Commodity Fetishism in Computer Games: In-Game Item Consumptions of Counter Strike: Global Offensive Players

Year 2020, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 45 - 72, 29.12.2020

Aykut Tamir

Abstract

This research aims at what is the motive behind computer game player’s specific in-game item consumptions. The reason for adopting this aim is, game companies sell some in-game items which are not functionally helping the player. In older games like World of Warcraft, Knight Online, players would buy the in-game items to make their game characters stronger. That is, those items had function in terms of better game playing. However, players of the CounterStrike: Global Offensive, buy some in-game items that are not useful for any purpose in the game. Thus, I wanted to make a research on the relation between commodity fetishism and consumption motives of gamers towards these items. In-game items became a significant case because digital markets in some games brought new in-game consumption cultures along. Some of these consumption cultures are examples to commodity fetishism approach. There are few studies exploring in-game items with no function in literature. This study explores these items in detail and uses a method that was not used for this purpose before. That is why this study is
important and original. The qualitative descriptive analysis method was conducted to find out players commenting about in-game items on Steam&Reddit forums. As a result, I detected that game companies make more profit through these digital markets and gamers' consumption motives correlate with commodity fetishism. In the comments the players stated that in-game items provide them psychological boost, self-confidence and feeling better, and they even have associated items with the placebo effect.

Keywords

commodity fetishism, game studies, culture industy, digital media

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