Game Balance: Designed structure and consumer agency in an online game

<p>Massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) attract millions of people every year and are now a major industry. Using the internet, these games connect players and give them goals to pursue within virtual worlds. This thesis examines the early life of one such game, the North American version of TERA, based on participant observation on a player vs. player server. TERA’s players met and interacted within a virtual game world controlled by the company which developed the game, and although players constructed their own social groups and factions within this world they were constrained by software that they could not change. Everything from the combat rules to the physics of the environment was designed, and players could only take actions that were accounted for and allowed by that design. However, TERA launched as one of many available MMORPGs which were competing for the attention of the same audience. Its players tended to be experienced and well-informed about the genre, and used their knowledge to evaluate and critique TERA both privately and in public forums. Aware that game companies’ chief concern was for profit, players exercised agency by embracing a consumer identity and pressuring developers in their own commercial terms. To retain players’ loyalty and continue receiving their fees, companies were obliged to appease their customers. This allowed players to see the game world develop and change in accordance with their desires despite the fact that they lacked the access or the expertise to change it themselves. I link this approach to agency to the rise of consumer movements in capitalist societies, and show how the virtual world of TERA can serve as an example for other situations in the physical world where contemporary technologies are used to both enable and constrain agency.</p>

Game Balance: Designed structure and consumer agency in an online game

<p>Massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) attract millions of people every year and are now a major industry. Using the internet, these games connect players and give them goals to pursue within virtual worlds. This thesis examines the early life of one such game, the North American version of TERA, based on participant observation on a player vs. player server. TERA’s players met and interacted within a virtual game world controlled by the company which developed the game, and although players constructed their own social groups and factions within this world they were constrained by software that they could not change. Everything from the combat rules to the physics of the environment was designed, and players could only take actions that were accounted for and allowed by that design. However, TERA launched as one of many available MMORPGs which were competing for the attention of the same audience. Its players tended to be experienced and well-informed about the genre, and used their knowledge to evaluate and critique TERA both privately and in public forums. Aware that game companies’ chief concern was for profit, players exercised agency by embracing a consumer identity and pressuring developers in their own commercial terms. To retain players’ loyalty and continue receiving their fees, companies were obliged to appease their customers. This allowed players to see the game world develop and change in accordance with their desires despite the fact that they lacked the access or the expertise to change it themselves. I link this approach to agency to the rise of consumer movements in capitalist societies, and show how the virtual world of TERA can serve as an example for other situations in the physical world where contemporary technologies are used to both enable and constrain agency.</p>

Consumer movements, brand activism, and the participatory politics of media: A conversation

This is a scripted adaptation of a conversational podcast interview between Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets about contemporary consumer activism and its relationship to media studies. After the interview, the conversants agreed to develop the transcript of the conversation in order to be more relevant to a scholarly audience who are interested in how Jenkins’ ideas apply to the understanding and investigation of consumer culture today. The conversation frames and synthesizes a range of thinking around activism, fan studies, brand management, and consumer culture theory. Couched in the American context but containing themes that may also relate to global culture in the current moment, it covers the theoretical as well as the pragmatic concerns of many of the stakeholders in the world of contemporary consumer activism, from the activists themselves to the brand managers who respond to their actions to the creators who write the stories that inspire them both. Topics include the relevance of participatory culture today, anti-racism and the role of media, consumer conflicts with brands and the corporations who police them, the importance of civic imagination to civic engagement, differences between brand managers and story creators, consumer activism in the workplace, activist and participatory approaches to civic research, the nature of contemporary consumer activist movements, the impact of intersectionality, and the prefigurative possibilities for change today.

The Regeneration of Consumer Movement Solidarity

Consumer research has focused on the various resources and tactics that help movements achieve a range of institutional and marketplace changes. Yet, little attention has been paid to the persistence of movement solidarity, in particular its regeneration, despite a range of threats to it. Our research unpacks mechanisms that help consumer movement solidarity to overcome threats. Drawing on a six-year ethnographic study of consumer movements in Exarcheia, a neighborhood in central Athens, Greece, we find that consumer movement solidarity persists despite a cataclysmic economic crisis that undermines their prevalent ideology and the emotional fatigue that is common in such movements. Three key mechanisms serve to overcome these threats: performative staging of collectivism, temporal tactics, and the emplacement of counter-sites. Overall, our study contributes to consumer research by illuminating how threats to solidarity are overcome by specific internal mechanisms that enable the regeneration of consumer movement solidarity.

Getting Started in the Sixties

This chapter looks at letters that reflect the 1960s as a decade of concurrent movements, such as civil rights, Vietnam War protests, Native American and women's movements, consumer movements, and environmental movements. It focuses on the letter of E. R. Leach, who brought the concept of power into the ethnographic picture of highland Burma. It also refers to Leach's awareness of tensions between generations and of class variants and their impact on the sociology of knowledge. The chapter recounts the author's work with Shia Muslims in South Lebanon in the summer of 1961 to learn about dispute settlement in villages and examined whether it was secular or religious. It mentions exchanges of letters with Professor G. E. von Grunebaum from UCLA, who awarded the author a grant to go to Lebanon.

Campaigning for sustainable food: sustainably certified consumer communities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between consumer movements and sustainability certification bodies in the development of food-related consumer campaigns.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts a longitudinal approach to the study of an empirical case, the Fairtrade Towns (FTT) movement in the UK. It combines netnographic analysis on the FTT’s online forum with interviews with members of the community and of the certification body coordinating the movement.FindingsThe author conceptualises Sustainably Certified Consumer Communities (SCCC) as a distinct sub-group of consumer movements whose identity coalesces around a sustainable certification and that mobilises supporters with the purpose of promoting social change through the marketplace. The longitudinal approach allows the identification of definitional elements, main practices and unresolved tensions of this concept.Originality/valueResearch addressing the social movement dimension of contemporary food-related sustainability certification is limited. The present study advances consumer research through the conceptualisation of SCCC and contributes to a new understanding of the political roles that market-oriented certification bodies can play in consumer activism. From a managerial perspective, it provides valuable insights into practitioners interested in fostering community engagement.

A “Body of Business Makers”: The Detroit Housewives League, Black Women Entrepreneurs, and the Rise of Detroit’s African American Business Community

This article examines the Detroit Housewives League (DHL) in the 1930s and 1940s, concentrating on DHL members’ actions as businesswomen. Past narratives have framed the DHL as an extension of the black women’s club movement or as part of the women-driven consumer movements of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly highlighting the organization’s philosophies on black women’s purchasing power. I argue that entrepreneurial DHL women brought prior business knowledge to their organizing and were significant business experts and leaders. By conducting business research, forging community networks, and, significantly, establishing commercial colleges and other forms of business education in the city, DHL members’ work was vital for the black business community as a whole and for women entrepreneurs in particular. In reframing the DHL as an organization established by black entrepreneurial women, I suggest scholars should reevaluate black women’s contributions to other forms of activism in order to recover additional histories of black women’s entrepreneurship and business leadership.