Free-to-Play

An examination of free-to-play and mobile games that traces what is valued and what is marginalized in discussions of games.

Free-to-play and mobile video games are an important and growing part of the video game industry, and yet they are often disparaged by journalists, designers, and players and pronounced inferior to to games with more traditional payment models. In this book, Christopher Paul shows that underlying the criticism is a bias against these games that stems more from who is making and playing them than how they are monetized. Free-to-play and mobile games appeal to a different kind of player, many of whom are women and many of whom prefer different genres of games than multi-level action-oriented killing fests. It's not a coincidence that some of the few free-to-play games that have been praised by games journalists are League of Legends and World of Tanks.1: We Can Be Really Bad at History
2: Requirements, Advantages, and Options
3: Rationalizing and Resisting
4: Bringing FTP West: Building an Ultimate Team
5: Hardcore Clicking
6: Hoping You Get Lucky
7: Marvel Does It All“Free-to-Play is an entertaining and enlightening look at the free-to-play model from historical, economic, and cultural perspectives. I would recommend this book to anyone seeking a better understanding of the future of video games as a medium and a cultural touchstone.”
—Shira Chess, Associate Professor of Entertainment and Media Studies, University of Georgia; author of Play like a Feminist.
 
“Paul has written a fast-paced and skilled analysis that reveals the biases in game reviews and identifies how free-to-play games transgress accepted norms and values. A must-read!”
—Aphra Kerr, Associate Professor of Sociology, Maynooth University, Ireland; author of Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked EraChristopher A. Paul is Associate Professor of Communication and Chair of the Department of Communication at Seattle University. He is the author of Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games and The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games.