This document summarizes Dr. Juho Hamari's research on the intersection of money and games across three veins: commodification, gamification, and workification. It provides an overview of each vein, key studies conducted, and references. The first vein discusses how games and in-game content have become commodified products. The second vein examines how game mechanics and incentives have been applied to other domains through gamification. The third vein explores how games have become integrated into real-world economies through activities like esports, streaming, and gold farming.

1. Prominent Research veins on
“money and gam€$”
Dr. Juho Hamari
http://juhohamari.com | juho.hamari@uta.fi | @virtualeconomy
Game Research Lab | University of Tampere | Finland

4. VEIN I:
“Commodification”

5. Closing the
willingess-to-pay gap
 Hamari, J., & Järvinen, A.(2011).
Building customer relationship through game
mechanics in social games.
In M. Cruz-Cunha, V. Carvalho & P. Tavares (Eds.) Business, Technological and Social
Dimensions of Computer Games: Multidisciplinary Developments(pp. 348-365). Hershey,
PA: IGI Global.

6. The more parts there are,
the more parts can be sold

7. ”Commodification” of games
Lehdonvirta (2009) Hamari & Järvinen (2011)
Paavilainen, Hamari,
Stenros, Kinnunen (2013);
Nieborg (2015)
In-game
content as
products
Games-as-
a-service
”big data”
Commodified
player

8. Game design as marketing
Alves & Roque (2007)
Oh & Ryu (2007)
Hamari & Lehdonvirta (2010)
Hamari (2011);
Zagal, Björk & Lewis (2012)
Prax (2013)
Game
design as
marketing
”cognitive biases”
”Dark patterns”
”problematic”
Business
model
influences
game design

9. Game business ethics
Alha, Koskinen, Paavilainen, Hamari & Kinnunen (2014) Kimppa, Heimo & Harviainen (2016)
Degree of
”ethicalness”
between
models
Free2play
itself is
not evil
but how it
is used

10. Why do players buy in-game
content?
Park & Lee (2011) Hamari (2015) Hamari & Keronen (2016)
”FIRST
DOSE IS
ALWAYS
FREEMIUM”
Literature has
focused on game
experiences and
perceived value of
virtual goods
Enjoyment
may
diminish
purchases
Satisfaction
with the game
does not
affect
purchases

11.  Lin, H., & Sun, T-C.(2011).
Cash trade in free-to-play online games.
Games and Culture, 6(3), 270–287.

13. References -
Commodification
▪ Alha, K., Koskinen, E., Paavilainen, J., Hamari, J., & Kinnunen, J. (2014). Free-to-
Play games: Professionals’ perspectives. In Proceedings of Nordic Digra 2014,
Gotland, Sweden, May 29, 2014.
▪ Alves, R. T., & Roque, L. (2007). Because players pay: The business model
influence on mmog design. Proceedings of DiGRA 2007, 658-663.
▪ Hamari, J. (2011). Perspectives from behavioral economics to analyzing game
design patterns: loss aversion in social games. In Proceedings of CHI’2011 (Social
games workshop), Vancouver, Canada, May 7-12, 2011. Social games workshop.
▪ Hamari, J. (2015). Why do people buy virtual goods? Attitude towards virtual
good purchases versus game enjoyment. InternationalJournal of Information
Management, 35(3), 299-308. DOI:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2015.01.007
▪ Hamari, J., & Järvinen, A. (2011). Building customer relationship through game
mechanics in social games. In M. Cruz-Cunha, V. Carvalho & P. Tavares
(Eds.) Business, Technological and Social Dimensions of Computer Games:
Multidisciplinary Developments (pp. 348-365). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
▪ Hamari, J., & Keronen, L. (2016). Why do people buy virtual goods? A literature
review. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Hawaii InternationalConference on System
Sciences (HICSS), Hawaii, USA, January 5-8, 2016. DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.2016.171
▪ Hamari, J., & Lehdonvirta, V. (2010). Game design as marketing: How game
mechanics create demand for virtual goods. InternationalJournal of Business
Science & Applied Management, 5(1), 14-29.
▪ Kimppa, K. K., Heimo, O. I., & Harviainen, J. T. (2016). First dose is always
freemium. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society, 45(3), 132-137.
▪ Lehdonvirta, V. (2009). Virtual item sales as a revenue model: identifying
attributes that drive purchase decisions. Electronic Commerce Research, 9(1-2), 97-
113.
▪ Lin, H., & Sun, C-T. (2011). Cash trade in Free-to-Play Online Games. Games &
Culture, 6(3), 270-287.
▪ Nieborg, D. N. (2015). Crushing Candy: The Free-to-Play Game in Its Connective
Commodity Form. Social Media+ Society, 1(2).
▪ Oh, G., & Ryu, T. (2007). Game design on item-selling based payment model in
Korean online games. Proceedings of DiGRA 2007, 650-657.
▪ Paavilainen, J., Hamari, J., Stenros, J., & Kinnunen, J. (2013). Social Network
Games: Players’ Perspectives. Simulation & Gaming, 44(6), 794-820.
▪ Park, B. W., & Lee, K. C. (2011). Exploring the value of purchasing online game
items. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(6), 2178-2185.
▪ Prax, P. (2013). Game Design and Business Model: an Analysis of Diablo 3.
Proceedings of DiGRA 2013.
▪ Zagal, J. P., Björk, S., & Lewis, C. (2013). Dark patterns in the design of games.
Proceedigs of Foundations of Digtal Games 2013.

14. Vein II
“Gamification”

15. Gamification as an
economic phenomenon
Huotari & Hamari (2012; 2016) Nelson (2012) Hamari, Huotari &Tolvanen (2015)
Gamification
as service
marketing
Gamification
touches all
aspects of
economics
Gamification as a
continuation of
soviet and
american schools
of management

16. Gamification as
incentive for work
Jung, Schneider &Valacich (2010) Morschheuser, Hamari & Koivisto (2016)
Workplace
Crowdsourcing

17. Gamification as an
incentive for sharing
Montola, Nummenmaa, Lucero,
Boberg, and Korhonen (2009)
Thom, Millen & DiMicco (2012) Hamari (2013; 2015)
Sharing economy-
sharing goods
and services
Sharing Photos
Intra-
organizational
information
sharing

18. References - Gamification
▪ Hamari, J. (2015). Do badges increase user activity? A field
experiment on effects of gamification. Computers in Human
Behavior. DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.03.036
▪ Hamari, J., Huotari, K., & Tolvanen, J. (2015). Gamification and
economics. In S. P. Walz & S. Deterding (Eds.), The Gameful World:
Approaches, Issues, Applications (pp. 139-161). Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
▪ Hamari, J., & Koivisto, J. (2015). Why do people use gamification
services? International Journal of Information Management, 35(4),
419-431. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2015.04.006
▪ Hamari, J. (2013). Transforming Homo Economicus into Homo
Ludens: A field experiment on gamification in a utilitarian peer-
to-peer trading service. Electronic Commerce Research and
Applications, 12(4), 236-245.
▪ Huotari, K., & Hamari, J. (2016). A definition for gamification:
Anchoring gamification in the service marketing
literature. Electronic Markets. DOI: 10.1007/s12525-015-0212-z
▪ Jung, J. H., Schneider, C., & Valacich, J. (2010). Enhancing the
motivational affordance of information systems: The effects of
real-time performance feedback and goal setting in group
collaboration environments. Management Science, 56(4), 724-742.
▪ Montola, M., Nummenmaa, T., Lucero, A., Boberg, M., & Korhonen,
H. (2009). Applying game achievement systems to enhance user
experience in a photo sharing service. In Proceedings of the 13th
International MindTrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous
Era (pp. 94-97). ACM.
▪ Morschheuser, B., Hamari, J., & Koivisto, J. (2016). Gamification in
crowdsourcing: A review. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Hawaii, USA,
January 5-8, 2016. DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.2016.543
▪ Nelson, M. J. (2012). Soviet and American precursors to the
gamification of work. In Proceeding of the 16th International
Academic MindTrek Conference (pp. 23-26). ACM.
▪ Thom, J., Millen, D., & DiMicco, J. (2012). Removing gamification
from an enterprise SNS. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference
on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 1067-1070). ACM.

19. Vein III
“Workification”

21. ”Real-Money-Trade” /
gold mining
Heeks (2008) Nakamura (2009) Lehdonvirta (2005)
“gold farming
has eroded the
real/virtual
dichotomy”
Strategies of
managing RMT
Games as the
fourth world

23. eSports
Hutchins (2008);
Seo (2013);
Sjöblom & Hamari (forthcoming)
Jonasson &Thiborg (2010);
Witkowski (2012)
Cheung & Huang (2011);
Hamari & Sjöblom (2015);
Weiss & Schiele (2013)
eSports is a
complex
business
ecology
eSports
consumed for
the same
reasons as trad
sports
are eSports
real sports?

25. ”Let’s play” – watching
others play games
Hamilton, Garretson & Kerne (2014) Sjöblom & Hamari (2016)
tension release, social
and affective
motivations predict
watching
Communal and relatedness
predict subscribing
Streams as informal
communities that
form around shared
identities drawn
from streams’
contents

26. … And Gambling of course

27. References - Workification
▪ Cheung, G. and Huang, J. (2011). Starcraft from the stands:
Understanding the game spectator. In Proceedings of the 2011
Annual Conference on Human Factors in computing systems (CHI’11).
ACM, New York, NY, USA, 763-772.
▪ Hamari, J., & Sjöblom, M. (2015). What is eSports and Why Do
People Watch It?. Available at SSRN 2686182.
▪ Hamilton, W. A., Garretson, O., & Kerne, A. (2014). Streaming on
twitch: fostering participatory communities of play within live
mixed media. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1315-1324). ACM.
▪ Heeks, R. (2009). Understanding" gold farming" and real-money
trading as the intersection of real and virtual economies. Journal
For Virtual Worlds Research, 2(4).
▪ Hutchins, B. (2008). Signs of meta-change in second modernity:
the growth of e-sport and the World Cyber Games. New Media &
Society, 10(6), 851-869.
▪ Jonasson, K., & Thiborg, J. (2010). Electronic sport and its impact
on future sport. Sport in Society, 13(2), 287–299.
▪ Lehdonvirta, V. (2005) Real-Money Trade of Virtual Assets: New
Strategies for Virtual World Operators. Proceedings of the 2005
Conference on Future Play (Future Play 2005), Lansing, MI, USA,
October 13-15.
▪ Nakamura, L. (2009). Don't hate the player, hate the game: The
racialization of labor in World of Warcraft. Critical Studies in Media
Communication, 26(2), 128-144.
▪ Seo, Y. (2015). Professionalized consumption and identity
transformations in the field of eSports. Journal of Business
Research.
▪ Sjöblom, M., & Hamari, J. (2016). Why Do People Watch Others
Play Video Games? An Empirical Study on the Motivations of
Twitch Users. SSRN. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2779543
▪ Weiss, T., & Schiele, S. (2013). Virtual worlds in competitive
contexts: Analyzing eSports consumer needs. Electronic Markets,
23(4), 307-316.
▪ Witkowski, E. (2012). On the Digital playing Field: How we “Do
Sport” With Networked Computer Games. Games and Culture. 7(5),
349-374.

28. “Money & Games” research
▪ “Commodification” =
Money from developing games
▪ “Gamification” =
Money from applying games
▪ “Workification”/“playbour” =
Money from playing games

29. Distribution of topics at the
”money & games” seminar
Vein I
”Commodification”
Vein II
”Gamification”
Vein III
”Workification”
Heimo, Harviainen, Kimppa & Mäkilä
Deterding
Paul
Montola
Consalvo & Paul
Van Roessel
Prax
Okopny, Musabirov, Krysanova, & Lysov
Paavilainen
Dippel & Fizek
Sihvonen
Alha, Paavilainen, Kinnunen & Koskinen
Järvelä, Salminen, Kivikangas, Hamari & Ravaja
Kinnunen
Malinen
Luo
Bulygin, Musabirov, Sirotkin & Okopny

30. Thank$
Dr. Juho Hamari
http://juhohamari.com | juho.hamari@uta.fi | @virtualeconomy
Game Research Lab | University of Tampere | Finland