VIRTUAL CONSUMERISM

Abstract

Selling virtual items for real money is increasingly being used as a revenue model in games and other online services. To some parents and authorities, this has been a shock: previously innocuous ‘consumption games’ suddenly seem to be enticing players into giving away their money for nothing. In this article, we examine the phenomenon from a sociological perspective, aiming to understand how some media representations come to be perceived as ‘virtual commodities’, what motivations individuals have for spending money on these commodities, and how the resulting ‘virtual consumerism’ relates to consumer culture at large. The discussion is based on a study of everyday practices and culture in Habbo Hotel, a popular massively-multiuser online environment permeated with virtual items. Our results suggest that virtual commodities can act in essentially the same social roles as material goods, leading us to ask whether ecologically sustainable virtual consumption could be a substitute to material consumerism in the future.

Keywords:

• virtual property
• consumer behaviour
• commodification
• global culture industry
• massively-multiplayer online game (MMO)
• real-money trading (RMT)

Notes

Except for the gradual wearing down of computer hardware and network infrastructure, and the electricity they consume.

Note that Lash and Lury (2007, p. 182) use the similar term virtual object to refer to ‘potentials that generate a succession […] of actual forms’, e.g. a brand that is actualised as a series of sporting events. In this parlance, virtual commodities are instances of ‘actual form’. However, due to their digital nature, virtual commodities can remain extremely close to the objects that spawned them, e.g. a digital brand image.

Copyright law of course tries to persuade users that media representations are commodities that can be sold by the piece. The ease at which digital information is duplicated works against this interpretation being perceived as correct by the consumers. So-called Digital Rights/Restrictions Management technologies attempt to turn media products into actual virtual commodities.

According to Sulake (2005), Habbo Hotel Finland had 280,000 monthly unique visitors in 2005, although some probably just visited the front page. According to Sulake (2008a, p. 189), 57 per cent of Finnish Habbo users are 13–18 years old. According to Statistics Finland (2008), there are approximately 640,000 people aged 10–19 years in Finland. Thus at least 280,000 × 57 per cent/640,000 = 24.9 per cent of 13–18-year-olds were visiting Habbo in 2005. It is not unreasonable to assume that similar penetration continues today, given that Sulake (2008b) claims strong growth in total user base globally.

These ‘Habbo celebrities’ should not be confused with occasional visits by actual celebrities such as Ozzy Osbourne, which are organised by Sulake as part of marketing and promotional activities.