Abstract
Video game fans participate in the official promotion of video games, either voluntarily, or unwillingly when their fanworks are appropriated and used by video game publishers. The article provides a quantitative overview of the presence of fans in the official social media profiles of four selected mainstream games (Dragon Age: Inquistion, Evolve, Mortal Kombat X and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt) during a one-year period from August 2014 to July 2015. Combining the traditional method of content analysis and Facebook data-mining, we explore the frequency with which fans appear in social media (including questions of various forms of fanworks and gender) and what user activity is generated by posts featuring fans and fan creations. Results show that fans or their fanworks are featured in 8–24% of all posts depending on a game and in the most common categories of painting and cosplay they generate a comparable level of user engagement as traditional promotional posts.
Highlights
We explore the frequency at which fans appear on official Facebook pages, what types of fans they are, and whether they are given credit for their creations
In the second step of the content analysis, we have closely examined the types of fans that were featured in social media profiles
Streamers on Twitch and YouTube were often featured on Evolve’s Facebook page during the alpha and beta versions of the game development. These findings suggest that the perceived fan capital among the administrators of social media profiles is first influenced by the overall visual culture of Facebook and by specificities of a given game which allow for emergence of a more traditional gaming capital, such as power gaming (Consalvo, 2007)
Summary
The presented results allow us to think of a prototypical fan post used in the official promotion of video games It most likely features a fan artist, either a painter or a cosplayer. Featured fanworks are used in motivating other players to participate actively in fandom and create their own art, and share it with video game companies. Considering the ethos of the so-called fannish gift economies (Booth, 2010; Hellekson, 2009) and the official communication, which often emphasizes the communal aspect of fandom, the metaphor of the Carer applies to the topic of featuring fans in social media In this context, Fast et al explicitly mention that “[m]edia companies frequently attempt to leverage the community ties” In very rare cases, talented fans are asked to become official employees of video game companies, further strengthening the narrative of a fan as the Apprentice (Fast et al, 2016).
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