Gamification,metrification and data fans in China: From lovebour to playbour

Abstract

Emerging within the global context of quantification and metric tracking, this study examines a new type of popular music fans in China who self-identify as ‘data fans’. Moving beyond the conventional focus on fans’ affective labour, this article argues that metricisation and gamification form a contemporary regime of consent, through which data fans’ playful engagements are transformed into productive labour and self-governed participation that aestheticise exploitation and naturalise platform control. Drawing on a year-long digital ethnography and 33 semi-structured interviews, the study revisits Burawoy’s concept of manufacturing consent to examine how play functions as a mechanism of voluntary value creation. The analysis unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the gamified design of social media and music platforms binds fans and idols in an accelerated cycle of reciprocal labour. Participation, visibility and productivity become mutually reinforcing, transforming affective devotion into a quantified and competitive game sustained by shared enjoyment and care. Second, platforms manufacture autonomous players who perceive themselves as self-directed participants. These data fans voluntarily devote time, skills, and even personal financial resources to what they regard as ‘bounty-hunting’, generating supra-value beyond conventional unpaid labour. Third, the ‘meta-players’ reinterpret metric production and analysis as gameplay itself, deriving meaning, identity and pride from continuous engagement. The calibrated uncertainty of opaque algorithms sustains their sense of autonomy, rendering playbour both pleasurable and unending. Overall, the study advances a sociological understanding of how digital capitalism manufactures consent through enjoyment, illustrating a paradigmatic shift from lovebour to playbour in the digital fandom.

Introduction

Affective labour has been theorised as a crucial site of value production through emotions, attachments and social ties. It involves the creation and modulation of affects, such as satisfaction, passion, intimacy or care, and represents a defining feature of biopolitical production in post-Fordist capitalism (Gregg, 2009; Hardt & Negri, 2000, 2004). Feminist scholars have long pointed out that affective labour cannot be understood apart from the persistence of reproductive and care work, whose feminised and devalued nature continues to sustain social and economic systems (Jarrett, 2016; Schultz, 2006; Whitney, 2018). Within fan studies, this perspective frames unpaid and emotionally invested fan activities as affective work that sustains communities and cultural circulation (De Kosnik, 2012; Stanfill, 2019). Stanfill’s (2019) concept of lovebor captures this entanglement between affect and labour: a form of work motivated by love, where fans’ devotion and care reproduce both their communities and the commercial systems surrounding them. Scholars of Chinese digital fandom have similarly shown how social media and entertainment industries capitalise on fans’ emotional energy and transform it into ‘emotional capital’ (Fang & Zeng, 2021; Guo & Li, 2021; Li & Qu, 2023; Liang & Shen, 2016).

Yet, amid the wave of the datafication of recordings (Negus, 2019) and platformisation of fandom (Stanfill, 2024), a new figure has emerged: the ‘data fan’, whose work is primarily oriented toward creating data traffic for their idols (Yin, 2020; Zhang & Negus, 2020), rather than for self-expression or emotional communion. Indeed, data fans simultaneously inhabit the dual roles of data entry workers and fans. They are enthusiastic about studying algorithmic systems and actively contribute to the development of folk theories. However, it is easy to take for granted that their behaviour is emotionally driven (Hills, 2002; Jenkins, 1992). The ways in which their playbour is enacted and sustained in today’s metrified environments merits scholarly attention.

In light of this cultural formation, moving beyond the conventional emphases on the emotionally expressive work and affective labour of fans, this article argues for a conceptual shift from lovebour to playbour in digital fandom, uncovering a distinct yet underexplored form of care labour that is enacted and sustained by the pleasures of play, competition and algorithmic feedback. In the age of algorithms and big data, emotional investments are increasingly measured, ranked and circulated as metrics. Studies of algorithmic management and gig work (Aloisi & De Stefano, 2022; Krzywdzinski & Gerber, 2021; Van Doorn & Chen, 2021; Vasudevan & Chan, 2022) reveal the mechanisms of digital control but often overlook how play operates as a form of consent. By examining how care and affect are rendered productive and competition through play, this article advances these discussions, showing that consent in the platform economy is not coerced but manufactured through gamification.

The concept of playbour (Kücklich, 2005) captures this reconfiguration of labour as a playful, voluntary and affectively charged activity. To understand this process, Burawoy’s (1979) Manufacturing Consent shows how capitalism secures participation not through coercion, but by reorganising labour into game-like systems of productivity that generate pleasure, pride and a sense of voluntary achievement. In this article, it is contended that by revisiting and revising Burawoy’s theory, playbour represents the algorithmic reincarnation of factory game, where the pride of work has been replaced by the pleasure of play, and consent is generated through the affective charge of fun. The ludic design of platforms does not simply make work fun – it structures participation as a form of self-regulation. Users are encouraged to play, but the parameters of play are defined by algorithms that translate interaction into value. The pleasure of playing the game masks the asymmetry of its design, where the rules of visibility, reach and success are controlled by the platform itself.

This article highlights the key role of gamification of data making/analysis practices in engaging fans and sustaining their playbour through datafication, constituting a new driving force of contemporary (fan) labour practices. It is argued that metricisation and gamification constitute a contemporary regime of consent, in which data fans’ playful engagements are transformed into productive labour and self-governed participation, aestheticising exploitation and naturalising platform control. The argument unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. The first temporal dimension examines how the gamified design of social media and music platforms, coupled with perpetually updating algorithms, binds data fans and artists in an accelerated cycle of reciprocal labour, where participation, visibility and productivity are continuously incentivised. Within this environment, competing fandoms engage in game-like dynamics of motivation, rivalry and reward, transforming practices of devotion and support into structured contests of performance and value production. In this process, data fans’ spontaneous formation of sisterhood alliances and collective data monitoring exemplify a gamified mode of cooperative labour, which is internalised as voluntary play and sustained through shared enjoyment and care.

The second dimension concerns the ‘autonomous players’, a subjectivity manufactured by capitalist platforms. These data fans perceive themselves as in control, echoing Burawoy’s (1979) account of illusory autonomy within the factory game. Yet this voluntarism extends beyond the confines of traditional labour: data fans even devote their own time and resources to engage in supra-value production. During the relational labour (Baym, 2018) of ‘bounty hunting’, they see platform revenue sharing, donations and raffles as additional bounty rewards for play rather than wages to which they are entitled.

The last dimension points out the data practices can be reinterpreted as a game through voluntary challenge. Those ardent data aficionados and amateur experts derive meaning, identity and pride from production itself, turning exploitation into achievement and pleasure. Accordingly, the calibrated uncertainty produced by visualised metrics and opaque algorithms transform their data making/analysis into a game-like pursuit of self-determination, making playbour both pleasurable and endless.

Literature review: Gamification, metricisation and manufacturing consent

The convergence of gamification and metrification becomes a feature of platform capitalism, reshaping both how labour is organised and how value is imagined. In a society increasingly structured by artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, digital systems continually translate human daily activities into quantifiable traces (Burgess et al., 2022; Tkacz, 2022). As Beer (2016) argues, this cultural preoccupation with metrics signals a ‘metric society’, where quantification not only measures but constitutes value. Following Mau’s (2019) notion of a ‘cult of numbers’, metrification extends the reach of evaluation, transforming social distinctions into numerical hierarchies through rankings, ratings or counts, and converting previously qualitative relations into measurable competition. These developments signify a profound cultural reorientation in which selfhood, worth and participation are rendered calculable (Ajana, 2018).

To better understand how metricised systems transform work into self-disciplining practice, it is useful to return to Burawoy’s classic insight. In Manufacturing Consent (1979), Burawoy demonstrated that the labour process under capitalism fuses coercion and consent through a subtle reorganisation of work itself. Rather than relying on external discipline, management transformed labour into a game-like system of productivity – what he called organisational games and managerial design. Within this structure, workers competed to ‘make out’ under piece-rate wages, deriving satisfaction and pride from their productivity. Crucially, this competition appeared voluntary and enjoyable, yet it was precisely this appearance that secured workers’ consent. The factory game thus concealed exploitation within the pursuit of achievement, turning the experience of work into its own mechanism of control.

In contemporary labour regimes, the ‘factory game’ has been displaced onto digital interfaces, where platforms deploy metrics, feedback loops and gamified mechanisms as new forms of managerial design. What once measured productivity now measures participation (Andrejevic, 2009; Terranova, 2000); what once rewarded output now rewards attention (Davenport & Beck, 2001; Goldhaber, 1997), embedding fans in the logic of the attention economy, where visibility itself becomes currency (Abidin, 2018; Bishop, 2019). In this system, value is no longer fixed or realised through production, but continuously anticipated, circulated and speculated upon – what Davis (2018) terms speculative value.

Such gamified governance is made possible by the broader datafication of everyday life, which turns ordinary actions into quantifiable gameplay. Huizinga’s (1955) Homo Ludens and Caillois’s (1961) Man, Play and Games laid the conceptual groundwork for understanding play as both a voluntary activity and a regulated social form. Huizinga saw play as a sacred, autotelic act that sustains culture through its separation from work, while Caillois distinguished between paidia (spontaneous play) and ludus (rule-bound) games that impose structure and measurement. In contemporary design discourse, Tekinbaş and Zimmerman (2004) bridge these traditions, defining games as systems that create artificial conflict with quantifiable outcomes. It is precisely these quantifiable outcomes – points, scores, leaderboards – that underpin gamification. By appropriating the formal properties of games, gamified systems reintroduce ludus into non-play contexts, transforming voluntary play into a managerial and behavioural instrument. The collapse of Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ in digital contexts – where play spills into work, fitness, education or data fandom in this study – marks the moment when play’s intrinsic freedom is subordinated to extrinsic objectives.

Critical scholarship has demonstrated that gamification’s promise of engagement often conceals its function as a tool of control. Defined by Kellogg et al. (2020) as the delegation of managerial tasks to data-driven systems, algorithmic management merges surveillance and behavioural engineering into an affectively charged interface. Companies such as Uber and Deliveroo employ gamified dashboards that visualise performance, issue rewards and guide workers through predictive feedback loops (De Oliveira, 2021; Moore & Robinson, 2016; Rosenblat & Stark, 2016). These systems translate Taylorist principles of efficiency (Taylor, 1967) into algorithmic governance, individualising responsibility while disguising coercion as motivation (Schrape, 2014). Woodcock and Johnson (2018), drawing on autonomist Marxism (Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter, 2009; Tronti, 1966), distinguish between ‘gamification-from-above’, the managerial use of play to discipline labour, and ‘gamification-from-below’, workers’ playful reappropriations that resist control. This dialectic reveals that gamification is not a neutral design technique but an ideological site where pleasure and power intersect.

Existing studies of gamification have largely centred on formal workplaces – warehouses, call centres, ride-hailing and delivery services (Van Doorn & Chen, 2021; Vasudevan & Chan, 2022) – where algorithmic management is explicit. Yet the same mechanisms now extend into spaces not conventionally coded as labour. Social and music platforms such as Sina Weibo, QQ Music and WeChat Channel employ points, rankings and feedback loops that transform users’ participation into measurable productivity. However, research on playbour – the fusion of play and labour first theorised by Kücklich (2005) – remains fragmented between analyses of digital games and social media participation, with insufficient attention to how metrification sustains users’ willingness to ‘work’ for the platform. This article intervenes by bridging these literatures, conceptualising the data fan as both a product and a producer of algorithmic play. In this new regime, pleasure and affect are subsumed under the logic of metrics, and play becomes the interface through which participation is governed. By reframing the labour of fandom through playbour, this study reveals how gamification re-enacts Burawoy’s (1979) insight that consent is the key mechanism of control but now transposed from the factory floor to the platform interface.

Understanding why data fans willingly sustain such engagement requires turning to broader transformations in the moral and temporal orders of capitalism. Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2018) analysis of the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ demonstrates how critiques of alienating and bureaucratic labour are absorbed into capitalism’s value system. The contemporary moral discourse of creativity, autonomy and passion redefines work as a site of self-realisation. This ideological shift legitimises new forms of exploitation by converting freedom into obligation and pleasure into productivity. Within platform economies, the ethos of passion aligns seamlessly with gamified feedback systems: points, badges and rankings aestheticise work, translating affective investment into self-discipline. Rosa’s (2013) theory of social acceleration further illuminates this dynamic. Under conditions of ‘dynamic stabilisation’, continual innovation and participation become prerequisites for social survival. Algorithms intensify this acceleration by delivering constant updates and performance metrics, compelling users to adapt in real time. Far from offering leisure, play becomes the medium through which acceleration is lived.

The sustainability of playbour also depends on new configurations of expertise and amateurism. Leadbeater and Miller’s (2004) notion of the ‘professional amateur’ (Pro-Am) captures how skilled hobbyists engage in sustained creative work outside formal employment. Such amateur experts perform emotionally invested and technically sophisticated labour, blurring the boundary between leisure and professionalism (Baym & Burnett, 2009). The Pro-Am figure embodies a mode of self-valorisation through play: labour becomes meaningful precisely because it is framed as self-chosen, skill-based, and intrinsically rewarding. This identity offers participants a source of pride and legitimacy, transforming what might otherwise appear as exploitation into an expression of competence, devotion and expertise. Consequently, Pro-Am subjectivities sustain playbour not through external coercion, but through the internalisation of professional values and the affective gratification of being recognised as capable players within gamified economies of visibility.

By synthesising these strands, this study interprets playbour as the algorithmic re-engineering of consent through metrics, pleasure and speculative value in a non-game context. In this context, data fans are self-perceived agents whose voluntary participation produces continuous streams of supra-value. This framework thus extends Burawoy’s (1979) theory of manufacturing consent into the digital age, revealing how metricisation and gamification operate as a contemporary regime of consent that transforms data fans’ playful engagements into productive labour and self-governed participation, aestheticising exploitation and naturalising platform control.

Methods

To better understand and immerse myself in data fandom, I conducted a one-year digital ethnography (Murthy, 2008) beginning in September 2022 and 33 online synchronous text interviews (O’Connor & Madge, 2017; Pearce et al., 2014) via Sina Weibo and WeChat. I chose the data fandom of a well-known Chinese youth singer as a typical cultural unit. Following the digital traces of data fans, I identified three main sites, namely Sina Weibo, Tencent QQ Music and WeChat Channel. Through daily interactions with them, I became an experienced data fan and a content creator. During this process, I was granted access to two WeChat discussion groups and two self-formed Weibo groups. Inspired by the suggestions of taking digital fieldnotes by Boellstorff et al. (2012), I took screenshots of all public posts and replies. Additionally, I used WeChat’s bookmarking function as digital fieldnotes to systematically categorise and code recorded texts, images and links on a daily basis, establishing a foundation for subsequent analysis.

Given the geographical dispersion of the participants and China’s pandemic control policies during the interview period, synchronous online text-based interviews were employed. During fieldwork, I employed purposive sampling on Sina Weibo to invite 13 data fans from my fandom who have consistently engaged with data/platform algorithms for online interviews. Additionally, I leveraged my social capital and used snowball sampling, kindly requesting my interviewees to refer additional participants, to complete the recruitment of the next 20 participants. Among them, nine are or have been members of self-organised data fan groups, while the rest are independent data fans. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 48 years, with 30 participants identifying as women and three as men. The majority were single, residing in coastal cities, and either held or were pursuing higher education degrees. I adopted the sequential interview method to ensure data saturation, which involves verifying that responses to the research questions no longer introduced new interpretations and had already been mentioned by other respondents in previous interviews.

This study employed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) framework of thematic analysis. All digital fieldnotes and interviews were imported into NVivo for joint coding and identifying shared recurring patterns. The data analysis process was iterative; through continuous review and refinement, I ultimately identified their labour motivations. Given the sensitivity of this study and the respondents’ requests, I used ‘data fabrication’ (Cera, 2023) – rephrasing the participants’ response in English – to protect their privacy and anonymity.

The ‘leaderboard game’ of love

Competitive play in quantified affection

The first dimension of gamification in data fandom operates as a circular economy of affection and competition, where love is mobilised, quantified and reciprocated through the mechanics of play. In this self-propelling feedback system, data functions not merely as a record of participation but as both commodity and capital within contemporary digital capitalism (Sadowski, 2019). Through datafication – the quantification of everyday practices for analysis and circulation (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013) – data fans transform emotional connection into measurable activity. Their engagement no longer manifests as an abstract or purely affective attachment but as a tangible contribution to their idols’ career trajectories, sustained by gamified incentives and algorithmic feedback loops.

Thus, the gamified features lure them into voluntary playbour. This situation exemplifies a new configuration of practices under new socio-technical conditions compared to the games in factory settings as described by Burawoy (1979). In traditional factory-based labour, workers engage in waged labour due to ‘inexorable coercion’, and only afterwards do they invent making out as a way to counteract the repetitive and monotonous work process. In digital spaces, however, it is the appeal of game elements that comes first, drawing fans into data prosumption.

In the interviews, several data fans believed that their affective labour was valid because their behaviour was visible and traceable. This positive feedback kept the fans reinvesting their time and energy in gamified ranking systems. Sarah, a university staff member, stated that making visible data is one of the few things that she can do to help her idol extend their career life and ‘leave a mark on the legend written by him’. Echoing this, another participant noted that love itself becomes a game – a recursive cycle of effort, gratification and renewed purpose: ‘When a new song comes out, there’s something new to do again. I’ve found today’s joy – a small spark that brightens the monotony of my working life.’

The game-like symmetry and accelerating reciprocity of the idol–fan relationship bind both sides into a continuous cycle of affective performance and reward. For fans to make data for their idols willingly and continuously without financial compensation, idols also need to provide their fans with the corresponding emotional value. This includes striving for more performance opportunities, responding to random fans’ comments on social media platforms, and publicly declaring fans hold a significant place in their lives, among other actions. Thus, this relationship needs a symmetrical effort, and hence it is not selfless devotion without expecting anything in return. Fans’ affective labour is more like a reward – thanking idols for their dedication and commitment to the fandom, as they perceive themselves as part of it, as a whole. This form of reciprocity does not entail an exact replication of actions but rather an equitable emotional/affective labour to maintain the idol–fan relationship.

This study also suggests that, when this reciprocal affective labour is challenged, it will have a significant impact on the willingness and motivation to continue making data voluntarily. If a singer does not interact with fans or show up for a long period of time, their motivation to make data will drop dramatically and they might even disengage from being a fan. Thus, fans could withdraw at any time if they were not satisfied with the ‘service’:

I’ll get very bored. When my idol doesn’t have new activities or doesn’t appear for a long time, our fans are like ‘widows’ and usually in this case many of them will run away to adore other idols. We cannot commit ourselves. (Harper, media worker)

The phenomenon of ‘boredom’ operates as a gamified mechanism of perpetual momentum, where idols and fans co-produce an accelerating cycle of participation and value accumulation. Technological acceleration (Rosa, 2015), driven by algorithms, enhances the speed of transport, goods and services, and organisational management, decision-making and control, all aimed at minimising process duration. In the context of singer–fan interaction, fans can watch performances and interact with their idols directly on the screens, regardless of their physical geographic location, but it also correspondingly increases the pressure on both parties to give timely feedback to each other. In this affective assemblage, consent is produced and reproduced.

On top of that, the work-from-home arrangements further enhanced this self-propelling feedback system. During the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic and downward pressure on China’s economy that still exists in the post-pandemic era, the labour provided by idols has filled the emotional support that fans lack in real life. Like Julia, a jewellery designer, said, ‘The three years I liked him basically overlapped with the pandemic, so thankfully my idol soothed this traumatic period of my career downturn.’ With a policy of social distance, the convenience of the internet allows singers to always be virtually available to fans. Driven by the need to alleviate loneliness, the motivation and demand for emotional bonds are strengthened. The flexibility induced by remote work/study has nearly erased the boundaries between leisure and work. This is particularly evident in the case of popular music, which serves as a decorative backdrop to daily life. Consequently, flexible consumption also contributes to the fragmented production, seamlessly embedded in the interstices of everyday life. This, in turn, obscures the user labour beneath the guise of leisure.

The gamification of data fan practices has resulted in the anxiety of being on what Hartmut Rosa (2013) calls a ‘slippery slope’. While music streaming services are not gig working platforms like Uber, they accomplish the same governance of the fans using the prevailing fear and anxiety in the ranking system. The pleasure derived from data monitoring and making emerges from this competitive, game-like logic. Data fans experience satisfaction through the measurable progress, rankings, and collective achievements that resemble the gratification of gameplay. The quantifiable outcomes of their participation – daily charts, streaming milestones or leaderboard positions – serve as both feedback and reward, sustaining motivation and transforming affective attachment into a continuous cycle of ludic competition and accomplishment. The weekly championship is not the end of the road, instead, all the results are used as a foundation for future endeavours.

In addition, the cause of this anxiety also comes from the algorithms becoming the new rule-maker and time-manager of the play. Burawoy (1979) identifies the terminological shift from ‘time-study men’ to ‘industrial engineers’ during the 30-year period from 1945 to 1975, characterising them as ‘agents of speed-up’ (p. 164). The shop floor also underwent a transition from the piecework system to the hourly-based standard rate system. Today, the time measurement has been supplanted by continuous, 24-hour systems, imposing even stricter demands on the prosumer for immediate responses. MacKenzie (2021) points out the impact that ultrafast algorithms have on financial market exchanges by slicing time into nanoseconds. Similarly, data fan culture is the result of an algorithm-driven market. The sorting system in QQ Music also slices time into smaller units and accelerates the pace of labour process. TME UniChart (see Figure 1), for example, which updates the indexes every 10 minutes and recalculates the rankings weekly, spurs them to move from being mere consumers of music to free labourers. To appease the system, they are compelled to tacitly make data on a minute-by-minute basis, and even train their daily actions into muscle memory to seize the limited additional music promotion resources rewarded by Tencent. Like a hamster running on a wheel, data fans are in a perpetual race against time. However, for them, endless work is still fulfilling, because it confers a sense of freedom to participate voluntarily, and they always get affective responses from data visualisations. Hence, without the need for human surveillance, they accomplish voluntary value production.

Figure 1.

The dashboard of TME UniChart.

‘We are sister comrades’

In some cases, gamification extends beyond individual motivation to shape collective organisation and governance. What begins as playful participation evolves into a structured system of coordination, where data fan alliances institutionalise the logic of the game through data monitoring, duty schedules and performance targets. Some data fans consciously established provisional ‘alliances’ to pursue joint forms of cooperation. Such self-governing groups are typically composed of administrators and members. Administrators are usually experienced data fans, while members are like-minded data fans who are recruited by administrators based on their loyalty to the idol and their sense of responsibility. These practices mirror Burawoy’s (1979) notion of ‘organizational games’, in which managerial control is achieved through internalised competition and cooperation. Yet in this case, the platform’s gamified affordances provide the framework within which fans themselves design, enforce and reproduce the rules of play. Gamification thus operates as a mode of social organisation, transforming affective devotion into a collectively managed system of playbour.

Within data fan alliances, gamified structures organise collective participation through the continual use of visualised metrics, which determine the rhythm and intensity of labour. Clock-in rituals and on-duty schedules function as game mechanics that translate affective enthusiasm into quantifiable performance. Members are expected to follow team leaders, complete daily tasks, and report their progress within group chats, where numerical targets serve as both motivation and control. Recruitment notices openly demand candidates who are ‘highly resistant to stress’ and capable of ‘flexible working hours’, signalling an ideal of endurance and adaptability rather than reforming the conditions of participation. Such expectations epitomise what Boltanski and Chiapello (2018) term the new spirit of capitalism, and resonate with Harvey’s (1987) critique of flexible accumulation and Sennett’s (1998) notion of ‘flexible humans’. In such alliances, flexibility and self-motivation are not imposed externally but reimagined as virtues of play. Fans willingly join these self-managed teams because the gamified organisation promises not only collective purpose but also personal fulfilment, skill enhancement and recognition within a competitive field. For instance, as articulated during the interviews:

I’ll have a better understanding of the internet. I think [making data] will help me in the future if I want to do self-media or something like that, and I’ll be more resilient and will improve the ability to organise a team. (Madeline, teaching intern)

I joined a data fan group on Weibo, and I worked as a copywriter. My work is organising collective actions and controlling comments. I joined it because firstly I think I have this ability, and it is also a self-training. It can not only enhance my writing skill but also cultivate my ability to organise a team. (Cora, college student)

Anchored by shared goals – voluntarily engaging in surveillance and data generation to elevate their idol’s metrics – these alliances transform coordination into camaraderie. The sister-comrade bonds that emerge through collective play reinforce both emotional solidarity and sustained participation, constituting what can be described as a long-term gamification of consent. By collaborating to develop tactics for gaming algorithms while avoiding detection as automated bots, fans continually reanimate the very system that structures their actions. Their imagined sisterhood, coupled with visions of self-development and moral commitment, ensures the reproduction of affective attachment and platform productivity. Notably, this gendered solidarity operates less as a form of resistance than as a feminised mode of care-oriented governance. Even when male members are present, the collective insists on addressing one another as ‘sisters’, symbolically reaffirming the ethics of care as a shared labour identity:

I think it feels a bit like ‘colleagues’, but it will be closer than colleague, because everyone [in my group] likes the same person, and we gather together to make data for the idol we like. Everyone has a sense of belonging and closeness. (Ava, college student)

Calling is the most direct way to bring members of a fan group closer together and connect, and ‘sister’ is not offensive and has a connotation of kinship in itself. (Vida, unemployed)

Traditionally, sisterhood solidarity was discussed in the context of women’s movements against political, racial and class oppression (hooks, 2014; Morgan, 2016). In this study, however, the sisterhood alliances exemplify the gendered reproduction of playbour, where care and cooperation sustain, rather than subvert, algorithmic management. Instead, they channel emotional energy into competition with rival groups for visibility and commercial attention. Pearl, a civil servant, revealed that her group have a game known as the ‘relay reposting game’. To generate significant repost and comment data for their idol’s posts, group members use casual yet irrelevant conversation topics – such as ‘What shall we eat today?’ – during reposting activities, thus enabling participants to maintain pleasure in the ongoing competitive dynamics of leaderboard ranking. This parallels Burawoy’s theory, which observes that workers, having already consented to labour, seek to make it entertaining. Yet unlike factory games tied to formal production quotas, these self-invented games are collectively designed and democratically maintained, revealing both fan agency and the creative diversification of value production within the logics of gamified control.

‘Autonomous’ players

A second dimension of playbour concerns the emergence of what can be called ‘autonomous players’ – data fans who perceive themselves as autonomous agents yet actively reproduce the logic of platform capitalism. Drawing from Burawoy’s (1979) analysis of illusory autonomy on the shop floor, these players have internalised the goals of the algorithmic ‘game’, transforming the pursuit of play into self-managed production. In data fandom, the sense of control and voluntarism operates as a noteworthy mode of consent: participants imagine themselves as strategists and organisers rather than labourers, even as their actions sustain and extend the mechanisms of value extraction.

In the interviews, several respondents informed me that there are internal raffle prizes or reimbursement events. Some wealthy fans – referred to as ‘CEOs’ – fund such intra-fan raffles or reimbursement events from their own pockets, offering prizes or compensation to participants who excel at metric-making tasks such as streaming songs, purchasing digital albums or boosting social media metrics. CEOs in these data groups require participants to ‘clock in’ after completing assigned tasks. Apart from raffles, CEOs with access to a large number of Weibo accounts – which can be traded on the black market – will distribute these accounts for free to a selected group of loyal fans and ask them to complete certain data work.

The speed of consuming the accounts is really amazing, more than ten times faster than yesterday, causing us to replenish the warehouse of accounts a dozen times, but it’s not enough. So, we’re calling on everyone to finish all tasks of their accounts [like + favourite + purchase + download + karaoke the targeted song] and give CEO extra time to replenish accounts. It’s hard for everyone, we can do it, sprinting towards 98 scores!!!! (A posting made by a ‘CEO’ on 11 December 2022)

This fan-to-fan relational labour is particularly prevalent when a new single by their favourite artist is released. Their goal is to produce higher-ranking music data by switching as many accounts as possible with a limited number of people. These informal arrangements often evolve into competitive team-based contests in which higher metric output earns symbolic rewards or recognition. Within the constraints of China’s tightly regulated digital environment, such practices have given rise to self-organised grey labour chains – forms of play that replicate production relations without formal employment.

Therefore, this dimension extends beyond the realm of free labour to become a self-financed form of playbour, where ‘autonomous’ players willingly spend their own resources to sustain the system’s productivity. The ‘bounty hunters’ also find gratification in the gamified circuits of visibility and competition, where expenditure becomes both a sign of devotion and a measure of success, measured by metrics such as likes, shares, rankings and engagement scores. Their autonomy is therefore productive, generating extra-value through the expenditure of personal time, skills, and resources beyond the formal boundaries of labour itself.

‘Meta-players’

Building upon the autonomous players discussed in the previous section, this part examines a more devoted form of participation: ‘meta-players’ who take pride in mastering and analysing the system itself – not just within the game, but about the game. For these ‘hardcore data fans’, play becomes not merely a mode of engagement but a site of identity formation, where the pleasure of control and the pride of expertise fuse into an endless pursuit of optimisation. In this aspect, gamification becomes symbolised through a ‘prediction game’ concerning the prospective metrics of their favourite artist’s work. Their activities – data entry and experimenting with platform affordances – are playable and pleasurable, yet still productive within the platform economy. Following existing notions of hybridised production and play – prosumption (Toffler, 1980), playbour (Kücklich, 2005), produsage (Bruns, 2008) and playsumption (Prior, 2018) – this analysis foregrounds how gamified affordances render play itself productive, continuously converting affective pleasure into consent for value generation.

In Burawoy’s (1979) analysis, the making out game on the shop floor contained an institutionalised ceiling – workers collectively recognised an upper limit of about 140% productivity. The limit maintained the illusion of autonomy while ensuring managerial dominance. Yet, in the case of data fandom, this ceiling has vanished. Whereas industrial management depended on setting boundaries to channel effort and maintain productivity, platform management operates by abolishing limits, ensuring endless circulation and self-exploitation. The making and analysis of data can be understood as an ideological production through which data fans, like factory workers, generate meaning, identity and pride from their own participation. However, the sense of mastery and creativity derived from these self-made games conceals the underlying asymmetry between users and platforms. Through play, fans come to experience algorithmic discipline as self-expression, converting surveillance and productivity into sources of satisfaction and pride.

In this case, gamification comes from two aspects – the top-down imposition of ‘gamification-from-above’ (Woodcock & Johnson, 2018) and the playful attitude of data fans. Chinese top music steaming apps – KuGou Music, QQ Music, Kuwo Music and NetEase Cloud Music – provide affordances and limitations to the users through their design. When interacting with a screen, a click can yield various and diverse results (Norman, 2013). In the case of meta-players, game elements only possess potentiality until it is realised and experienced by their gameplay attitudes. This occurs as they navigate and choose from the various preconfigured options available within a digital media system. Take Tencent QQ Music app as an example. It is not intentionally designed as a game, but the global sorting algorithms of these applications are undeniably gamified. It implies which rules affecting the ranking of content users should be aware of, and which actions contribute to higher music rankings and rewards.

The process of playing inherently involves negotiation towards gamification-from-above. Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman (2004) propose that ‘meaningful play’ arises partly in response to the rules established by the game designer but also stems from players’ efforts to resist and engage with these rules. In the case of TME UniChart, for example, meta-players often test how playing different versions of the same song would affect the spread score of that song by creating multiple accounts to do the experiment. Therefore, they can backtrack the algorithmic principles of music chart ranking through the curve of data changes updated by UniChart every 10 minutes. Similarly, data fans tend to subscribe to the WeChat Index Toolbox provided by Tencent to monitor changes in the search volume of their favourite artists (see Figure 2). This process of data analysis and extrapolation gives them a sense of achievement.

Figure 2.

A bar chart of a particular artist’s WeChat Index, shared by a ‘meta-player’ who studies data for fun. The horizontal axis represents dates, while the vertical axis shows the indexes as published by WeChat. This allows for their analysis of public opinion trends and the artist’s popularity profile.

Like creating mods in video games, data fans who work in stats-related jobs in the real world prefer to produce content to round out their gaming experience. These professional amateurs (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004) came up with more ways of playing with data. When I asked Tina why she labelled herself as a ‘data fan’ when she just got into fandom, she replied without hesitation: ‘Because of interest.’ As an accountant, she is interested in anything to do with numbers, markets and finance. Similar to Tina, Jessica maintains a great interest in things related to numbers. She quit her previous job as a data analyst and changed to a stable job to meet her family’s expectations. However, her nostalgia for a life working with numbers led her to start organising her idol’s music data on Microsoft Excel for fun in her spare time.

Their engagement is further sustained under the psychological mechanisms of ‘gaming addiction’. As with gaming, making and analysing data may lead to addiction. Nana, a college student, confessed that she had ‘gaming addiction’ to data making and data analysis. For her, everyday life was boring, but saw how data growth and change was always fun and easily motivated by positive feedback. It was secondary to her whether the singer benefited from her work or not; what mattered most was her own enjoyment of the process. There are also other data fans who are not only satisfied with data entry, but also gain a sense of achievement by making predictions about where the data will go in the future based on their experience. Consequently, they can develop corresponding folk theories and effectively manage the risks associated with their own accounts and their idols’ popular music works. In the Manufacturing Consent, psychological rewards, rather than monetary compensation, serve as the primary motivation for workers to engage in making out as a means of resisting the boredom of obligatory work. In this context, data fan activities manifest as a form of dual labour. On the one hand, with the rise of remote work and online learning, in the spirit of De Certeau’s (1984) la perruque, data fans appropriate work time for leisure, covertly reclaiming autonomy within the structures of labour discipline. On the other hand, such leisure activities push them into the realm of playbour. Thus, their engagement in playbour emerges as a mode of resisting real-world labour while affiliating with the digital spaces. Visualised metrics and trends, paradoxically, offer a rare sense of certainty and security in risk societies, thereby generating psychological pleasure.

The ambiguity and black-box nature of the algorithms become the fun part of their play. While Burawoy (1979) emphasises that ‘playing a game generates consent to its rules’ (p.93), in data fandom, the algorithmic rules themselves have become an integral part of ‘puzzle games’. This parallels Burawoy’s notion of ‘uncertainty’ in the game of making out. Such uncertainty must be neither too great, leading to outcomes beyond players’ control, nor too slight, making the game devoid of challenge (Burawoy, 1979, p. 87). The combination of visualised data and opaque algorithms precisely provides an appropriate level of uncertainty. Thus, this can also be understood as ‘gamification-from-below’ (Woodcock & Johnson, 2018) – a bottom-up unveiling of the system that transforms the non-game (systems) into self-invented game. Here, it more closely aligns with Caillois’s (1961) concept of paidia (playing), characterised by greater freedom in the ways and rules of engaging with data analysis.

Admittedly, even if an algorithm is deciphered at a given point in time, the designers are always updating and changing existing data patterns, and algorithms thus have a dynamic evolutionary nature (Perel & Elkin-Koren, 2017). Instead of being a stumbling block, continuously evolving algorithms become a new part of play. Based on their own experience as content creators, they love to compare the algorithms of different social platforms and the different priorities that need to be focused on, to explore what kind of content creation can break through the information cocoon. Successfully calculating and deciphering the reasons behind the changes in output values is what they find interesting.

Looking beyond the exploitation/emancipation dichotomy, data fans exemplify how consent is both produced and reproduced within the logics of platform capitalism. Their pleasure lies in tracking and interpreting the fluctuations of digital metrics, in mastering the rules of algorithmic visibility, and in testing the limits of those very rules. Between freedom and constraint, they transform data work into a form of play – an iterative, self-sustaining practice through which participation becomes both a leisure pursuit and a mode of governance in the digital age.

Discussion and conclusion

Moving beyond Burawoy’s analysis of manufacturing consent – wherein workers come to participate willingly in their own exploitation – this study interrogates the rise of data fan who engages with idol-related metrics through gamified activities, instead of formal contractual and self-interested factory labour. Rather than proposing an escape from what autonomist theorists call the ‘social factory’ (Gill & Pratt, 2008; Tronti, 1966), it examines empirical findings on data fans, whose algorithmic awareness reveals how individuals make sense of their playful behaviours and the logics underpinning them in this transformed labour landscape.

This study reveals how the intertwining of metricisation and gamification generates multilayered consent, transforming data fans’ playful participation into self-governed labour that sustains the logics of platform capitalism. First, this study illustrates how expressing love becomes a game structured through metrics and leaderboards. Visualised data serve as both the currency and scoreboard of devotion, transforming emotional attachment into a measurable form of competition and participation. Within this gamified ecology, data fans’ affection is continuously reproduced through cycles of challenge, reward and comparison, while idols respond by generating new content to sustain the momentum of play. The mutual acceleration of production and engagement binds both sides within a shared game logic – one that renders care productive and competition affective, making disengagement increasingly difficult. The second dimension concerns the rise of ‘autonomous players’ who go beyond the realm of free labour. Here, metric-making becomes not merely a task but a game of self-directed optimisation, not only through time and effort but also through personal financial investment. In doing so, they embody the illusion of autonomy that Burawoy (1979) identified on the factory floor: the belief that one is in control while, in fact, reproducing managerial logic. The final dimension turns to ‘meta-players’, who elevate participation from self-directed optimisation to the ludic production and analysis of data itself – transforming algorithmic systems into the very terrain of play. This type of practice is often carried by professional amateurs who rely on their expertise in computer science and statistics and derive various ways of interacting as gameplay from the existing algorithmic rules and gamified designs. The black-box nature of algorithms is not a hindrance to their actions, but part of gaming experience. Consequently, data play functions as an ideological apparatus: by metrifying their own play, data fans internalise the logic of productivity, transform self-surveillance into pride, and reproduce the conditions of their own consent.

Overall, this research provides a novel understanding of the manufacturing of consent among emerging data fans, whose orientation toward playbour regards data-driven interaction as a core aspect of identity. In the traditional factory labour studied by Burawoy (1979), waged labour constitutes a fundamental condition for the subsistence of workers. Their consent arises internally through the process of labour, rather than externally before entering the factory. Extending Burawoy’s (1979) theorisation of labour process, this study investigates its contemporary manifestations in gamified and platformised environments. Positioned not as workers by either the state or the platform, but as players participating in leisure, data fans’ value production becomes obscured, with motivations that are correspondingly intricate. This study argues that consent arises through the affective infrastructures of gamification, where the quantification of interaction and the pleasures of play render self-surveillance and participation both desirable and self-legitimating. Such dynamics are further sustained by data fans’ seemingly autonomous, democratically imagined play ethos. Consequently, the value forms thus generated are multifaceted. Data fans’ activities in digital spaces simultaneously yield use value related to self-satisfaction, affection and interpersonal relationships, as well as exchange value and surplus value mediated through the privatisation of user data. Additionally, their ultimate goal is to enhance the speculative value (Davis, 2018) of idols by fostering high expectations among music critics, investors and market analysts regarding its future development, thereby consolidating and elevating the symbolic value and financial valuation.

This study also advances our understanding of digital fan culture by revealing data fandom as a space of continual negotiation between gamified platform control and self-directed engagement. In this labour process, algorithms assume the role previously occupied by traditional time-study men and industrial engineers, becoming a new time regulator with whom fans cannot bargain. It continuously monitors user interactions in real time and administers rewards or penalties, thereby constructing an addictive feedback loop. This encourages data fans to dedicate increased time and creativity to unpacking opaque algorithms and maintaining platform activity. Driven by metrics and leaderboards, data fans actively exercise agency either individually or collectively to conduct data analysis, obtaining psychological rewards in the process. Simultaneously, competing fandoms interact and engage in a game-like dynamic of incentive and rivalry. By strategically visualising selected metrics and employing carefully managed algorithmic opacity, platforms stimulate sustained user attention and participation, continually optimising algorithms and interface design. Through these mechanisms, potential resistance is effectively suppressed or co-opted, facilitating the continuous reproduction of consent.

In this context, the relationship between platform capitalism and the forms of competitive and monopoly capitalism can be understood as a dynamic marked by both continuity and transformation. Platform capitalism inherits the high degree of concentration typical of monopoly capitalism, with a few corporations – such as Tencent, which owns WeChat and QQ Music with vast user bases, and Sina, the proprietor of Weibo – dominating critical data, algorithms and cloud infrastructures, thereby establishing near-unshakable market positions. At the same time, platform capitalism also adopts the fierce competitive elimination mechanisms of competitive capitalism, characterised by rapid technological iterations and intensive capital activities among platforms, allowing a small number of leading firms to rapidly expand while accelerating the demise or acquisition of smaller competitors. A key difference is that the territorial control exerted by platforms extends beyond the shop floor; rather, they incorporate fragmented groups of fans, singers, agencies and advertisers into a digital ecosystem governed through algorithms and real-time data monitoring. This hybrid form profoundly reshapes production regime, capital accumulation and labour control, offering new perspectives for examining contemporary digital labour and fan studies.