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Full-Text Articles in Business
Gamer Resistance To Marketization Of Play, Jacob C. Almaguer
Gamer Resistance To Marketization Of Play, Jacob C. Almaguer
Markets, Globalization & Development Review
Video games provide an important context to understand the role of markets in a virtual space. Particularly, consumerism has appeared to have transferred from actual reality in the virtual reality in video games. For instance, growth in use of microtransactions by companies enable consumers to exchange real currency for in-game currency. Thus, the distinction between reality and fiction appears to be blurring. This may be problematic given the hegemony of AAA video game developers (Triple-A games are those with very high development and promotion budgets), commonality of neoliberal appeals in video games, and the potential influence that video games can …
The Unfree Space Of Play: Emergence And Control In The Videogame And The Platform, Logan Brown
The Unfree Space Of Play: Emergence And Control In The Videogame And The Platform, Logan Brown
Markets, Globalization & Development Review
This article attempts to understand the economic and informatic ramifications of the convergence between increasingly connective games and massive online platforms by considering recent trends in both that center around designing for emergence. Scholarship on emergence as a property of games overwhelmingly treats emergent design as a liberating force that privileges player agency in a virtual space. Yet, as games fuse with surrounding platform ecosystems like Steam, Facebook, and Google, those emergent behaviors are subject to vast systems of inscription that analyze user behavior in order to reshape the free space of emergence and extract greater social and financial capital. …