A myriad of digital artifacts are routinely exchanged online. While previous studies suggest that these are sometimes considered to be gifts, CSCW has largely overlooked explicit digital gifting where people deliberately choose to give digital media as gifts. We present an interview study that systematically analyzes the nature of digital gifting in comparison to conventional physical gifting. A five-stage gift exchange model, synthesized from the literature, frames this study. Findings reveal that there are distinctive gaps in people’s engagement with the digital gifting process compared to physical gifting. Participants’ accounts show how digital gifts often involve less labor, are sometimes not perceived as gifts by the recipient and are rarely reflected on and reciprocated. We conclude by drawing out design implications for digital gifting services and rituals.
Games that revolve around user-generated content (such as Minecraft) have been explored mainly from a ludic perspective, leaving the work practices that are entailed in content production underexplored. My research looks into the underlying economy in Minecraft’s community, which plays a significant role in the game’s current form. The conducted ethnographic fieldwork revealed the various aspects of the work of producing in-game content, by teasing out the discrete segments of the arc of work of commissioning, creating and delivering a Minecraft map. In this talk, I am going to briefly introduce the ways in which the distinct practices and activities involved in Minecraft’s commissioning market are carried out, by teasing out the distributed resources and the accountability systems members employ in doing their work.
University of Nottingham School of Computer Science Nottingham, NG8 1BB
email: mrl@cs.nott.ac.uk