Vili Lehdonvirta

Virtual item sales as a revenue model: identifying attributes that drive purchase decisions

The global market for virtual items, characters and currencies was estimated to exceed 2.1 Billion USD in 2007. Selling virtual goods for real money is an increasingly common revenue model not only for online games and virtual worlds, but for social networking sites and other mainstream online services as well. What drives consumer spending on virtual items is an increasingly relevant question, but little research has been devoted to the topic so far. Previous literature suggests that demand for virtual items is based on the items’ ability to confer gameplay advantages on one hand, and on the items’ decorative value on the other hand. In this paper, I adopt a perspective from the sociology of consumption and analyse examples from 14 virtual asset platforms to suggest a more detailed set of item attributes that drive virtual item purchase decisions, consisting of functional, hedonic and social attributes.

Designing motivation using persuasive ambient mirrors

In this article, we describe four case studies of ubiquitous persuasive technologies that support behavior change through personalized feedback reflecting a user’s current behavior or attitude. The first case study is Persuasive Art, reflecting the current status of a user’s physical exercise in artistic images. The second system, Virtual Aquarium, reflects a user’s toothbrushing behavior in a Virtual Aquarium. The third system, Mona Lisa Bookshelf, reflects the situation of a shared bookshelf on a Mona Lisa painting. The last case study is EcoIsland, reflecting cooperative efforts toward reducing CO2 emissions as a set of virtual islands shared by a neighborhood. Drawing from the experience of designing and evaluating these systems, we present guidelines for the design of persuasive ambient mirrors: systems that use visual feedback to effect changes in users’ everyday living patterns. In particular, we feature findings in choosing incentive systems, designing emotionally engaging feedback, timing feedback, and persuasive interaction design. Implications for current design efforts as well as for future research directions are discussed.

Virtual Consumerism: Case Habbo Hotel

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.

Real-Money Trade of Virtual Assets: Ten Different User Perceptions

In massively multiplayer online games and similar virtual worlds, virtual assets such as accounts, currencies and items are increasingly being traded for real money. The phenomenon is controversial: while some players support it, many feel strongly against it. In this paper I describe different ways in which players perceive real-money trade and explain why a player might hold a particular view by referring to related research on player motivations. The results should help designers choose their strategy towards virtual asset trade and understand how the audience is likely to react to it.

Using individual, social and economic persuasion techniques to reduce CO 2 emissions in a family setting

This paper presents EcoIsland, which is a system persuading individuals and families to change their lifestyle patterns to reduce CO2 emissions. EcoIsland visualizes the users current eco-friendly behavior as an island shared by his/her family members. Several persuasive techniques developed in behaviorism, social psychology, and economy are used to offer incentives to him/her to encourage eco-friendly behavior. We examine and compare the implementation and effectiveness of different types of persuasive techniques in several user studies.

How do young people identify with online and offline peer groups? A comparison between UK, Spain and Japan

Peer groups such as neighbourhoods and hobby circles are important sources of social identity for young people, but their viability is challenged by processes of urbanisation and labour mobility. In recent years, traditional peer groups have been joined by easily accessible computer-mediated groups, which have become an everyday part of life in many countries. In this article, we examine how young people identify with various online and offline peer groups. We compare online and offline identification experiences from the perspective of how socio-demographic position and individual sociability characteristics influence them, and examine how these identification processes differ between national contexts. Empirical analyses are conducted based on a survey of online community users from the UK, Spain and Japan (N=4299). It is found that participants identify as strongly with their online communities as they do with their own families, and stronger than with offline hobby groups. In the mature online societies of the UK and Japan, the online group provides a more socio-demographically inclusive source of identification than traditional leisure-time formations. As friends and family move online, affinity towards online groups is more likely to be a reflection of high sociability than a lack of it. Games, social networking sites and other online environments should be seen as crucial contexts for todays youths socialisation and identification experiences.

Online spaces have material culture: goodbye to digital post-materialism and hello to virtual consumption

In the history of the study of economic policies and behaviours, there is a wellknown pattern where a crisis in the real economy results in a change of the dominant approach used to understand it. The Great Depression of the 1930s resulted in neoclassical dogma being replaced with Keynesian economics. The oil crisis of the 1970s resulted in the Keynesian system being scrapped in favour of monetary economics. The latest global economic downturn, suggest Akerlof and Shiller, highlights a need for psychologically and sociologically informed understandings of economic behaviour. In sociology and anthropology, there is a long tradition of scholarship dealing with behaviour that is today considered part of the economic sphere. This tradition is based on the observation that one of the most important ways in which we relate to each other and ourselves is through material objects (Douglas and Isherwood, 1978; McCracken, 1990; Mauss, 1990). Gifts express love and gratitude. Possessions establish social standing. Dress and accessories organize people and time into occupations and leisure activities.

Applying pervasive technologies to create economic incentives that alter consumer behavior

Economic incentives are a powerful way of shaping consumer behavior towards more commercially efficient and environmentally sustainable patterns. In this paper, we explore the idea of combining pervasive computing techniques with electronic payment systems to create activity-based micro-incentives. Users who consume additional resources by e.g., occupying an air-conditioned space instead of a normal space are levied additional micro-payments. In an alternative approach, consumers who choose to save resources are rewarded with micro-rebates off the price of a service. As a result, the cost of using a service corresponds more closely with the resources used, leading market mechanisms to allocate resources efficiently. A key challenge is designing incentive mechanisms that alter consumer behavior in the desired fashion. We introduce four incentive models, and present evaluation results suggesting that consumers make different decisions depending on which model is used.

Drawing on mobile crowds via social media Case UbiAsk: Image based mobile social search across languages

Recent years have witnessed the impact of crowdsourcing model, social media, and pervasive computing. We believe that the more significant impact is latent in the convergence of these ideas on the mobile platform. In this paper, we introduce a mobile crowdsourcing platform that is built on top of social media. A mobile crowdsourcing application called UbiAsk is presented as one study case. UbiAsk is designed for assisting foreign visitors by involving the local crowd to answer their image-based questions at hand in a timely fashion. Existing social media platforms are used to rapidly allocate microtasks to a wide network of local residents. The resulting data are visualized using a mapping tool as well as augmented reality (AR) technology, result in a visual information pool for public use. We ran a controlled field experiment in Japan for 6 weeks with 55 participants. The results demonstrated a reliable performance on response speed and response quantity: half of the requests were answered within 10 min, 75% of requests were answered within 30 min, and on average every request had 4.2 answers. Especially in the afternoon, evening and night, nearly 88% requests were answered in average approximately 10 min, with more than 4 answers per request. In terms of participation motivation, we found the top active crowdworkers were more driven by intrinsic motivations rather than any of the extrinsic incentives (game-based incentives and social incentives) we designed.

The Stoic Male: How Avatar Gender Affects Help-Seeking Behavior in an Online Game

Men are more reluctant to seek help for their problems than women. This difference is attributed to social expectations regarding the male gender role. Today, help-seeking is moving online: instead of traditional peer groups and counselors, people depend on online communities and e-counselors. But online users can appear in guises that differ from their physical sex. An empirical study was conducted in an online game to examine whether users’ avatars’ gender influences how they seek and receive help. Analysis is based on user-to-user communications and back-end data. Results indicate that male avatars are less likely to receive sought-for help than female avatars and more likely to be the recipients of indirectly sought help. The authors conclude that avatar gender influences help seeking independent of physical sex: Men overcome their inhibition for help seeking when using female avatars. Practitioners should ensure that means for indirect help seeking are available in order not to exclude male-pattern help seekers.