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.
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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-
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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).
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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.
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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
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