Commoditization of Helping Players Play: Rise of the Service Paradigm

The paper provides a cultural and economic background for the rise of the service paradigm in the realm of games. Both the complicated relation between products and services and a variety of contemporary examples are examined in order to develop a detailed understanding of the ecology of games-related services. From mapping the current situation we move on to create a particular player service model. The model is created both to help analytically dissect what player services are and to pinpoint some blind spots in current service design. The model can be further used to rethink the current industry ecology and to potentially find entirely new semi-independent service domains. Author