Project: Prime Time Year: 2020 Discipline: VR, Game Development Website: algorithmic.studio Collaborators: Jamie Lamb
Prime Time uses Virtual Reality to simulate the semi-automated, pressurised work environment of an Amazon Fulfilment centre. It embeds the player in the relentless machinic system, replicating the real experience of working in an environment where their every action is closely monitored. They are expected to meet impossible time pressures which are enforced by a punitive system that adds points to their record based on performance, which is constantly surveilled, three points results in employment termination.
Through research and investigation, Prime Time exposes the practises that Amazon’s tours and highly polished advertisements won’t. The experience presents the 21st century equivalent of industrial factory work, a new model of tailorist managerial practises where your boss is a piece of software that is unable to be empathetic, forgiving, flexible and regulates your every breathing moment and transforms you into a mere appendage of the computational industrial system.
The simulation includes clues which the player may discover amongst the products they must stow, which are suggestive of less than legal activities from their employer involving tax, employee rights, freedom of information and customer privacy.
