The Game of Making Money: How Rural Migrant Delivery Riders Are Motivated to Work Very Long Hours in China

ABSTRACT What motivates rural migrant delivery riders in China to work very long hours, and how are they managed by their working platforms? This paper investigates the motivations of rural migrant riders in Shanghai to engage in continuous work and examines the management strategies employed by their platforms. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with rural migrant riders working for the two largest on‐demand food delivery platforms in China, this paper finds that gamified algorithmic controls incentivize riders' labour. Driven by strict working performance assessment, Shanghai riders are attracted by three types of games: the everyday game of assessing work performance, the game played with their working platforms and the game played among riders. Building on these findings, this article identifies three defining features that condition consent from workers within the platform labour regime: its temporal fragmentation, informational asymmetry and hyper‐individualization. The gamification process ultimately aligns with broader trends of datafication within the online food delivery sector. These findings contribute to understandings of labour games in platform economies and offer insights into the emergence of ‘sticky labour’ in exploitative working environments. In doing so, it underscores the contingent, situated nature of labour motivation in the platform economy and extends Burawoy's analysis to digital labour regimes.