More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Placing Value on Community Co-creations: A Study of a Video Game 'Modding' Community

Authors:

Ofer ArazyAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Pages 480 - 491

https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998301

Published: 25 February 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Firms developing software -- and in particular, video game producers - seek to leverage the community of users/developers in enhancing product offering and increasing sales. Despite the practical importance of this phenomena, to date little research has investigated the actual value such communities add aside from few qualitative case studies of successful synergies between commercial enterprises and open-source communities. The objective of this study is to try and quantitatively assess the effectiveness of firms' efforts to increase sales of their product through inducing community's co-creation activity. Our empirical investigation focuses on producers of video games and their user/developer 'modding' community. An analysis of 45 games reveals that when firms are successful at engaging the community, the value added by the modding community contributes to an increase in sales of the base product. Implications for research on open innovation and for practitioners are discussed.

References

[1]

Teresa M. Amabile, Colin M. Fisher, and Julianna Pillemer. 2010. IDEO's Culture of Helping. Harvard business review January, February: 1-9.

[2]

John A. Banks and Sal M. Humphreys. 2008. The Labour of User Co-Creators: Emergent Social Network Markets' Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14, 4: 401--418.

[3]

Reuben M. Baron and David A. Kenny. 1986. The Moderator-Mediator Variable Distinction in Social Psychological Research: Conceptual, Strategic, and Statistical Considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, 6: 1173--1182.

[4]

Yochai Benkler. 2002. Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm. Yale Law Journal 112, 3: 369--446.

[5]

Yochai Benkler. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press.

Digital Library

[6]

Benjamin J. Birkinbine. 2015. Conflict in the Corporate Involvement in Free and Open Source Software. 2, 2: 3--19.

[7]

Henry Chesbrough. 2003. The Logic of Open Innovation: Managing Intellectual Property. California Management Review 45, 3: 33--58.

[8]

Henry Chesbrough. 2006. Open Innovation: A New Paradigm for Understanding Industrial Innovation. Open innovation: researching a new paradigm: 1--12.

[9]

Armi Dimaranan. Raptr 2012 report proves "community as a service" approach vital for gamers . Retrieved February 6, 2016

[10]

Cliff Edwards. 2013. Valve Lines Up Console Partners in Challenge to Microsoft, Sony. Bloomberg Business.

[11]

Troy Godfellow. Civilization chronicles interview with Brian Reynolds. Civilization Fanatics Center, 2006. Retrieved February 6, 2016

[12]

Renyi Hong and Vivian H.-H. Chen. 2013. Becoming an ideal co-creator: Web materiality and intensive laboring practices in game modding. New Media & Society 16, 2: 290--305.

[13]

Julian Kuklich. 2005. Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry. The Fibreculture Journal 5, 5: =.

[14]

Richard N. Langlois. 2003. The vanishing hand: the changing dynamics of industrial capitalism. Industrial and Corporate Change 12, 2: 351--385.

[15]

Ulrich Lichtenthaler. 2011. Open Innovation: Past Research, Current Debates, and Future Directions. Academy of Management Perspectives 25, 1: 75--93.

[16]

David Nieborg. 2005. Am I Mod or Not? - An analysis of First Person Shooter modification culture. Creative Gamers Seminar Exploring Participatory Culture in Gaming: 16. Retrieved from http://www.uta.fi/hyper/gamelab/creativegamers/

[17]

Hector Postigo. 2003. From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-Industrial Transitions from Leisure to Work. Information, Communication & Society 6, 4: 593--607.

[18]

Hector Postigo. 2007. Of Mods and Modders: Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modifications. Games and Culture 2, 4: 300--313.

[19]

Hector Postigo. 2010. Modding to the big leagues: Exploring the space between modders and the game industry. First Monday 15, 5.

[20]

Walter W. Powell and Birthe Soppe. 2015. Boundaries and New Organization Forms. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences 2, August: 768--772.

[21]

Eric Raymond. 1999. The cathedral and the bazaar. Knowledge, Technology & Policy 12, 3: 23--49.

[22]

Walt Scacchi. 2004. Free and Open Source Development Practices in the Game Community. Software, IEEE: 59--66.

Digital Library

[23]

Walt Scacchi. 2011. Modding as an Open Source Approach to Extending Computer Game Systems. International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes 3, 3: 36--47.

Digital Library

[24]

Michael E. Sobel. 1986. Some New Results on Indirect Effects and Their Standard Errors in Covariance Structure Models. Sociological Methodology 16: 159.

[25]

Olli Sotamaa. 2003. Computer game modding, intermediality and participatory culture. New Media: 1--26.

[26]

Olli Sotamaa. 2005. -- Have Fun Working with Our Product!?: Critical Perspectives On Computer Game Mod Competitions. Digital Games Research Association conference: 1--10.

[27]

Olli Sotamaa. 2010. When the Game Is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices Among Computer Game Modding Culture. Games and Culture 5, 3: 239--255.

[28]

José Pedro Tavares and Licínio Roque. 2006. CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Portugal

[29]

Tiziana Terranova. 2000. Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Social Text 18, 2 63: 33--58.

[30]

Glen L. Urban and Eric von Hippel. 1988. Lead User Analyses for the Development of New Industrial Products. Management Science 34, 5: 569--582.

Digital Library

[31]

Joel West and Scott Gallagher. 2006. Patterns of Open Innovation in Open Source Software.

[32]

Joel West and Scott Gallagher. 2006. Challenges of open innovation: the paradox of firm investment in open-source software. R and D Management 36, 3: 319--331.

Cited By

Cook SSemaan B(2024)Mod Installation as Reclaiming Representational Diversity: The Role of Aesthetic Agency in Stardew ValleyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770898:CHI PLAY(1-33)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677089
Hwang SKiene COng SShaw A(2024)Adopting Third-party Bots for Managing Online CommunitiesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36537078:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3653707
Kou YZhou YZhang ZGui X(2024)The Ecology of Harmful Design: Risk and Safety of Game Making on a Metaverse PlatformProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660678(1842-1856)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3660678
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Placing Value on Community Co-creations: A Study of a Video Game 'Modding' Community
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing

Recommendations

How to innovate with a brand community

This study examines how a firm can innovate with a brand community via an inductive, longitudinal study of three brand communities. The proposed framework for building an innovative brand community features six mechanisms: animation, openness, ...
Value cocreation and wealth spillover in open innovation alliances

In this study, we investigate the economic and strategic value of open innovation alliances (OIAs), in which collaborators and competitors integrate in the pursuit of the codevelopment of technological innovations. Given that OIAs differ substantially ...
Steal my idea! Organizational adoption of user innovations from a user innovation community: A case study of Dell IdeaStorm

Open innovation models suggest that an organization's end users can be a potentially beneficial source for new ideas and innovations. However, incorporating end users raises some interesting challenges regarding how to balance the decision making power ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

February 2017

2556 pages

ISBN:9781450343350

DOI:10.1145/2998181

General Chairs:
Charlotte P. Lee
University of Washington
,
Steve Poltrock
Retired
,
Program Chairs:
Louise Barkhuus
Stockholm University and Cornell Tech
,
Marcos Borges
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
,
Wendy Kellogg
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

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]

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 February 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CSCW '17

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CSCW '17: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

February 25 - March 1, 2017

Oregon, Portland, USA

Acceptance Rates

CSCW '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 183 of 530 submissions, 35%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CSCW '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

October 18 - 22, 2025

Bergen , Norway

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

26
Total Citations
View Citations
1,447
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)218
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)21

Reflects downloads up to 25 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Cook SSemaan B(2024)Mod Installation as Reclaiming Representational Diversity: The Role of Aesthetic Agency in Stardew ValleyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770898:CHI PLAY(1-33)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677089
Hwang SKiene COng SShaw A(2024)Adopting Third-party Bots for Managing Online CommunitiesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36537078:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3653707
Kou YZhou YZhang ZGui X(2024)The Ecology of Harmful Design: Risk and Safety of Game Making on a Metaverse PlatformProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660678(1842-1856)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3660678
Kang YLee ULee S(2024)Who Makes Popular Content? Information Cues from Content Creators for Users’ game Choice: Focusing on User-Created Content Platform “Roblox”Entertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2024.10069750(100697)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2024.100697
Reisinho PRaposo RZagalo N(2023)The ethical dilemma of modding digital games: A literature review of the creation and distribution of modsConvergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies10.1177/1354856523122393330:2(860-881)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231223933
Fang KJiang JSun XChen YHe JHuang L(2023)Creative Console: A Player-Driven Game Based on a Modular Fast-Evolving-and-Verifying FrameworkProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36110507:CHI PLAY(803-832)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611050
Nemati AHashemkhani Zolfani SKhazaelpour P(2023)A novel gray FUCOM method and its application for better video games experiencesExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121041234:COnline publication date: 30-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121041
Farshchian BMikalsen M(2023)Using a Service Lens to Better Understand Practices –and Vice VersaComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-023-09478-333:3(499-551)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10606-023-09478-3
Pereira LBernardes M(2022)Reporting on the project development practices of total conversion game mod teamsCreative Industries Journal10.1080/17510694.2022.207759017:3(295-317)Online publication date: 20-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/17510694.2022.2077590
Afi FOuiddad S(2021)Consumer engagement in value co-creation within virtual video game communitiesManagement & Marketing. Challenges for the Knowledge Society10.2478/mmcks-2021-002216:4(370-386)Online publication date: 30-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.2478/mmcks-2021-0022
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten