Abstract:

The rise of the creative industries reflects emerging dynamics in contemporary China's economy and labor. This article examines creative labor in China's video game industry, exploring how game developers' labor subjectivity is embedded in the production process and how it is organized and mobilized. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 42 semi-structured interviews, the study finds that the game industry recruits a group of developers with a distinctive form of subjectivity, referred to as ganke(肝客), through game development competitions. Rooted in gaming culture and long-term gaming practices, this subjectivity manifests both as a passion-driven willingness to engage in high-intensity labor and as creative enthusiasm coupled with strong gamer identity. However, under increasingly modularized production practices, firms do not incorporate this subjectivity as a whole, but rather differentially mobilize or suppress its various dimensions. The article conceptualizes this mechanism as fragmented appropriation. Specifically, the high-intensity labor represented by gan(肝) is institutionalized and transformed into stable forms of overwork, while dimensions such as creative passion and gamer identity are suppressed. In response, developers adopt various coping strategies: some seek promotion in pursuit of more creative work, while others channel their creative passion into side projects, gradually withdrawing emotional investment from their daily labor. While existing research tends to treat subjectivity as a resource that can be mobilized as a whole, this article emphasizes the complexity and multidimensionality of subjectivity. It introduces the concept of fragmented appropriation to capture a mechanism that operates on distinct dimensions of subjectivity, distinguishing it from approaches that treat subjectivity as a unified whole. In doing so, this article reveals the operational logic, practical processes, and consequences of this mechanism, thereby advancing theoretical discussions on the interaction between labor subjectivity and labor control in creative labor research.

Key words: creative labor, labor subjectivity, labor process, video game industry, modular production