Through the use of this game, students have the opportunity to experience educational content and “role-play” in an environment that is immersive and highly interactive. This pilot program indeed demonstrates the value of an educational pre-learning tool for parents and students along with the teachers that come to the Fort to re-enact history. It is a web-based 3D game platform developed in Unity 3D that currently supports single player use, and in the near future will be developed for multiplayer functionality. In March 2011, California State Parks entered an agreement with University of California Merced (UCM) to create an interactive, learning game able to educate students, schools and visitors about Fort Ross: the “Fort Ross Virtual Warehouse Project” (FRVWP). Furthermore, Candy Crush Saga’s commodity form is structured by a platformed modality of cultural production and circulation and therefore embedded in the political economy of its host platform. It is argued that the free-to-play commodity form comprises three commodity types: the product commodity, the “prosumer commodity,” and the player commodity. Candy Crush Saga developer King Digital Entertainment has been able to attract hundreds of millions of players and build a business model that combines the commodification of virtual items, connectivity, user attention, user data, and play. Through a case study of the popular casual game Candy Crush Saga it is contended that the connective properties of social media platforms affect the form and format of game apps as cultural commodities. These social media platforms operate app stores that sustain the transformation of games as fixed, physically distributed products that follow a transaction logic, into digitally distributed, freely accessible, or “free-to-play” apps. Drawing on the theory of multisided markets and critical political economy, this article surveys the political economy of game apps and investigates how it is symbiotically related to the technological and economic logic underlying connective platforms operated by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. The goal of this article is to add a complementary perspective to the study of social network sites by surveying how the political economy of social media platforms relates to the structure of free-to-play games in their commodity form. Ultimately all three of these distinctions will prove necessary to show that fixed cosmetic rewards are ethically permissible, random rewards of all types are ethically problematic, and fixed functional rewards can be acceptable, but only under certain conditions. Third, there is a difference between items which are obtainable both for real money and for in-game effort and items which are only obtainable for real money. Second, there is a difference between cosmetic items and those which affect gameplay this is particularly pronounced in multiplayer games, where a player might have an advantage over another through the expenditure of real money. In the latter, a player knows how much she is paying for the loot box, but she does not know what is inside. In the former, a player knows exactly what she is purchasing and how much it will cost her. First, there is a difference between a fixed-reward microtransaction and a random one, such as a loot box. In this paper I will be investigating the ethics of freemium games, microtransactions, and loot boxes. In examining these games, this article will ultimately indicate the need for game studies to interrogate the intersection between commercial motivations and game design and a broader need for media and cultural studies to consider the social, cultural, economic and political implications of impatience. This article will examine three ‘freemium’ games, Snoopy Street Fair, The Simpsons’ Tapped Out and Dragonvale, to explore how they combine established branding strategies with gameplay methods that monetize player impatience. Although offering a free gameplay experience in line with open access philosophies, these games also create systems that offer control over the temporal dynamics of that experience to monetize player attention and inattention. Free to download, but structured around micropayments, these games raise the complex relationship between game design and commercial strategies. The gaming industry has seen dramatic change and expansion with the emergence of ‘casual’ games that promote shorter periods of gameplay.
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