New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia ISSN: 1361-4568 (Print) 1740-7842 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tham20 Avatar economies: affective investment from game to platform Luke van Ryn, Thomas Apperley & Justin Clemens To cite this article: Luke van Ryn, Thomas Apperley & Justin Clemens (2019): Avatar economies: affective investment from game to platform, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, DOI: 10.1080/13614568.2019.1572790 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2019.1572790 Published online: 28 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 17 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=tham20 NEW REVIEW OF HYPERMEDIA AND MULTIMEDIA https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2019.1572790 Avatar economies: affective investment from game to platform Luke van Ryn a , Thomas Apperley b and Justin Clemens a a School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; bCentre for Excellence in Game Culture Studies, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Video game avatars have been understood as a key site of players’ “affective investment” in play and games. In this article, we extend this conversation to explore the avatar’s role in engaging players with gaming platforms. Through a case study of Team Fortress 2 (Valve Software, 2007) and the Steam platform, we demonstrate the avatar’s function beyond gameworlds as a tool for encouraging certain kinds of play. Team Fortress 2, we argue, is a crucial testing ground for Valve’s experiments with gaming economies via the Steam platform. By extension, we show the importance of video game avatars for encouraging affective investment in platforms more broadly, including Microsoft’s Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and even workplace dashboards. Received 7 August 2018 Accepted 17 January 2019 KEYWORDS K.4.m miscellaneous; K.8.0 general; K.1 the computer industry; video games; avatars; platform Introduction In this article we examine the affective ties between player and avatar within a wider platform ecosystem. The rise of online gaming platforms such as Steam, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live through which players manage a library of games—maintaining a consistent data identity across the games played within the network—have created an important new context for the videogame avatar. The affective investments that players make in avatars has become a crucial component of a broader investment in the platform itself. These new relations which bind players into the affective economies of digital marketplaces are elaborated through a case study that tracks the relationship between Valve’s Steam platform and their “flagship” game Team Fortress 2 (Valve Software, 2007). Steam is primarily a publishing platform for games that is owned by the privately-held company Valve. Since its advent as a distribution and digital rights management tool (Shen, 2015), Steam has subsequently expanded to include various other functions, including multi-player matchmaking, social CONTACT Luke van Ryn luke.vanryn@unimelb.edu.au versity of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group School of Culture and Communication, The Uni- 2 L. VAN RYN ET AL. networking, streaming, and micro-transactions. By 2017 there were over 150 million active Steam accounts, and the platform supported 26 languages. Since 2017, the majority language on Steam is Mandarin, as Chinese players flocked to the platform buoyed by the success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG Corporation, 2017; see Hall, 2017). We argue that it was through Valve’s effective use of avatars that Steam was successfully able to become more than a platform for digital distribution and storage, but also a site for social accumulation and curation of gaming capital. By curating their avatars’ appearance and profile, users make an affective investment in the platform which is facilitated by Steam’s virtual economy. The virtual economy of Steam provides users with a modality of expression that allows them to track the accumulation of memories and experiences across games. This virtual economy did not emerge haphazardly; it was specifically designed to create stronger affective links between the users and the platform, by retaining the centrality of the affects that players associate with videogames. This shift in gaming towards to a multisided (Nieborg & Poell, 2018), platform-orientated affective experience is facilitated through the emphasis on the avatar as a site of affective investment in gaming. “Avatar” is used to demarcate the representation of the user in a digital environment that enables “the user to experience and interact within the spaces of digitally mediated worlds” (Nowak & Fox, 2018, p. 33). The term is used in a number of contexts, including social media and digital games, as well as 3D virtual environments. In the context of digital games, the avatar has been previously earmarked as a key site of “affective investment” (Frow, 2012) and of the accumulation of “avatar capital” (Castronova, 2005; Korkeila & Hamari, 2018; Scott, 2012; Walsh and Apperley, 2008). In multiplayer gaming environments the appearance of a person’s avatar is the key to establishing a “reputational hierarchy” between players (Castronova, 2008, p. 51). While the specific details of how this is established varies between games, the central aspect is a demonstrable “affective investment” in the appearance or quality of the avatar which has been developed over time (Apperley and Clemens, 2016, 2017). The avatar acts as a signifier that externalises the skills and experiences of the player. In games—particularly multiplayer games—avatars are crucial for visually communicating with other players, and have become an elaborate tool for self-expression through customisation. For single-player games the avatar is crucial in the promotion of the game, both in official publications and through the “spreadability” of the avatar images across social media via the integration of gaming platforms into photo-sharing and livestreaming. This article explores how avatars are used to tie the affective relations players have with avatars to platforms more broadly. The following discussion of the introduction of a platform-based economy to Team Fortress 2 illustrates how Valve uses players’ affective investment in their avatars to bind Team Fortress 2 players to their game publishing and distribution platform Steam. We argue NEW REVIEW OF HYPERMEDIA AND MULTIMEDIA 3 that the increasingly close relationship between Team Fortress 2 and the economy of the Steam platform over the past decade exhibits a progressive refinement of tools for avatar creation, curation and monetisation. Specifically, we argue that the avatar is a site through which intensities of affect are experienced. Thus, avatar customisation has become a key technique of engaging players in the Steam economy that quantifies their experiences of affect and enabling avatars to function as site of accumulation, valuation and exchange within the platform. Background: avatars and affect in gaming “Affect” is understood here in terms of pre-cognitive forces or intensities that bring together bodies and worlds (Siegworth and Gregg, 2010, p. 6). The affective dimensions of gaming, then, include attention to the bodily gestures of play, the sensory interfaces of gaming systems, and players’ “investment” (Frow, 2012) in avatars. Individual games cultivate a sense of care in the avatar, both on an aesthetic and narrative level through characteristics like cuteness (Apperley & Heber, 2015), and because the avatar as a point of vulnerability to the vicissitudes of the gameworld (Veale, 2015) is the focus of attention and action. The continual maintenance of the avatar in the gameworld creates an ongoing investment of affect (Frow, 2012), which is constantly in modulation through changes in the rhythms and intensities of the game (Apperley, 2010; Ash, 2010; Frow, 2012; Sundén & Sveningsson, 2012), and the player’s changing kinaesthetic responses which include specific focuses of movement and attention (Ash, 2012; Swalwell, 2008; Väliaho, 2014), that may involve a total change in the comportment of the body (Ash, 2010; see also Shinkle, 2005). The relationship between the player and the game is structured by the flow of affective intensities between the on-screen body of the avatar and the body of the player (Frow, 2012, p. 366). We argue that the measured and meticulous process of design which directs the virtual economy of Steam towards the maintenance of affect also uses the avatar as its structuring principle. The virtual economy is designed to expand the affective architecture of digital games into the Steam platform in order to capture the affective investment of players. The explicit role of game design as the modulation of affect has been highlighted in recent scholarship by Anable (2013), Ash (2010, 2012), Moore (2011, 2012) and Schüll (2012). Ash (2012, pp. 3–4; cf. Lottridge & Moore, 2009) outlines the process of “affective design,” which is directed at “holding users’ attention” by careful modulation of affect through “aesthetic and material design.” Anable (2013, para. 6) characterises casual games as “affective systems,” arguing that “we make choices and push buttons in games because of how games structure our feelings about those choices and actions”. Ash focuses on “triple-A” videogames (with large budgets), arguing that: “every aspect of videogames is actively designed on a 4 L. VAN RYN ET AL. micro-level to generate particular forms of affect” (2012, p. 5). Moore (2012) argues that experienced players of first-person shooter (FPS) games experience a structuring of affect through an acclimatisation and familiarity with the nuances and variability of the genre, which ultimately allows them to manage their experiences of affect. Schüll’s work on machine gambling argues that the gambling industry is driven by a design process which is based on “adaptive attunement to consumers’ desires, affects, and bodies” (2012, p. 74; cf. Ash, 2010, p. 654). The goal is to create a product that is “designed to facilitate affective balance and continuity of play” (Schüll, 2012, p. 307). Across these debates we find attention to the work of affect in the design of gaming experiences. The affective ties between digital games and the Steam platform have been facilitated by the platform’s dual role as a repository of game libraries and gameplay data, as well as a digital publisher and distributor of games. Moore (2012, p. 353), argues that the affective experience of gaming is not well expressed or captured in the games themselves, but rather in what he calls the “gamer persona”: “a pool of collected scores, purchases, player histories, scores, and social interactions.” The public sharing of these subcultural artefacts is increasingly cultivated by platform features such as “awards,” “achievements,” “trophies” and other forms of quantification which reframe an externalised affect within a particular platform, a process Ash (2015, p. 109) describes as the “ecotechnization of care.” Achievement notifications signal a sphere of avatar capital beyond the game, but within the platform ecosystem. We argue that Steam’s carefully curated virtual economy further extends this, in order to provide a meaningful and quantifiable social environment where the emotions elicited through the processes of affective design can take root within the platform. From an economic point of view this illustrates what Nieborg describes as the integration of the social capital of gaming with the “connected value generated via platformed interactions” (2015, p. 6; cf. Consalvo, 2007). Previous work by Moore (2011) explores the affective dimensions of digital items used to customise avatars in Team Fortress 2. However in this article rather than examining how digital items mediate the player/game relationship, we argue that avatar augmentation constitutes an alternative economic trajectory which binds players to platforms that is premised on the potential to modulate the flow of affect between user and platforms through the avatar. Team Fortress 2 and Steam Team Fortress 2 is an early example of the class-based team shooter genre, currently enjoying renaissance with Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment, 2016) and Destiny 2 (Bungie, 2017). Through the different classes of avatar available, each with their own capacities, these games allow players to cooperate on a common goal using a variety of strategies unavailable in games where avatars are functionally identical (such as Valve’s CounterStrike, 2000). The classes of Team NEW REVIEW OF HYPERMEDIA AND MULTIMEDIA 5 Fortress 2 range from a nimble Scout, adept at close-quarters combat, to a Medic, suited to assisting and strategically leading the team, to a Spy, who uses disguises and cloaking to disrupt opposition plans. These class-specific differences include mechanisms whereby a Spy may fatally “backstab” an opponent with a single stroke, and a Soldier may fire a rocket at their own feet (sacrificing some of their health) in order to propel themselves to higher ground.1 The avatars of Team Fortress 2 have highly functional roles. They convey important tactical information to other players inside the game-world and perform a pseudo-material role in the game’s physical engine. They are designed with exaggerated shapes in order for players to easily distinguish at a glance the class, direction of movement and orientation of the avatars of both team members and opponents (Manning, 2012; Moore, 2011). In addition to these communications, avatars have a material function: they inhabit invisible “hitboxes”, which detect collisions between avatars and other objects in the game world (walls, other avatars, and bullets). These hitboxes vary widely from class to class, and may be “bigger” or “smaller” than the avatars themselves. Both of these roles contribute to the players’ affective relationship with their avatar, as both their representative to other players in the gameworld and a point of material vulnerability which requires constant attention and modulation of movement and action. In May 2009, Valve introduced the capability for player avatars to wear hats (Valve Corporation, 2009a). While serving no tactical in-game purpose, these hats allowed players to display something about their personality by choosing an appropriate hat. The relative abundance or scarcity of items means that some items reach hundreds of dollars in value. One example is the Earbuds item, which was given to players who launched the game humorously described as “America’s #1 War-Themed Hat Simulator” on Mac OSX between 10 June and 16 August 2010 (Valve Software, 2010). When equipped, the avatar wears a pair of white Apple-style earbuds and is followed by a trail of musical notes. This item has been popular and valuable since its introduction and has emerged as a kind of “numeraire” or benchmark for the value of other items (Varoufakis, 2012b). The value of this item—of which there are more than 60,000 in existence—has trended downward from US$60 to US$5 in recent years as players have sought out different items, different games, and different economies. The development over time of mechanisms for gaining hats illustrates a shift in the relations between player avatars and the economics of video game production, distribution and play. Initially, hats were gifted to players as random “loot drops” during the course of play. For every 25 min of online play on the Steam platform, each player had a 25% chance of receiving a hat. The ability to gain in-game items, such as hats, provides players with an incentive to 1 This act reincorporates a player discovered action from earlier FPSs into the official design of Team Fortress 2. 6 L. VAN RYN ET AL. maximise the amount of time they play while connected to the Steam Community platform. For example, players who pre-purchased BioShock Infinite (2K Interactive, 2013) on Steam were awarded several digital items that customised Team Fortress 2 avatars. Thus, the avatar becomes a tool for Steam to encourage players to purchase games on their particular platform rather than another. Features such as achievements, contact lists, and cloud storage are all elements of the affective pull of avatars at work in this ecosystem. The hats of Team Fortress 2 illustrate how affective investment in avatars is embedded in platforms through design practices that are aimed at keeping players’ attention on the platform. The December 2009 “War!” update for Team Fortress 2 introduced the capability for players to “craft” items, thereby transforming duplicate or surplus weapons and items into new ones (Valve Corporation, 2009b). Players commonly “smelt” excess weapons and items into scrap metal, which may then be combined to create random items. This practice has the dual benefit of allowing players to expand the variety of their item collections and reducing the administrative overhead demanded of Steam’s servers, which track the status of the game’s 6 million player inventories. The scrap metal crafted in this way also became a common medium of exchange when trading was introduced in the September 2010 “Mannconomy” update. This update allowed players to purchase items of their choice directly through an in-game store (Valve Corporation, 2010). It also introduced “Unusual” and “Strange” item qualities, which are respectively enhanced with a cosmetic aura—such as glowing flames or clouds of smoke—and tracking of players’ combat statistics. Each of these items represented a new means for players to accumulate and display wealth through their avatars. “Strange” weapons illustrate a process of affective design that draws on the affective investment of players. Previous studies of Valve games have noted that players value these weapons highly (Yamamoto & McArthur, 2015). A “Strange” Rocket Launcher will count the number of opponents it kills, gaining descriptors such as “Mildly Menacing”, “Spectacularly Lethal”, “Legendary” and so on as the player surpasses 45, 275, and 7500 kills (among other tiers). This gives players an incentive to focus their play on using particular items to gain these markers of distinction, dedication and skill. Importantly, this form of avatar capital is integrally tied to the player’s Steam account: trading, selling or gifting these items to another player will reset the item’s statistics. These appellations must be earned rather than traded. In 2012, Yanis Varoufakis began working for Valve, with the remit of investigating the emerging economies of Valve games and the Steam platform. Varoufakis is an economist with expertise in game theory who later rose to prominence as the maverick Minister of Finance in Greece’s Syriza government from January to July 2015, where he played a significant role in renegotiating Greece’s debt repayments to the European Union (Cook, 2015). In a series of NEW REVIEW OF HYPERMEDIA AND MULTIMEDIA 7 blog posts, Varoufakis (2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d) discussed the issues he was exploring as Valve’s “economist in residence.” The emergent social economy of players trading avatar items with each other presented an exciting and unique dataset for Varoufakis: “An economy where every action leaves a digital trail […] an economy where we do not need statistics since we have all the data!” (2012a). Of particular interest to Valve CEO Gabe Newell and Varoufakis was the sustainability of the economy emerging around in-game items of Team Fortress 2, as a microcosm of the platform’s larger digital economy. In an exploration of arbitrage—that is, opportunities for profiting through trading in-game avatar items—Varoufakis raises the “tantalising thought” of providing realtime market pricing information directly to Steam users (Varoufakis, 2012b). Throughout these four articles, which constitute Varoufakis’s published output as a Valve employee, Steam users are seen not only “as gamers but also as traders, developers, participants in something much bigger than just video games” (Varoufakis, 2012a). From the perspective of the game designers and platform developers—at Valve at least—the significance of avatars is considered on a platform scale. The development of “avatar capital” in Team Fortress 2 is such a significant history because it formed the basis for the more general evolution of Valve’s Steam platform (as well as similar advances on other platforms). In the same way as capabilities of customisation, self-expression and exchange drew and retained players of Team Fortress 2, the gradual rollout of player profiles, achievements and markets throughout the Steam platform further cements players’ affective investment in, and economic ties to, the gaming platform. Later developments further embedded the relationship between player and platform in the avatar. In December 2012, Valve initiated a beta version of its Community Marketplace, through which players may buy and sell items between each other for real money, from which Valve and the game developers take a percentage (Valve Corporation, 2012). This had the twin benefit of allowing players to gauge item values in a much more transparent fashion (as foreshadowed by Varoufakis), and allowing publishers and the Steam platform to profit from players’ propensity to truck, barter and exchange the digital items they had found, traded and created. In June 2013, Steam started awarding Trading Cards to players based on the amount of time and money they spend playing games on Steam. Sets of these cards may be turned in for “badges” which adorn players’ Steam user profiles, demonstrating their tastes and achievements in gaming. As with the in-game items of Team Fortress 2, players may trade these cards among themselves and buy and sell them for real currency. Thus the collecting and playing of games becomes both a vector for players’ affective investment in the Steam platform, and a means for Steam to extract extra value from players’ activities. 8 L. VAN RYN ET AL. Discussion: techniques of avatar economies In the discussion that follows we highlight three important facets of the avatar’s role in the mutual “affective economies” that bind players to platforms. They are: . . . the avatar as a site through which intensities of affect are experienced; avatar customisation as a key technique of player engagement, both within games and platforms; and the avatars’ economic function as site of accumulation, valuation and exchange. Together, these three facets demonstrate how the avatar is at once a focus for players’ affective investment, a site of bodily labour and a source of value for gaming platforms. Avatars and “dressage” Players’ affective investment in their avatars develops further through the gesture, repetition and labour of playing a game. In many games, avatars are a locus for the player’s attention and concern: a vulnerable agent moving through a gaming world (Veale, 2015). The embodied and affective “feel” of different avatars and items allows players to express their playstyles, habits and capital. Players can express their playstyles, habits and capital through the choice of avatars with different mechanics, feel, and “gestural economies” (van Ryn, 2013). Digital games, including Team Fortress 2, train players in particular bodily routines, forms of attention and disciplines—what Apperley (2010, p. 48; after Lefebvre, 2004) calls “dressage”. Apperley (2010, p. 48) has noted that “[digital games] train people in the rhythms (timings, movements, patterns, positions) of digital games, in the gestures, and postures appropriate to play.” The work of play, therefore, is the work of aligning one’s play to games’ gestural economies. The strategic selection of an avatar class, as well as tactical decisions made during play, draw on, reinforce and expand these embodied and affective habits. In Team Fortress 2, this manifests in players’ identification with a preferred “main” class, which is often socially coded. Playing with the tricky techniques of the Spy may represent light-hearted fun to one player, or an impediment to team balance to another. These avatar classes activate different “gestural economies”: the quality of player attention, focus and movement differs from class to class. “Economy” here is working in the dual sense of efficiency of the micro-movements of gameplay, and the overall relationships between these. The bodily gestures and forms of attention involved in a successful “performance” (Jayemanne, 2017) may vary greatly from class to class. Playing as a Medic, for example, rewards a broad strategic awareness and surveillance rather than NEW REVIEW OF HYPERMEDIA AND MULTIMEDIA 9 the precise movement and timing of a practiced Sniper. The Medic’s “Medi-gun” heals teammates rather than harming opponents. Once the Medic has targeted a teammate, they are tethered together by a beam of light that can curve around and through players, terrain and other objects in the game world. The healer may therefore shift their attention from their patient to the environment of that healing, including a strategic awareness of opponents’ positions, numbers and strength. It is for this reason that a PC Gamer article suggested new players begin playing with the Medic class, in order to develop an awareness of the game’s overall mechanics, maps and rhythms while performing a role that is useful for the team (Francis, 2011). Player avatars thus assist in the training of players in the possibilities and values of play. The role of attention in affective investment extends beyond the gameworld. Steam as a platform overlays notifications of player achievements, online friends, and item drops as a form of “tertiary retention” (Ash, 2012, p. 16). That is, they form part of the “environment” (Ash, 2012, p. 8) within which players engage in gameplay, publicise their skills, and affectively invest in platforms such as Steam. What is crucial is the work of the player avatar at each level of the system from the gameworld to the platform. Avatars are both the object of players’ dressage, a tool through which players are disciplined in appropriate forms of play, and the apparatus of platforms’ affections. This kind of affective investment extends beyond gameworlds and social media platforms. The broader implications of the avatar’s role in driving particular performances might best be exemplified in China’s Social Credit System, planned for a 2020 launch (Botsman, 2017). By combining the function of actuarial database, matchmaker and review manager, this system promises a happier and more peaceful society. Crucially, it is player-citizens’ investments in various platforms’ avatars that allows this aggregate data-body to be surveilled in the first place. Customisation in the platform economy Affective investment in avatars is palpable in the labour and energy that players put into customisation of their avatar. But the scope of the customisation that is available has a profound impact on how the process of investment ties them to a particular platform. Forms of customisation range from choosing various predesigned avatars from the Nintendo IP suite in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo, 2017) to the extreme where almost every element of the avatar’s appearance is customisable, as is found in games like Dark Souls III (From Software, 2016). Team Fortress 2 extends the former model, with each player choosing from nine available avatars and then adding their own elements on top of the avatar. Many games require the use of a particular avatar which is often strongly identified with the game, a key example being Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider game series (Core Design, 1996–2003; Crystal Dynamics, 2006–present). 10 L. VAN RYN ET AL. Other games attach customising features to advancement through the game, making players earn them through commitment and performance. For example, Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe, 2016) initially allows tailoring of avatars and unlocks additional modes of customisation as the game progresses, by offering an increasing range of collectable hats for sale that can be worn by the avatar. When players create avatars, even within a more-or-less limited set of choices, they exhibit a wide variety of appearances. This may reflect the player’s own appearance, fashions, and attitude, or otherwise resonate with key elements of the player’s identity. Conversely, the customisation process is also an opportunity for players to experiment with an in-game self-presentation very different from their real-life persona, by exploring alternate or fantastic identities. These modes of affective investment in avatars through redesign are illustrated by the “virtual world” Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003– present). In terms of verisimilitude, the expanded possibilities of self-presentation in Second Life are extensive, to the point where users earn money by designing bespoke avatars for others based on their photographs, and video tutorials on Second Life forums demonstrate how to make “realistic” avatars using photos and free editing tools. The level of detail makes the possibilities of self-presentation profound for many people with disabilities, who may include details like wheelchairs as part of their avatar (Hickey-Moody & Wood, 2008). Linden Lab highlights the potential income from such labour as part of Second Life’s appeal (Linden Research, 2017), illustrating our argument that investment in avatars is an important aspect of contemporary platform economics. The kind of identity play offered through the customisation of the avatar is radically reshaped in Team Fortress 2. Primarily this is because the customisation process is designed to connect players to Steam’s platform economy, which reframes the exploration of identity into an expression of gamer identity through social and economic capital. By becoming part of an economy external to the game, achievement in the game can be socialised, quantified and connected to a larger community that has a shared experience of the affect involved in the processes of “earning” avatar items. This provides a social framework for the sharing of affect that is imbricated in the economy of the platform. Platform affordances for affective customization extend beyond gaming. We see this in Twitter’s hashtag function as a means of “ambient affiliation” between users (Zappavigna, 2011, p. 800), Facebook’s “real name” policy as an attempt to facilitate authenticity (Hoffman, Proferes & Zimmer, 2018) and the use of “reaction GIFs” to communicate affect at a distance (Miltner and Highfield, 2017). We highlight this link between platforms’ affects and affordances in order to demonstrate the broader significance of the trajectory we are describing. As our digital profiles become increasingly customisable, they become more tightly woven into digital economies. NEW REVIEW OF HYPERMEDIA AND MULTIMEDIA 11 The avatar as an economic object The avatar itself can be considered an economic object, in the senses of a site where players’ experience is accumulated, where cash may be invested and, lastly, as a commodity which may be bought, sold and exchanged. Considering the avatar as a site of the quantification of affect through the accumulation of experience pivots the affective investment discussion: the avatar becomes a repository for the work of affective investment, through customisation of the avatar over time, acquisition of levels and skill, and various forms of property. This sense is well captured in Castronova’s term “avatar capital”, as the product of work, achievement, and mastery of play. The economic aspect of the avatar expands beyond the simple accumulation of capital, however. The attribution of value to particular in-game actions by designers and players creates openings for players to seek to “game” the avatar by performing tasks that efficiently produce experience points (XP), ingame currency, and real-world value. Designers and players wittingly and unwittingly create economic relationships between gaming performances (killing enemies, gathering resources, etc.) that manifest in the avatar. Accounts of such practices abound in relation to the repetitious production of value by “grinding” (Dibbell, 2007), and players profiting from inefficiencies in markets as developers introduce new content into games (Varoufakis, 2012b). Avatars are both the agents that perform this work (under the direction of players) and the means by which this value is displayed. The game avatar has a more or less direct relationship with an “account” in Steam which is (among other things) a securitised financial data identity, where there is a relationship between money, the Steam account, and in-game currencies and items. Digital objects from Team Fortress 2 can be bought and sold through Steam, with a regulated profit-sharing model which divides the proceeds of the sale between Valve, the developer of the games (in the case of TF2 this is also Valve) and the player selling the digital object. Cash thus flows both into and from the game through the avatar. Since 2011 TF2 has been distributed on a “free-to-play” basis, whereby Valve profits not from a once-off purchase of the title but rather through myriad micropayments from players. This model is manifested in a two-tier player system in which players who have not made any purchases within the game are limited in their ability to craft, trade and earn items for their avatars. Perhaps most interestingly, this model is also applied at an additional level of abstraction: players’ profiles on the Steam platform. Each player’s profile displays their recent play activity, the number of games that they own, and—as players upgrade their profile by purchasing games and performing tasks on the Steam platform—further customisable data such as achievements, inventories and community reputation. So while in-game avatars allow players to invest cash to expressively customise their appearance, Valve’s Steam platform 12 L. VAN RYN ET AL. —and other console platforms like Xbox Live—deploys this functionality additionally in the relationship between consumers and distribution channels. The avatar can be considered a commodity in a literal sense: indeed they were one of the first digital items that were traded for “real money” as documented by Dibbell (2006). Steam accounts are frequently bought and sold internationally on sites such as playerauctions.com, allowing players to circumvent domestic content restrictions, play games that have since been deleted from the Steam catalogue, or simply acquire a bulk collection of games at a steep discount. By tying ownership of titles to specific player profiles, however, Valve removes some demand for such secondary markets (cf. Lehdonvirta and Virtanen, 2010). While gaming avatars—in which category we include the player profiles of platforms such as Steam and Xbox Live—allow players a great deal of customisation, enjoyment, investment and profit, they simultaneously tether players to specific platforms. Platforms’ capacities for translating affect into value extend into other domains of contemporary capitalism. Consider Netflix’s aggregation of user browsing, viewing, pausing and rewinding behaviour into its recommendation engine, and its production and licensing strategies (Hallinan & Striphas, 2016, p. 128; cf. Prey, 2018). User profiles—avatars—in on-demand streaming entertainment platforms accumulate user gestures, feedback, and subscriptions as a means of creating value in the “vectoralist economy” (Wark, 2004). While our analysis has highlighted affective investment in the context of a videogame platform, the translation of user affect, gesture and labour into value is apparent in increasingly varied fields of everyday life. Conclusion This article presents an analysis of gaming avatars in Team Fortress 2, arguing for the significance of the avatar in digital gaming more generally. In particular, we illustrate how players’ “affective investment” in the customisation and ongoing development of the avatar also establishes a broad connection to the Steam platform. The avatar—at once a representational, affective and gestural agent for players—is shown to be a key site of the circulation and exchange of value between player/customers and platforms. The avatar thus operates both in circulations of value reflecting players’ affective work through techniques of customisation and dressage, and in terms of the formal economy of the platform. In the case of Steam, we see the deployment of cutting-edge economic theory in the development and evolution of a gaming platform This has broader ramifications for contemporary networked digital gaming, as similar avatar-based capacities have appeared in the game distribution systems of Microsoft and Nintendo. Our discussion of Team Fortress 2 and Valve is therefore applicable at a more general level to the work of avatars in online ecosystems. NEW REVIEW OF HYPERMEDIA AND MULTIMEDIA 13 While further commodifying digital game play, it is also worth noting that the virtual economy of Steam also creates a mutable relationship between time, skill, money and social capital within the platform that merits further investigation. The affective cultivation of quantification through indexibility and accumulation of the player’s archive of play experiences challenges the digital ephemerality the play experience and underscores the significance of human memory in affective design. Several opportunities for future research emerge from this analysis. First, this discussion could be connected to performative, phenomenological and postphenomenological analyses of embodiment (cf. Egliston, 2018; Jayemanne, 2017; Keogh, 2018). Second, the role of the game avatar in creating belonging and status within communities is deserving of further research. Finally, the analysis of digital game avatars presented here may be generalised beyond gaming to the uses of avatars in social media platforms, online communities and workplace dashboards. The avatar economy we have discussed here illustrates a model of affective investment in everyday digital platforms. The self-contained platform economy of Steam, which facilitates the social exchange, valuation and storage of data, experience and affect illustrates the complex way that affective design practices are used to capture multiple activities and keep attention focused within a platform. Acknowledgements Thanks to Natalie Hendry and Julian Sefton-Green for their feedback on a draft version of this article. Thanks to Angela Ndalianis for her useful comments on an earlier version of this paper that was presented at the 2014 Australian Association for Literature conference in Melbourne. Thanks to Ge Zhang for his research assistance. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Funding This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DP140101503]) and by the Academy of Finland funded Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies [grant number 312395]. ORCID Luke van Ryn http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1770-8027 Thomas Apperley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6390-6593 Justin Clemens http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5752-4978 References Anable, A. (2013). Casual games, time management, and the work of affect. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 2. doi:10.7264/N3ZW1HVD 14 L. VAN RYN ET AL. Apperley, T. (2010). 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