Value Construction of Virtual Goods. The Case of Dota 2

Student: Bulygin Denis

Supervisor: Ilya Musabirov

Faculty: Saint-Petersburg School of Social Sciences

Educational Programme: Sociology (Bachelor)

Final Grade: 10

Year of Graduation: 2017

In this work represented social practices of players related to evaluation and consumption of virtual decorative goods in Dota 2. Using topic modeling algorithm Latent Dirichlet Allocation I extracted common topics of items-related discussions on Reddit.com subreddits /r/Dota2 and /r/Dota2fashionadvice. Players discuss items in their connection to the concepts of game story (game lore), expectation mismatch, artificial scarcity, items appearance, and visual effects. Extracted topics reflect practices related to consumption as well as playing the game. This finding shows that consumption and usage of decorative items, which do not affect the gameplay, nevertheless, is connected to game experiences of players.

Full text (added May 22, 2017)

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