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10,000 gold for 20 dollars: an exploratory study of World of Warcraft gold buyers

Published: 29 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Buying virtual currencies with real money from a third-party often violates the terms of use of online games. This study quantitatively investigates players who buy in-game gold from a third-party in World of Warcraft. A cross-cultural survey dataset of 2865 players reveals that differences between Asian and Western players are negligible compared to differences across genders, job categories, and play motivations. Our findings have implications for the design and study of interactions between players and virtual currencies.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '12: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
May 2012
332 pages
ISBN:9781450313339
DOI:10.1145/2282338
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • SASDG: Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 May 2012

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Author Tags

  1. World of Warcraft
  2. demographics
  3. online games
  4. real-money transactions
  5. virtual currency

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FDG'12
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  • SASDG

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Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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  • (2018)Emergent Cultural Differences in Online Communities’ Norms of FairnessGames and Culture10.1177/155541201880065015:4(394-410)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2018
  • (2017)Designing interactive systems through a game lensComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.04871:C(455-468)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2017
  • (2014)Meaningful game elements for personal informaticsProceedings of the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers: Adjunct Program10.1145/2641248.2642734(125-130)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2014
  • (2014)How players value their characters in world of warcraftProceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing10.1145/2531602.2531661(1333-1343)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014
  • (2013)The future of crowd workProceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work10.1145/2441776.2441923(1301-1318)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2013
  • (2012)Evaluating the Virtual Products for Online Games via the Grey Relational AnalysisInternational Journal of E-Adoption10.4018/jea.20120701034:3(39-47)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2012

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