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Free To Play/Pay To Win: Consuming Competition Through Online Gaming In The Neoliberal Age, Brandon Jones
Free To Play/Pay To Win: Consuming Competition Through Online Gaming In The Neoliberal Age, Brandon Jones
Honors Projects
This project examines online gaming in the context of decades of deregulation and privatization. In the piece, I examine American culture’s infatuation with the value of competition through a historical and hegemonic scope. Throughout the piece, I make connections between online gaming and the illusion that the populace must compete for unnecessarily scarce resources. The goal of this project is to illustrate how micro-transactions in online gaming is not beneficial for the consumer, but rather coercive reinforcements of the spontaneous philosophy of competition prevalent in the Neoliberal age.