The consumer literacies of teenagers in virtual gaming environments

Abstract

This project examines how Norwegian children and youth understand and engage with the commercial landscape of virtual world gaming websites. The study aims to find out what experiences they have with using money during games, and how they relate to the ways they are positioned as customers and consumers within gaming platforms. We invited 19 participants aged 11-17 to group interviews. We talked about their game consumption habits and their knowledge of the business of gaming platforms and the gaming industry. Afterwards we asked the participants to pick a favourite game and draw a spider diagram of the commercial landscape of the game. We wanted them to represent visually their understanding of the micro and macro aspects of the gaming culture that they were part of. We also used what we call a play along method. We asked the participants to choose a favourite game and show us how they usually played the game while we observed and asked questions. Playing games was a daily activity for the participants, and their playing had increased during the coronavirus confinement. Some of the participants spent relatively large sums of money on gear like PCs, specialized headphones, and purchasing new games. The older participants (15-17) felt they had more control over commercial pressure to spend on gaming than the younger participants (11-13). The participants expressed how they were exposed to different types of marketing, varying from commercials to Youtube videos about gaming. The participants had a good understanding of the different revenue streams through which game owners earned money. They participants did not show interest or knowledge about the wider gaming industry – who owned the gaming companies and the web of different commercial actors involved in the online gaming economy. The creative methods that we used were particularly useful in developing the participants’ consumer literacy by helping them understand and reflect on how they were actors in a global industry.