Playbour (sometimes spelled playbor) is a hybrid form of play and labour, specifically in the digital games industry.
The term was coined by Julian Kücklich in 2005 in his article Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry.
Kücklich describes playbour as a type of free labour that fits neither traditional definitions of work nor the categories of play or leisure.
While the term playbour itself is a relatively new invention, the phenomena it concerns – those of productive leisure and free labour in the digital games industry – have been around at least since the late 1990s.
[6] Relating the way companies such as Facebook, Google, and Apple (among others) push the burden of labor onto consumers as "whitewashing the fence for the twenty-first century," a reference to the classic Adventures of Tom Sawyer narrative, the issue of motivation and promised outcomes becomes complicated as users are expected to engage in labor for free in order to enjoy the benefits of different technologies.
In this respect modding can be fairly similar to another form of collaborative digital production; open-source software development.
[7] The emergence of Doom mods is usually attributed to the fact that the game's code was deliberately designed to facilitate player-created content.
The Creation Kit was a free software development tool that enabled users to alter game content.
[7] In addition to that, mods may help with establishing brands (e.g. Counter-Strike), thus saving companies a significant amount of money.
Mods also increase customer loyalty and are an important source of innovation in the digital games industry.