Being social for whom? Issues of monetization,exploitation,and alienation in mobile social games

Abstract

This study investigates Korean teen females’ Kakao gaming culture by focusing on the political economy of mobile social games and the issue of free labor within free-to-play games. Through focus group interviews with 23 teen females, the study explores how the connective properties of the KakaoTalk platform affect the logics of Kakao Games and how gamers’ social activities become monetized and commodified by game companies. Based on the monetization strategies of free-to-play games and the theoretical framework of exploitation and alienation in digital labor, we analyze how the game companies subtly conceal viral marketing tools under the mask of socializing components, specifically by encouraging users to send invitations and hearts, as well as engage in boasting. We argue that while this process multiplies revenue for the corporate territory of game companies and platform businesses, teen female gamers are alienated not only from their game play and social labor but also from themselves and others, thus revealing commodified social relations. This study interrogates the impact of the platformization and gamblification of the game industry and underscores the risk they produce for vulnerable populations.

Keywords

mobile social game political economy free-to-play games free labor alienation

Playing mobile social games has been a prevalent recreational activity among the South Korean population since the early 2010s. For example, 30 million Koreans, or more than half of the nation’s total population, downloaded one or more mobile social games from gaming platform Kakao Games by 2013 (Korea Creative Content Agency, 2013). What is unique about Korean mobile gaming fever is that many Koreans play mobile games that are linked to KakaoTalk, a free mobile instant messaging application. KakaoTalk allows users to play mobile games while interacting with other people in their social networks by cooperating or competing with one another (DIGIECO, 2013). KakaoTalk is considered a “national messenger” in South Korea and has become the driving force of mobile game downloads with 550 million gamers registered within Kakao Games, the gaming platform for KakaoTalk users (Takahashi, 2017).

The fact that all KakaoTalk users are considered potential users of Kakao Games provides benefits to the game developers because they can expect to incorporate social features for monetization. In addition to benefits to developers, KakaoTalk is the primary beneficiary of all revenue, as it takes a large percentage of total revenue from all games (Jin, 2016). Kakao Games made $54 million in the third quarter of 2014, which was a 54% on-year jump in net profit and reported 20 million monthly active users; among the ten most profitable mobile games on Google Play in 2014, eight were downloaded from Kakao Games in Korea (“2014 Google Play Annual Report on Game Category,” 2015). In recent years, Kakao Games even established strategic partnerships with major game developers, Tencent and Nexon, to apply Kakao Games’ Social Marketing Model (Yoon, 2021). By linking Kakao accounts within the game, industries are allowed to carry out various marketing activities through social features and users are capable of networking and competing with other gamers.

This study takes interest in this specific phenomenon of the popularity of Kakao Games and poses some political economy questions related to monetization, exploitation, and alienation. Previous studies on mobile social gaming have mainly explored the effects of game-playing on gamers’ social networks or social capital (Kobayashi, 2010; Skoric and Kwan, 2011; Steinkuehler and Williams, 2006; Williams, 2006) but have left untouched how the capitalist market logic of these games governs and guides those social relations. On the other hand, while scholarship has given needed attention to studies on the political economy and monetization structures of digital gaming (De Peuter and Young, 2019; Nieborg, 2015; Taylor et al., 2015), less attention has been paid to the relations of production and gamers’ consumer culture. As a result, in order to fill these gaps, this study explores the monetization strategies of the platformized mobile social game industry and how gamers experience this situation in their everyday lives: how their social activities are monetized, how their relations are commodified, and how gamers become alienated during this process.

Among all users, the study focuses on Korean teen female gamers between the ages of 15 and 18 for three reasons: (1) their increasingly intimate attachment to smartphones due to arduous academic schedules and parental monitoring (Park and Chun, 2013), (2) their vulnerable and marginalized social positionality and lack of dedicated public recreational spaces (Seo and Lee, 2017), and (3) their desire for peer relationship in the midst of school- and family-related stress. While the lives of teen boys also share some of the above qualities, we chose to investigate teen female gamers who we claim to be the most vulnerable population both online and offline since the culture and subculture within gaming center on men, target men, and are dominated by male perspectives (Gray et al., 2017). Compared to many existing studies on boys’ video game culture, girl gamers’ voices are rarely heard in the field.

Through conducting focus group interviews with 23 teen females, this study finds that Kakao Games subtly conceals viral marketing tools under the mask of socializing components, specifically by encouraging users to send invitations and hearts, as well as engage in boasting. We argue that while this process multiplies revenue for the corporate territory of game companies and platform business, teen female gamers are alienated not only from their game play and social labor but also from themselves and others, thus revealing commodified social relations. In sum, the study interrogates the impact of platformization and gamblification of game industry and underscores the risk they produce for vulnerable populations. This study contributes to the broader field of political economy in game studies by actively connecting issues of monetization of play, the blurring of gambling and digital game consumption, and free labor in the creative industry.

Literature review

Monetization and commodification in the mobile game industry

In recent years, many game studies scholars have recognized the “gamblified” aspects of digital game development (Brock and Johnson, 2021). Warning about the blurring of gambling and gaming, studies have questioned if loot boxes and skin betting are forms of gambling and how they affect vulnerable audiences (Brooks and Clark, 2019; Delfabbro and King, 2020). For instance, Ross and Nieborg (2021) explore social casino game apps and argue that they serve as an example of the platformization of gamble-play. In order to understand the context more deeply, Johnson and Brock (2020) point out three critical moments of the “gambling turn” in digital game monetization: (1) gaming market oversaturation, (2) the rising costs of game development and marketing, and (3) the changing characteristics—from creative to commercial—of the game industry culture.

Scholars argue that the new “platform capitalism” creates new gatekeepers and encloses ecosystems in the game industry, just as it does in other sectors, in a way that has allowed only few big companies—Supercell, King, and Tencent—to survive and control the market (Kerr, 2017; Karlsen, 2022; Nieborg, 2016). This means the market dynamic favors only these few large companies due to factors like economies of scale and high switching costs (Barwise and Watkins, 2018) and in contrast, small-scale companies have no choice but to get involved in monetization models—such as pay-to-win, paywalls, and loot boxes— that could exploit players economically (Griffiths, 2018; King and Delfabbro, 2019). These types of financial and cultural conditions have legitimized the logic of money to rule the game-designing process and monetization models.

Freemium is the most pervasive business model in the mobile gaming market. For this business model, basic game services (with limited functions) are provided for free of charge whilst more advanced features must be paid for. In 2020, freemium titles amassed 78% of digital games revenue and Asian mobile games earned $87.7 billion worldwide just with the free-to-play revenue (Valentine, 2021). The success of freemium model relies on driving customer lock-in, recruiting a large number of users in a short time after launch, and expanding the length of play and the money required to continue play (Johnson and Brock, 2020). By attracting enormous numbers of users and creating network effects, this model allowed a lot of mobile games, such as Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go, or Super Mario Run, to enlarge their ecosystems.

For monetization, game developers design various game features—in-app purchasing, virtual currencies, game restrictions, offers, upgrades, play accelerators, level systems, reward retention, punished absences, social interactions (cooperative or competitive), achievement and leader boards, and other random elements—into the model (Moreira et al., 2014). Gamers, therefore, must directly (via microtransactions) or indirectly (via watching advertisements or participating in social activities) purchase items such as coins, keys, or passes in order to progress without limitations in the game and access everything that the game provides. Scholars argue that often these features seem to be the unpredictable or gambling-esque version of microtransactions and are even more effective than direct game purchases (Johnson and Brock, 2020).

One of these monetization strategies that this study focuses on is the social features embedded in mobile social free-to-play games. These games are designed to encourage social interactions among gamers in order to attract new players, entice them to continue playing, and motivate them to spend more money (Shibuya et al., 2015). Gamers, motivated by unobstructed play, online social interactions, and competition, often choose to follow these social features and thus naturally get involved in viral marketing and social marketing (Flunger et al., 2017). Since all these activities involve microtransactions or gamers’ labor, this study aims to explore how mobile social gaming is related to the issues of free labor, exploitation, and alienation in the digital age. In recent years, scholarship has given needed attention to studies on the political economy and monetization models of mobile social gaming (see Jin, 2017; Nieborg, 2015). Nevertheless, less attention has been given to how gamers experience these gaming environments and to what extent these monetization models influence the way games are consumed (Karlsen, 2022). Thus, this study will examine the relations of production in which these players are situated: to other game players, non-game players, the game developers, the messenger platform, and the broader digital economy.

Free labor and alienation in digital games

Previous studies have explored the characteristics of digital labor and debated that many forms of online practices do not appear to be labor but in fact contribute significantly to the value of a website or an online game (Kücklich, 2005; Terranova, 2000). Terranova (2000) first uses the term “free labor” to understand these kinds of digital labor and criticizes that free labor, even though performed voluntarily, is just like traditional wage labor in the way that both impoverish the users and privatize wealth because these voluntary activities create value that belongs to only a minority of capitalists, not to the active volunteers. Free labor issues in the digital age have been far from simple due to two factors: (1) the explosive productivity of collective activities among internet users (Kelly, 1994; Terranova, 2012) and (2) the blurred boundaries between labor and leisure, production and consumption (Taylor et al., 2015; Yee, 2006). As for collective productivity, Kelly (1994) believes that the internet made possible the infinitely productive activities of connected human minds. This maximized productivity, however, bears various problems of labor in the digital industry, such as devaluation of labor or the exploitation of collective intelligence. Likewise, scholars argue that both the concept of collective intelligence (Terranova, 2012) and the complexity of labor and leisure (Galloway, 2007) are often used as a strategy for capitalists to achieve more profit by subtly obscuring the relations of production.

While some scholars from fan studies disagree that online activities are a kind of free labor because online participation is voluntary and produces pleasure (Baym and Burnett, 2009), many scholars who share Marxist orientation refute these perspectives. This position draws heavily on Dallas Smythe’s political-economic study (1977, 1981) on media audiences and argues that what is sold in the commercial television viewing process is not so much programs to audiences, but audiences to advertisers. That is, in order to be granted access to these audiences, advertisers pay television channels for air time, and in this process, the audiences themselves are turned into commodities. Fuchs (2012: 708) suggests that this model becomes even more apparent on the internet since the “corporate social media sell the users’ data commodity— user generated data, personal data, social networks and transaction data— to advertising clients at a price that is larger than the invested capital.” Thus, users are infinitely exploited since they are unpaid but also create the surplus value contained in this commodity (Krüger and Johanssen, 2014).

In the realm of digital gaming, a number of theorists enable us to see the ways in which games and gamers are implicated in broader political economies characterized by the widespread monetization of player activities (Taylor et al., 2015). In summarizing digital game labor studies, De Peuter and Young (2019) call this area “player-production.” Kücklich (2005), Postigo (2010), and Sotamaa (2010) examine the practices of players who provide gaming companies with free labor, contributing to the games’ commercial viability and longevity through the production and publication of modifications (mods) for games. These scholars argue that the perception of modding as play forms the basis of the exploitative relationship between modders and the game industry. Kücklich (2005) uses the term “playbour” to highlight the blurring boundary of work and play and the mobilization of gamer-generated content as a lucrative source of game industry productivity. Deuze (2011) also insisted that the voluntary work of user communities, such as game modding, could be exploited with informal labor contracts (such as end-user licensing agreements and the terms of service of major user-created content sites which control and exploit their free labor). In addition, Nakamura (2009), and Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter (2009) examine gold farming in MMOGs and criticize how the games convert all areas of life into sites of economic production. Similarly, in social games, gamers’ connective/social activities produce a sort of game capital, defined as a player’s gaming abilities and knowledge about a game, which is then appropriated and repurposed as a resource for game owners (Consalvo, 2007).

While scholars in this field focus on this exploitation process which is mainly limited to the monetary dimension, we argue that utilizing a theoretical frame of alienation is a better means to grasp this phenomenon, especially in terms of the gamers’ perspective. Traditional Marxist theories identified alienation in four dimensions focusing on relational aspects: the worker is alienated (1) in relation to the product of labor and (2) in relation to the act of production in the labor process; these two alienated relations have a further alienating effect by “estranging” the worker (3) from her/himself as well as (4) from others (Andrejevic, 2009: 303).

More recent studies on these issues explore how users react to this exploitation and alienation process. Fisher (2015) analyzes a class-action lawsuit filed by Facebook users against the company concerning its Sponsored Stories advertising program and argues that users criticize both alienation (demanding that they have full control over the information they generate) and exploitation (demanding ownership over a greater share of the surplus value they produce) in their activity in an attempt to redefine their participation. Most recently, Steinmann (2022) encourages the use of alienation as a tool for the analysis of the impact of digital ICTs on users. Here, alienation can be defined as a status when the desire to express oneself and achieve social recognition, self-realization, and participation through the use of ICTs is incongruent with the inherent purposes and functions of these technologies. In other words, the study argues that users react to structural alienation either by internalizing it (becoming enthusiastic data producers) or by imposing alienating conditions on other users. All of these studies provide insight into this current study which focuses on the concept of alienation in understanding teen female gamers’ everyday lives through the impact of prosumer commodification and monetization within the game sphere.

Methodology

The authors conducted focus group interviews with 23 South Korean high-school females aged between 15 and 18 who play mobile social games, including Kakao Games in 2013 and 2014. We conducted FGIs for several important reasons: (1) We argue FGIs are effective in capturing the actual experience of playing games due to their exploratory nature, (2) FGIs enable the minor interviewees to feel comfortable with their close peers and allow the adult interviewers to get to know their target group in better detail, and (3) FGIs are useful in providing context and depth about relevant background information (Poels et al., 2007). According to Gibbs (2012), focus group interviews allow interview participants to share their ideas with others in a way in which they would not in individual interviews. The tone of interviews was informal and similar to that of chats with peers so that authentic responses could be solicited. The interviews took place in classrooms, a familiar setting for the interviewees.

The authors decided to investigate the mobile social gaming of high-school females because they are generally regarded as the most active group that utilizes online spaces for social purposes; they also tend to be early adopters of new technologies who create cultural practices; this is also true in the US (Lenhart et al., 2011) and in Japan (Shibuya et al., 2015). Due to their arduous and busy everyday routines, high-school females do not have enough time for leisure or socializing, but they are able to take several short breaks with their smartphones, which allows them to play mobile social games either for leisure or communication (Seo and Lee, 2017).

This study used a snowball method to recruit research participants because it is the best way to recruit minor research participants from social networks where members already trust each other in a Korean cultural context. Therefore, early interview participants were recruited by making the best use of the researchers’ social network. Since one of the researchers had a high-school teacher as an acquaintance, the initial recruitment was conducted via the teacher. Then, a snowball sampling was combined when someone in the interviewees’ social networks was expected to provide meaningful data for this research; in general, the interview participants were eager to introduce their friends who were into mobile social gaming.

The authors of this study conducted the interviews with eight groups of two to four students. In terms of the size of research sample, interviews continued being conducted until data saturation was reached; that is to say, after interviewing 23 participants, research confirmed that no new information had emerged. The interviews were semi-structured, which allowed the interviewees to freely share their thoughts on playing mobile social games. The authors decided to stop conducting interviews after the eighth interview because once similar responses were elicited in every interview, the last few interviews did not have additional significant comments. The authors used a list of major questions in order to not stray too far from the research subject. If the interviewees felt uncomfortable with specific questions or topics, the interviewers moved the conversation away from the topics. Also, when the interviewees provided unexpected, but meaningful ideas, the interviewers gladly listened to the interviewees, anticipating new insights to be discovered. Since the interviews were semi-structured, the length of each interview relied on how much the interview participants were willing to offer. At the most, the interviews took less than 2 hours, and the interviews lasted for approximately 90 min on average. The interviews were audio-recorded using smartphones and were transcribed by the authors for analysis.

The data of the interviews were analyzed over seven steps. First, the comments from the interviewees were classified into groups by relevant research concepts. This process of data classification was conducted after each interview because the authors needed to decide whether to conduct more interviews. If newly emerged information appeared, more interviews were conducted. Second, these groups of comments were assigned to the relevant research questions. Third, the interview comments under each question were analyzed based on the appropriate concepts. Fourth, on the basis of the amount of repeated comments, this research identified the significance of the findings from each group. Fifth, based on the significance, the responses were organized for each research question and the arguments of this research were elaborated accordingly. Basically, this was the process of summarizing the findings and clarifying the arguments of this research. Sixth, the findings of this study were compared to the results of previous studies in order to confirm whether or not the findings supported or rejected existing studies, or if there were any original findings. Lastly, the implications and the limitations of this research were identified. By analyzing the most common and pervasive social gaming activities and their implications on social relationships, this study revealed important findings about the relationship between mobile social games and teen females’ digital labor.

Findings

Monetization via three core social functions

All interview participants named three core social functions of Kakao Games—encouraging users to send invitations and hearts, as well as engage in boasting as the primary means of interacting with one another. This study found that these social functions were used as effective viral marketing tools for mobile game companies. It was revealed that these game developers monetized the interviewees’ social activities through the complex free-to-play business model by linking the platform (here, KakaoTalk), developers, advertisers, to users.

Sending invitations to recruit gamers

One social activity in mobile social games is sending invitations. Outwardly, this function allows the interviewees to enjoy mobile social games, especially Kakao Games, with their friends or acquaintances by sending invitations to anyone in their KakaoTalk contact list who is not playing the games that they are playing. According to the interviewees, however, this process of invitation was very superficial and artificial. When an interviewee sent a ready-made invitation to one of their KakaoTalk contacts who had not downloaded the game yet, the message was delivered to the designated receiver through the mobile messenger, KakaoTalk. If the receiver accepted the invitation, he or she could easily download the game by simply touching the embedded link in the message. These invitation messages from friends were proven to be more effective in recruiting new members than company-driven promotions, such as television commercials or online advertisements.

The major motivation of this voluntary labor of the interviewees was the rewards they receive in games. All of the interview participants reported sending as many invitations as possible because they could earn more valuable and powerful in-game items or avatars based on their number of invitations. For the rewards, most interviewees sent the invitations not only to their close friends with whom they regularly communicated but also to mere acquaintances in their KakaoTalk messenger contact list. Interviewee V revealed why she sent invitations even to mere acquaintances and shared the number of invitations she usually sent for a single mobile social game.

If I send an invitation, the game rewards me. If I send ten invitations, they give me something like temporal boosters¹. If I invite a hundred, they give much better avatars. So, I think I do this because of the rewards. I send invitations to most of my KakaoTalk contacts. I think I’ve sent over 300 invitations.

All of the interviewees confirmed that the major purpose of sending invitations was not playing together but receiving rewards. Here, we find out how one’s social network easily becomes instrumentalized and commodified by the structure of mobile game design. Obviously, the result of this superficial social activity was not always positive for their relationships. For instance, with the popularity of mobile social games such as Anipang, many people expressed annoyance and social fatigue about these kinds of constant messages (Yoon, 2016). People complained about getting automatically connected to the games after mistakenly clicking the message, thereby getting interrupted with spam-like messages while actually missing their important personal messages. Due to these negative effects, Kakao actually had to change their invitation messaging policy; they had to prohibit sending invitation messages to a same receiver within a month instead of a 1 week period policy before. Interviewee B also provided her experience of sending an invitation that ended up resulting in an uncomfortable reaction from a recipient.

There was a promotion which gave a special game avatar if one sent 30 invitations. I invited everyone that I knew because I really wanted that avatar. At that time, I sent an invitation to my middle school friend whom I hadn’t contacted for a long time. Then she was angry about my using her only for a reward.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that these social activities were effective in recruiting new gamers. According to the interviewees, this specific interactive function of “sending invitations” seemed to be working very effectively as a viral marketing tool among the interviewees. Interviewee R admitted that she might not have known certain Kakao Games existed if she had not received invitations from online friends. Though many interviewees conceded that they were sometimes fed up with the frequent invitations, all the interviewees acknowledged that they, more than once, downloaded and played certain Kakao Games after receiving invitations from their close friends or mere acquaintances.

According to the interviewees, this function of sending invitations was becoming more sophisticated. At the early stage of Kakao Games, the interviewees could send invitations only to messenger contacts who never downloaded the game. Then, many Kakao Games began to provide the “dormant friend invitation” function which enabled the interviewees to send re-invitation messages to contacts who had downloaded the game but had not played it for a while. Again, the interviewees were sending the re-invitations not to build relationships but for rewards. Most interviewees themselves received these invitations and some of them actually returned to the games out of curiosity.

Interviewee I described that she usually played one specific game exclusively for only a couple of months after getting an invitation; then, her enthusiasm waned rapidly; the game slipped from her memory; but then she occasionally came back to the game after being re-invited. Thus, making gamers stay interested in playing certain mobile games is an important goal for game companies. According to Interviewee M, the effect of this “retention” function seemed to be similar to, but much stronger than, a phone call from a customer service team to a person who cancelled a service contract. For ephemeral free-to-play mobile social games, inducing gamers to enjoy games longer is essential for the success of these games, and this “dormant friend invitation” function was lengthening the shelf lives of Kakao Games.

Sending hearts to increase game usage

The second social function of playing Kakao Games was “sending items.” Through Kakao Games, the interviewees send certain game items to other gamers in their KakaoTalk contact list. Also, they could ask other gamers to send them items if they needed specific ones. Among all items, “sending hearts” (also called as “sending lives” in some Kakao Games) was the most frequently used function among the interviewees. A gamer can have a maximum of five hearts (or lives), and each play uses up one heart. If gamers exhaust all hearts, they have to wait a certain period of time to replenish. About this time-based recovery system, Interviewee M mentioned that because they could only play games in their spare moments, they did not have the patience to wait 10 to 20 minutes to play a game that only lasts 3 to 5 minutes; so, they asked for a “heart” from their friends and resumed the game immediately.

In Kakao Games, gamers can send hearts to each other. If another gamer sends a heart, the receiver can play the game right away without waiting. Since the senders also receive rewards, the interviewees willingly sent hearts to others. For Interviewee N, sending hearts was a daily routine.

As soon as I wake up in the morning, I activate the game app and send lives to my friends. I also get some benefits [from sending lives]. Frankly, I do this for myself. This is how I start my daily schedule. It is like signing the attendance sheet every day. So, I send lives to everyone. Then, they send some back to me.

To receive hearts, the interviewees use the “asking for hearts” function which sends requesting messages to other gamers. The interviewees usually asked for hearts from their close friends rather than just acquaintances. Interviewee M described the process of asking and sending hearts:

I usually cannot wait for the hearts. So, I upload posts asking for hearts on Kakao Story (KakaoTalk’s social media). And I also send request messages through KakaoTalk. Then, my friends send hearts to me. So I can play the game without waiting.

When their friends asked them for hearts, the interviewees had to activate the game application in order to respond to the requests. Since the interviewees were also asking for hearts frequently, they tried to accede to the requests. These received messages required the interviewees’ additional participation, which accordingly resulted in an increase in usage of the mobile social games. In summary, these cooperative social activities of exchanging game items generally happened for rewards, and these collective activities increased the game usage which might enhance the value of these mobile social games and the game platform, Kakao Games.

Boasting to induce in-game purchases

The interviewees referred to “boasting” as another social function that is commonly employed by those using Kakao Games. When gamers record higher scores than other gamers in their KakaoTalk contact list, they can send boasting messages to their counterparts. The interviewees earn a certain amount of cyber money (or other kinds of rewards) by sending “boasting” messages. Though “boasting” provides rewards to the senders, the interviewees usually did this only among close friends because these messages could provoke competitiveness in the receiver.

Both the “boasting” and “sending hearts” functions made the interviewees either cooperate or compete with their contacts. Both effectively increased the game usage by making gamers more engaged and compelling them to play more games. Interviewee E shared how “boasting” and “sending hearts (or lives)” worked together and influenced her to play more games:

I play a Kakao game, CookieRun, these days. A couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent a boasting message after she broke my record. I was really annoyed. I became highly competitive and kept playing the game to beat her. But we have only five lives. So, if I die five times, I have to wait for ten minutes to have one more life. But I cannot wait for ten minutes for a life. So, I asked my friends in the messenger group chat rooms to send me lives because we can send lives to each other. So, they sent me lives and I kept playing to defeat her.

“Boasting” is useful in inducing in-game purchases such as boosters or accelerators. Many interviewees admitted that they sometimes paid for in-game items to become more competitive after receiving boasting messages. Interviewee J delineated how “boasting” messages led to in-game purchases:

When someone breaks my record and sends a boasting message to me, I become very irritated. Since then, I go crazy. I play and play and play until I break the record again. If I can’t, then I buy game items to win.

To sum up, the interviewees expressed that while sending “boasting” messages led to attaining rewards, receiving a “boasting” message often provoked irritation and competitiveness. These social activities effectively increased the interviewees’ participation and also resulted in in-game purchases. This “boasting” function certainly increases the revenue of mobile social game companies and the game platform overall, yet at the cost of the teen female gamers’ emotional labor—irritation and annoyance—and commodified (competition-focused) social relationships. Considering that Korean school culture is already filled with competition and comparison, this intensification of competition in peer relationships is problematic. Even worse is the gambling-esque character that the boasting function reveals, in that it promotes in-game purchases. Organizations such as the UK's Gambling Commission (2019) criticize these in-game purchasing systems as “unfair or exploitative” and caution against their use with vulnerable populations.

Rewards with no exchange value and little use value

By analyzing the interview data, this research revealed that the core social functions of Kakao Games were working effectively as viral marketing tools rather than supporting the interviewees’ socializing activities. First, “sending invitations” was effective at recruiting new gamers. Second, “sending hearts” made the interviewees play more to increase game usage. Lastly, “boasting” nudged the interviewees to purchase more competitive in-game items, which raised the revenue of the game companies and the game platform, KakaoTalk. Though these social activities generated a large amount of surplus value for the game companies and the platform, and utilized the free labor of these female gamers, the value was rarely distributed to the interviewees who actually created this surplus value.

The interviewees received two kinds of benefits from their value-generating social activities: in-game rewards and social network enhancements. Firstly, the interviewees received in-game rewards such as avatars or hearts by conducting social activities. The problem is that these rewards—for instance, boosters, in-game items, or extra lives—have no exchange value outside the game environment and only have temporal use value. The interviewees could possess and use these items in the game environment but could not exchange them with other forms of goods or monetize them outside the platform. The fact that the interviewees generally did not play a specific game for more than a couple of months implies that these rewards lose their use value in 2 to 3 months. In other words, though the interviewees’ activities create substantial economic value for the game companies and the gaming platform, the rewards the interviewees receive from these activities have little use value after a certain period of time.

Secondly, many interviewees shared their experiences of enhancing their relationships with their friends within the gaming platform. In particular, most interviewees suggested that because of social functions such as “sending invitations,” they were able to contact old friends with whom they had not interacted for a while. In many cases, however, these rekindled relationships were need-based friendships. In addition, these superficial social activities sometimes aggravated their friendships, or even severed their relations with some friends. The interviewees could only send uniform messages and could not add any personalized comments, which inevitably harmed the quality of their social activities even though it increased their number of invitations. In other words, to some extent, these Kakao Games commodify existing social relationships. Even when these social activities have more positive than negative influences on gamers’ social relationships, they cannot be adequately compensated for their activities which generate enormous economic value for the companies.

Finally, these social activities within Kakao Games help recruit new gamers, invite past users to rejoin the games, and lure gamers to play more games or purchase in-game items—all of which are crucial to the profits of mobile game companies. In effect, game companies reduce marketing costs while increasing revenue by utilizing gamers’ free labor. Nevertheless, the rewards that gamers receive by providing these productive activities have no exchange value and very limited use value.

Discussion

Previous new media studies informed by a political economic perspective have argued that social media and mobile gaming commodify audiences; Van Dijck (2013) conceptualizes “connective commodity” to explain how social media platforms transform sociality into a standardized, tradable commodity, and Nieborg (2015) suggests that free-to-play mobile social games create product commodity (such as in-app purchases), prosumer commodity (such as virality or social interaction activities), and player commodity (such as advertising). Through these three monetization strategies, audience aggregation is at the core of the business model of social media and mobile gaming.

After analyzing the focus group interviews with 23 Korean high-school females, this research concludes that the various monetization strategies within Kakao Games could be understood in complex relation to these three types of commodities. In particular, this study found that for teen female gamers, their free social labor supporting the connective game platforms functioned as a “prosumer commodity.” While teen female gamers also made in-app purchases (product commodity) and were reduced to a kind of data to be sold to the advertisers (player commodity), they were much more broadly involved in the free social labor process. This could be due to the fact that teens are a vulnerable subject in terms of their financial status compared to adult gamers, so they have to provide their social labor rather than just pay for services, which could be an alternative choice. Free social labor is even more problematic since it is often unconsciously conducted and unimaginable in terms of its financial impact. Similar to this finding, while analyzing Candy Crush Saga, Nieborg (2015) reveals how these connective commodity forms are structured by and embedded in the political economy of their host platform such as social network sites. In other words, the network effect—“more users make the network better and more effective even if they do not purchase anything because their data activities subsequently lead to increased visibility and attract even more users” (Flunger et al., 2017)—applies to mobile social games as much as social network platforms.

It is true that game playing is a complex cultural process and that while game corporations certainly want to exert control into order to ensure profit, at the same time gamers are not pure without resistance. In this study, however, while sometimes these teen female gamers did feel uncomfortable with the labor process (through inviting friends to the game or requesting hearts), they had no option but to keep doing it, paying the price with emotional labor and free labor in order to enjoy the game more thoroughly and for a longer period of time. Several studies have identified these complex “trade-off strategies” at the location of potential “prosumer alienation” (Sevignani, 2013: 332). For instance, Sevignani (2013) examines how users compromised their privacy needs to achieve better perceived user benefits, and Fuchs and Sevignani (2013: 261) reveal statements like “Facebook does not exploit me because I benefit from it by connecting to other users” in order to show how the “commodity character of Facebook data is easily hidden behind the social use-value of Facebook-the social relations and functions enabled by platform use.” Along these lines, we argue that teen female gamers are alienated from themselves because they are coerced to play the Kakao game continuously by way of “peer pressure and a lack of viable alternatives” (Sevignani, 2013: 257). In addition, this kind of alienation worked more easily due to three factors: their attachment to their mobile phones and the overall online space, their desire for online identity construction, and the impatient and competitive nature of peer pressure. At the same time, our findings showed that teen female gamers were alienated from others since they commodified their social network by sending numerous invitations and asking for hearts.

This study confirmed that the free labor generated through social activities on mobile social games shares two predominant characteristics with those of online platforms such as search engines and social networking: (1) leisure-like online activities that collapse the boundary between work and leisure maximize productivity, which generates substantial value for capitalists (Ross, 2012), and (2) capitalists manipulate the explosive productivity of the collective activities of numerous internet users (Fuchs, 2012; Terranova, 2012). Teen female gamers in this study did not recognize that their online activities generated a substantial amount of surplus value for game companies, thus they did not expect or pursue any kinds of appropriate compensation. The interviewees did not seem to understand that their online interactions, such as recruiting new gamers or inciting in-game purchases, created a considerable size and scale of monetization. Since each gamer was only providing a tiny fraction of the aggregate of collective labor, the interviewees could not recognize how valuable their collaborated activities were. Though each gamer participated in seemingly insignificant social activities through casual gaming, the companies tapped into a colossal amount of surplus value² from the leisure-like labor of numerous networked individuals. In other words, the value is only realized in the network. In this way, these findings reveal how teen female gamers are alienated from the objects of labor (conducting the marketing to recruit new users, but awkwardly competing with them or even harming relationships due to this activity). Even if they were compensated with in-game rewards and social network enhancements, this process again indicates their alienation from the product of labor since these benefits had a negligible or null exchange value outside the game sphere.

Conclusion

Capitalistic societies have always sought new sources for surplus value; many scholars have warned that online leisure activities can also be targeted for exploitation. In this realm of digital play where play and labor become fuzzy, we problematize mobile social gaming since teen female gamers’ free labor—both material and emotional—alienates themselves as doubly marginalized subjects while multiplying revenue for the corporate territory of game companies and platform businesses. We use the term “doubly marginalized” to argue that Korean teen females are first already marginalized subjects in their economic, sociocultural, spatial, and temporal everyday lives. We stress the importance of considering relational dimensions while studying exploitation and alienation in digital labor (Krüger and Johanssen, 2014).

The findings of this study indicate that the areas of capitalists’ exploitation in the digital era are subtly but rapidly expanding. At the same time, we evidence the power of platformization through analyzing the messenger-based mobile social game platform, Kakao Games. By tracing Facebook Messenger, Nieborg and Helmond (2019) similarly argued that Messenger functions as a “platform instance” that facilitates transactions with a wider range of institutions within the boundaries of the app and far beyond. Recognizing this power, Kakao Games is now expanding these social marketing tools through the introduction of a more advanced and integrated solution called “Social Marketing Model.” It seems that the viral marketing tools they utilized in 2013–2014 were a test bed for progress. Other game companies are joining this model to survive, including international ones. This is why this study that considered the mobile social gaming culture of past years is still relevant and crucial at this moment. This study contributes to the academic area of political economy by bridging studies on the monetization of play, the blurring boundaries between gambling and gaming, and free labor in the creative industries.

Footnotes

Author contributions

Interviews were conducted together and analyzed together. The original idea for the study was initiated by Hogeun Seo, and first draft writing was done by Hogeun too. However, during the 5 years, we went through tremendous revisions, and every step was led by Shinhea Lee and the main revision writing was done by Shinhea Lee. The current version is mostly designed and written by Shinhea Lee, so we have made an agreement to change the authorship.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the 2-year Research Grant of Pusan National University.

Ethical approval

IRB approval was pursued by University of Texas at Austin (former affiliation for Claire Shinhea Lee and Hogeun Seo).

Patient consent

Consent forms from all the interviewees were collected.

ORCID iD

Claire Shinhea Lee

Notes

Author Biographies

Claire Shinhea Lee is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Communications at Pusan National University. Her research interests include critical cultural studies, qualitative audience studies, and feminist media studies. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals including Television & New Media, Convergence, Social Media + Society, and Media, Culture, & Society.

Hogeun Seo is an Assistant Professor at Handong Global University. He worked for new media companies, including Samsung and SK in South Korea. He earned his doctoral degree at the University of Texas at Austin and worked as an assistant professor for Belmont University in the United States. He explores diverse social issues of video games, digital technologies and the global media industries.

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