UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Crushing Candy : The Free-to-Play Game in Its Connective Commodity Form
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Crushing Candy : The Free-to-Play Game in Its Connective Commodity Form
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UvA-DARE（数字学术知识库）粉碎糖果：连接商品形式的免费游戏
作者：
Nieborg
本文的目标是通过调查社交媒体平台的政治经济如何与商品形式的免费游戏结构相关，为社交网站的研究提供一个补充视角。本文借鉴多边市场和批判政治经济学的理论，探讨了游戏应用程序的政治经济学，并研究了它如何与谷歌、苹果、Facebook和亚马逊运营的连接平台背后的技术和经济逻辑共生。这些社交媒体平台运营着应用商店，这些应用商店将游戏从遵循交易逻辑的固定的物理分发产品转变为数字分发的免费访问或“免费播放”应用。通过流行的休闲游戏糖果粉碎佐贺的案例研究，它认为，社交媒体平台的连接属性影响的形式和格式的游戏应用程序作为文化商品。糖果粉碎佐贺开发商King Digital Entertainment已经能够吸引数亿玩家，并建立了一个将虚拟物品商品化、连接性、用户注意力、用户数据和游戏相结合的商业模式。有人认为，免费游戏商品形式包括三种商品类型：产品商品、“生产消费者商品”和玩家商品。此外，《糖果粉碎佐贺》的商品形态是由文化生产和流通的平台化形态构成的，因此嵌入了其主办平台的政治经济。
The goal of this article is to add a complementary perspective to the study of social network sites by surveying how the political economy of social media platforms relates to the structure of free-to-play games in their commodity form. Drawing on the theory of multisided markets and critical political economy, this article surveys the political economy of game apps and investigates how it is symbiotically related to the technological and economic logic underlying connective platforms operated by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. These social media platforms operate app stores that sustain the transformation of games as fixed, physically distributed products that follow a transaction logic, into digitally distributed, freely accessible, or “free-to-play” apps. Through a case study of the popular casual game Candy Crush Saga it is contended that the connective properties of social media platforms affect the form and format of game apps as cultural commodities. Candy Crush Saga developer King Digital Entertainment has been able to attract hundreds of millions of players and build a business model that combines the commodification of virtual items, connectivity, user attention, user data, and play. It is argued that the free-to-play commodity form comprises three commodity types: the product commodity, the “prosumer commodity,” and the player commodity. Furthermore, Candy Crush Saga’s commodity form is structured by a platformed modality of cultural production and circulation and therefore embedded in the political economy of its host platform.