Avatar economies: affective investment from game to platform: New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia: Vol 24 , No 4 - Get Access
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. KEYWORDS: 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 Associati