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Simply defined, gamification is the use of game elements – point-scoring, levels, competition with others, measurable evidence of accomplishment, ratings and rules of play – in non-game contexts. Games deliver an instantaneous, visceral experience of success and reward, and they are increasingly used in the workplace to promote emotional engagement with the work process, to increase workers’ psychological investment in completing otherwise uninspiring tasks, and to influence, or “nudge”, workers’ behaviour.

According to Burawoy, production at Allied was deliberately organised by management to encourage workers to play the game. When work took the form of a game, Burawoy observed, something interesting happened: workers’ primary source of conflict was no longer with the boss. Instead, tensions were dispersed between workers (the scheduling man, the truckers, the inspectors), between operators and their machines, and between operators and their own physical limitations (their stamina, precision of movement, focus). The battle to beat the quota also transformed a monotonous, soul-crushing job into an exciting outlet for workers to exercise their creativity, speed and skill. Workers attached notions of status and prestige to their output, and the game presented them with a series of choices throughout the day, affording them a sense of relative autonomy and control. It tapped into a worker’s desire for self-determination and self-expression. Then, it directed that desire towards the production of profit for their employer.

Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification – a dozen new likes or retweets – but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioural psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules – unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback – to condition players into playing just one more round.

In News from Nowhere, Morris imagined a world in which human happiness and economic activity coincided. He reminds us that there needs to be a point to labour beyond making ends meet – and there is. Unalienated labour creates happiness for all – consumer and creator; whereas modern capitalism, in contrast, has created a treadmill in which this aspect of work has been lost. Capitalism, he explains, locks the capitalist into a horrible life, which leads nowhere but the grave.

No matter where they are based, people today can use the internet to cooperate and globally share the products of their cooperation as a commons. Commons-based peer production (usually abbreviated as CBPP) is fundamentally different from the dominant modes of production under industrial capitalism. In the latter, owners of means of production hire workers, direct the work process, and sell products for profit-maximisation. Think how typical multinational corporations are working. Such production is organised by allocating resources through the market (pricing) and through hierarchical command. In contrast, CBPP is in principle open to anyone with the relevant skills to contribute to a common project: the knowledge of every participant is pooled.

These participants might be paid, but not necessarily. Since commons-based projects are open systems, anyone with the right knowledge and skills can contribute, either paid by companies, clients or not at all.

The American anthropologist Edward Fischer, paraphrasing Aristotle, said that the good life is ‘a life worth living’, or a journey towards ‘a fulfilled life’. It has to do with happiness but is not limited to it; it’s often – perhaps counterintuitively – linked to commitment and sacrifice, to the work of becoming a particular person. The French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1982 described these practices as technologies of the self. According to Foucault, the self is ‘not given to us … we have to create ourselves as a work of art’. My informants on the streets of Paris were striving – in their own ways – towards being better selves. I came to understand the activities, processes and routines that they engaged in – begging, making a shelter, accessing temporary housing, etc – as practices of the self geared towards a better life, as practices of homemaking on the street, as practices of hope.

Aside from François, others I met on the streets of Paris – such as Sabal from India, and Alex from Kosovo – talked about their engagement in such practices of hope. Following them through soup kitchens, drop-in centres, government institutions and homeless shelters, I observed two main ways in which they attempted to push for a better life. Both of them were connected to the idea of home: my informants in Paris were longing to find and go back to a homeland, often one from the past, while on a daily basis they were struggling to construct a home in order to survive. That was what a better life looked like for them.

Home, according to the Australian social scientist Shelley Mallett, is always suspended between the ideal and the real. It relates to ‘the activity performed by, with or in person’s things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now.’ While Sabal’s India was part of the ideal, what Alex was dealing with was closer to the ‘real’ side of this distinction. His home-making efforts were a continuous process of daily activities.

It is possible that US technology adoption is somehow different to that in other developed countries and that this is contributing to jobless recoveries. For example, Bloom et al. (2012) show that US multinationals achieved more productivity gains from using information technology than their European counterparts, so it is possible that job creation patterns in the US also differed. At the same time, the extension of US unemployment benefits in recent years may have played a role in explaining slow employment recoveries. Meanwhile, European labour markets have become more flexible, which may have contributed to their robust employment growth during recent recoveries. Exploring these possibilities is an important task for future research.

What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.

People work for many reasons – to occupy their time, to find purpose in life and to contribute to society, among other things – but the need to earn money typically comes top of the list. Money puts food on the table, clothes in the wardrobe and a roof overhead. Yet these days, satisfying those needs in the most basic way does not take an especially large income, particularly for those with the option of depending on family members for assistance. The reason to work harder and earn more than the minimum needed to survive is, in part, the desire to have something more than the bare necessities – nice meals, rather than the cheapest calories available, a car, holidays abroad, a home full of books and art. Much of the work we do is intended to earn the money to afford a few luxuries to add to our comfort and enrich our lives.Yet we face a trade-off. The harder we work, the less time we have to enjoy the luxuries our labour affords us. The more lavish the luxuries we seek, the more we must earn to acquire them, and the longer and harder we find ourselves working.

Stand back, however, and the implications are far more substantial than this. One can just about spot the vision of a distant, near-workless future in the habits of young gamers. If good things in life can be had for very little money, then working hard to have more than very little money looks less attractive. The history of the industrial era has been one in which technology has reduced the proportion of income devoted to necessities like food while providing vast new possibilities for consumption. As this happened, the hours worked by the typical person declined.

Although it would seem straightforward that the laws protecting workers should also apply to workers in what is described as the ‘gig economy’ or ‘platform-based work’, there is much debate – and confusion – on this issue. This lack of clarity stems in part from the novelty of platform-based work. There has also been an effort to conceal the nature of platform-based work through buzzwords such as ‘favours’, ‘rides’, and ‘tasks’ as well as the practice common to many platforms of classifying their workers as independent contractors. Platform-based work includes ‘crowdwork’ and ‘work-on-demand via apps’. In crowdwork, workers complete small jobs or tasks through online platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, and Clickworker.  In ‘work-on-demand via apps,’ workers perform duties such as providing transport, cleaning, home repairs, or running errands, but the workers learn about these jobs through mobile apps, from companies such as Uber, Taskrabbit, and Handy. The jobs are performed locally.

Platforms mediate extensively the transactions they have with their workers, and also between the customers and the workers.  Platforms often fix the price of the service as well as define the terms and conditions of the service, or they allow the clients to define the terms (but not the worker). The platform may define the schedule or the details of the work, including instructing workers to wear uniforms, to use specific tools, or to treat customers in a particular way. Many platforms have performance review systems that allow customers to rate the workers and they use these ratings to limit the ability of lower-rated workers to access jobs, including by excluding workers from their system. The amount of direction and discipline that clients and platforms impose on workers, in many instances amounts to the degree of control that is normally reserved to employers and is normally accompanied by labour protections such as the minimum wage, limits on working time, and contributions to social security. This recent ILO study provides more detailed analysis on these features of platform-based work.