Abstract
This article discusses some economic and cultural features of video games and posits that this medium belongs within the core of cultural economics. We further provide an applied investigation of video game usage. Using data for Spain, we estimate zero-inflated ordered probit models to control for an excess of zeros in our ordinal dependent variable. We find that the probability of game playing increases with the consumption of other cultural goods (e.g., listening to music or watching television) or active involvement in artistic activities (e.g., writing or visual arts production). Game playing is in general an urban phenomenon; it is positively associated with the ownership of home equipment and access to new technologies, but decreases with greater time restrictions of a person. The main differences to the traditional art formats is that game playing appeals particularly to younger, usually less educated cohorts.
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Notes
Video games, in our understanding, incorporate not only computer games (i.e., games played on a general-purpose personal computer), but also digital games played on other platforms (i.e., consoles connected to the TV or portable consoles) both on-line and off-line.
In line with these arguments, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has opened in March 2013 a permanent exhibition showcasing the best in videogame design and aesthetics. According to the curator, video games are art not only due to the visual quality and the associated aesthetic experience but also due to the interaction design, which is by now the most important expression of contemporary design creativity and in the case of video games ranges from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior (Antonelli 2012).
Looking at single produces of the industry, its dominance is even more impressive. The release in 2010 of Call of Duty: Black Ops, a first-person shooter video game, led to sales of USD 650 m during the first 5 days, which set a five-day global record for a movie, book or videogame (Chan 2011). The game reached further USD 1bn in global sales within 15 days of its release.
See also Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. (2008) for a more general overview of the economic organization of the video game industry.
Interestingly, Marchand and Hennig-Thurau (2013) also advocate the potential of video games research in their academic discipline and argue that “marketing scholars still devote far less attention to [the video games industry] than to other entertainment industries, such as movies, television, or music” (p. 142).
BSA (2011) shows piracy rates for software as a whole and indicates that Spain exhibited in 2010 a software piracy rate of 43 %. This is higher than in some Central or Northern European countries, but comparable with France (39 %) or Portugal (40 %), somewhat lower than Cyprus (48 %), Iceland and Italy (49 % each), and much lower than Greece and most of the Eastern European countries. Moreover, Spain was just on the world average of software piracy. Rodriguez-Andrés (2006) study how income inequality influences national piracy rates across a sample of 34 countries. He does not present any particular evidence for Spain and finds that the USA are the only outlier in the regression analysis in terms of very low rates of piracy.
Even though the survey officially claims to cover people aged around 15 and above, a significant number of younger respondents, aged 13 and 14 (314 and 216 responses, respectively), have answered the questionnaire. This enables us to produce a wider and more accurate overview of video game playing patterns in Spain.
Also, Fernandez-Blanco et al. (2009) use latent class models to estimate cinema attendance finding two distinct behaviors for the observable attendance.
We have to be aware of the difficulty of separating time restrictions associated to the occupational variables from the likely variations in income associated with different employment statuses.
The main results of both factor analyses are presented in the “Appendix”. Note that in both cases only predictions for the first factor are used in the subsequent regression analysis, since Eigenvalues associated with the other factors drop sharply.
A further assessment and discussion of these trends is provided in Bryce and Rutter (2003).
For an interesting analysis on how the ownership of gaming equipment depends on the timing of the market entry of a console producing firm refer to Cox (2006).
Beyond the listed possible research venues, it is likely that we will see in future research using data from large multiplayer video games. Castronova (2001) advocates strongly for studies using data from virtual worlds as it might enable a unique context for natural experiments, a high number of participants as well as tightly controlled experimental conditions.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Martin Falk, John O’Hagan, Beatriz Plaza, the Editor Kathryn Graddy and participants at the European Workshop on Applied Cultural Economics in Ljubljana, workshop on “Culture, data and digitization” in Bilbao and an invited seminar at the University of Catania for helpful suggestions and insightful comments. Both authors are members of the project “Assessing effective tools to enhance cultural participation (PUCK),” which has been awarded a European Grant in the CULTURE 2007–2013 program from the European Union. Karol Jan Borowiecki is also member of the project “Renewal, Innovation & Change: Heritage and European Society (RICHES),” which has been awarded a European Grant under the FP7 framework. This research has been also funded with support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (projects ECO2011-27896 and ECO2013-46516-C4-4-R).
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Borowiecki, K.J., Prieto-Rodriguez, J. Video games playing: A substitute for cultural consumptions?. J Cult Econ 39, 239–258 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-014-9229-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-014-9229-y