Gaming Capital in Contemporary Role-playing Game Platforms

Abstract

Gaming capital: a fifteen-year-old theory detailing how one’s gaming knowledge can be conceptualized into something tangible. In her book Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games, Consalvo (2007) presented the term gaming capital to give a name and meaning to the collective understanding of both the individual player and the communities that entail the discussions about the game, genre, or the platform – including topics like knowledge, experience, and skill. Yet, there has not been much scholarly attention given to where one would situate gaming capital between cultural and symbolic capital, and where social capital would influence the transformation of knowledge to gaming capital. The discussion about gaming capital has been more about what it is, and what can be or cannot be gaming capital, but what steers gaming capital as an entity at their disposal has not been studied enough yet. The world of gaming has moved massively forwards in fifteen years, and the whole concept of what “gaming” is has subsequently changed, not only within the online multiplayer video game scene, but within analogue role-playing games too. Both mediums have their ways of accumulating and spending capital, and not everything is different in terms of gaming capital. Therefore, this study approaches the formation of gaming capital within both Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) and Dungeons & Dragons (1974) through information flow and social space perspectives.