Sisworo, Heri (2009) Football manager 2007: the numerical human / Heri Sisworo. Diploma thesis, Universitas Negeri Malang.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Human being according to Karl Marx has one main purpose in their lives that is to make history . However in order to stay alive and making history they have to fulfill their basic needs before everything else eating and drinking habitation and clothing. And the effort to satisfy those needs is called labor (1867). Basically labor is a process of changing or appropriating nature s production to human s wants. There are three elementary factors of the laborprocess the personal activities of human i.e. work itself the subject of that work and its instruments. Let s take a simple example of this process a farmer cultivates his soil with a plough. There is an activity (cultivating) the subject of the work (soil) and instrument (plough). This labor process then is an integral part of human s life. In other words work is human nature. This definition of labor remains the same although people and society (along with their needs) change every time. It only becoming more complex adjusting with the condition of the society. In this modern society labor is often called as occupation or job an activity somebody does regularly in order to get paid. When somebody has a job he is called worker and someone who hire him is called the employer or boss. The thing being traded by the workers is no other than their labor power (labor force). They meet the employer to be to negotiate how much their labor power is valued. Automatically both parties agree that worker s labor power is a commodity. Workers may do many activities based on their field of work and they are selected based on their skill or specialization. To gain the specialization they must undergo either working experience or specific education beforehand. When hired workers do the selected tasks get paid and they satisfy their needs with this payment. Marx added that when the workers own the labor process there will be a relation between workers and their product as an expression of their own essence. They will also recognize themselves in their product and will be recognized by others in their work. As I said above workers sell their labor power to the employer thus the labor process and automatically the product belong to the employer. Consequently the workers are alienated to their products. This is the basis of Marx s alienation theory. He went on by stating that there are four kind of alienation suffered by workers under capitalism. First in the product of labor the worker is alienated from the object he produces because it is bought owned and disposed of by someone else the capitalist. The labor process is the second factor of alienation which Marx describes. Marx identified this as a lack of control over the process of production. He is basically saying that this lack of control over the work process transforms worker s capacity to work creatively into the opposite and the worker in turn experiences activity as passivity. The worker now sees his actions as independent of himself and does not believe that these actions belong to him any more. Alienation from our fellow human beings is the third factor of alienation that Marx describes. This alienation occurs as a result of the class structure of society brought by the capitalism. And the fourth is that workers are forced to work blindly not with their creative best. This is mainly because the clear division of the labor in the workplace every worker only does a certain task based on his specialization (Gouldner 1980). The process of alienation leads to a process called dehumanization of workers. Since work or labor is human s nature along with its process and product any violation of it would decrease the degree of people doing the work. In capitalism the workers are dehumanized because they are seen as instrument of production in other words as commodities. The portion of what the workers produce is appropriated by the boss and the worker is therefore exploited. As commodities the workers become replaceable. They can be replaced by anybody else when they are no longer productive according to the boss or when the boss finds another worker with the same productivity but with a lower wage. The workers are no longer seen as who they are as human being but as instrument a production machine. Started from a process called commodification a process by which something which does not have an economic value is assigned a value and hence how market values can replace other social values (Rushkoff 2005). It describes a modification of relationships formerly untainted by commerce into commercial relationships. This commodification then lead to the process of alienation alienation is therefore characterized by the universal extension of saleability (i.e. the transformation of everything into commodity) (M sz ros 1970). This is exactly what happened to sports these days. Since I am going to analyze football (soccer) I will go straight to the commodification of football. Football is a global sport even from the beginning. The origin of this game can be found in every corner of the world. The Chinese Japanese Italian Ancient Greek Persian Viking and many more played a ball game long before our era. The Chinese played football-like games since 3000 years ago. The Ancient Greeks and the Roman used football games to sharpen warriors for battle. In south and Central America a game called Tlatchi . Obviously in the beginning of its history football was a game of fun. Yet started by the professionalism of football in 1880s this sport has become a big industry under capitalism world. As the most-well known sport in the world football is an industry with million dollars of capital flow. The product of football also much more diversified today one of them is the electronic game based on the real football world Football Manager 2007 (which will be analyzed in this study). Hence football has become commodified in other words football has become a commodity. Thus there is a change of the football s function from a pure sport into a medium of gaining profit. Electronic games including FM 07 are a product of popular culture it is produced distributed and consumed massively. In cultural studies point of view popular culture has the same position with canonical literary works. The argument that popular culture is ephemeral and thus unworthy of critical attention misses the fact that popular culture is also ideologically encoded and encoding (Agger 1992). Agger added that popular culture is central vehicle of ideology. Thus analyzing popular culture is as worthy as analyzing the classical ones. Moreover popular culture is consumed by most of the society FM 07 for example is played by 6 millions people and FM 07 has shaped a similar framework of playing of those people therefore it has a huge impact to the society itself. Cultural studies have made it possible to employ the literary theories in analyzing popular culture that used to be considered as low culture. There are not much studies concerning on video games at the time of this thesis writing. One of the recent studies about electronic game was a thesis by Herditya W Widodo which was published in 2007. Widodo analyzed the repressive society in the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. He found that the State and its apparatuses in the game utilize Ideological State Apparatus to support justify and necessitate repressiveness done by the Repressive State Apparatus to the resistant class in the society. Interestingly both RSA exists because of the existence of the resistant class and vice versa. It is appears then that despite the hostility between them both parties need each other to exist (Widodo 2007). To conclude Widodo s thesis can be a model of analysis for this study. This study then will try to uncover not just Marx s dehumanization concept in the world of Football Manager 2007and also the dehumanization caused by the representation of human as statistics. To answer this question I will play the game thoroughly and then taking the narrative elements (plot/storyline characterizations setting and theme) needed. These elements then considered as a text which will be used as a modal to gain meaning through analysis. This method is in compliance with what Bressler proposed for the Marxist critics that a Marxist critic may begin the analysis by showing how an author s text reflects his or her ideology through the text (1994 221) To avoid misunderstanding it is important to define the terms which are used in this thesis 1. Player or football player is a person whose job is playing football professionally in the game s world. 2. Gamer is the is the common player of the game who completes only and all the intended playable elements in the original game and use only options that are available by the gaming original resources available and common to all other possible players. 3. Match is the game of football. 4. Alienation is a process of estrangement from other people society or work. In Marxist s perspective it is a process of separating labor and the work. Alienation leads to dehumanization the process of taking away the humanness value of certain individual or group. 5. Statistics is data presented in the game that includes all of graphs number profiles etc.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Diploma) |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | ?? ?? |
| Divisions: | Fakultas Sastra (FS) > Departemen Sastra Inggris (ING) > S1 Bahasa dan Sastra Inggris |
| Depositing User: | Users 2 not found. |
| Date Deposited: | 30 Dec 2009 04:29 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Sep 2009 03:00 |
| URI: | http://repository.um.ac.id/id/eprint/10942 |
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