Purchasing Progress: How Video Gamers Justify Violating the Rules of the Game.

• In Event: Crime and Justice in Digital Media

Abstract

Video games have become one of the world’s most popular forms of entertainment over the past few decades. The industry is worth upwards of $180 billion, eclipsing the movie and music industry earnings combined (Arora, 2023). As the video game industry has expanded, developers have increasingly turned to using in-game currencies as a form of monetization. Some developers have begun selling currency directly to players while others have continued to forbid the practice. As a result, third-party websites have appeared that offer to sell players in game currency to circumvent “the grind” where players have to earn the currency through playing the game. Purchasing from these websites is a violation of the end user license agreements of video game companies, and thus constitutes deviant behavior. Through the utilization of survey research, this study seeks to understand how gamers justify purchasing in-game currency from third parties using Sykes and Matza’s (1957) techniques of neutralization as a theoretical framework.

Authors

• Leslie-Dawn Quick, Marshall University

• Ryan Phillips, Marshall University