was solid, but it would have been helpful to know more about how people would interact with the story so we could make the experience more fitting.

We also could have made the games and story more interwoven than they were. Trying to split the work of writing one story between multiple people proved challenging in itself, especially when having to keep track of multiple pathways. Working relevant mini games into this process added another step of difficulty to the process.