RIOT NOW. Esprit ludique, créativité et «free work» dans un JdR indépendant

The article focuses on emerging forms of “free work”, in which the boundaries between work and leisure are completely blurred. It does so through an ethnography of Tin-Hat, a small Italian association that successfully designed, produced and marketed an “independent” Role-play Game. Tin-Hat members express their passions and creativity outside their day-time and paid job, conceiving Tin-Hat as resisting the capitalist model of low-cost, fast and hence low-quality production. In the particular and articulated combination of playfulness and professionalism that Tin-Hat represents, people are free in their work but they also work for free, and the creative and innovative work organisation is possible thanks to the means granted by paid work activities and to some complicity with contemporary capitalist strategies.