Daniel Nielsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 904558 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Nielsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Nielsen |
| SIGNATURE | NIELSEN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Charles University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9165-9614 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 5 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 5 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Speculators Inside the Slop Factory: Shovelware and Financialized Game Development in Roblox
Roblox, launched in 2006 by Roblox Corporation, hosts more than 40 million player-created games and had 85.3 million daily users as of Q3 2024. The platform promotes game creation as an educational tool. Based on interviews with 17 Roblox creators, this article explores how players are drawn into game development. Unlike traditional platform labor, Roblox incentivizes creators through speculative financial gain rather than creative passion. These…
From player to asset: Venture labor in axie infinity
This paper examines crypto economies in ‘play-to-earn’ games via a case study of Axie Infinity (Sky Mavis, Citation2018). High entry costs spawned ‘scholarships’ in which asset-owning managers lease Axies to applicants – largely young Filipino adults – in exchange for a share of earnings. Using scraped data from four Discord communities, we analyse scholarship applications, revealing three strategic framings: (1) Hardship as leverage: Applicants …
The Business of Play: Financialization and Optimization in World of Warcraft
In World of Warcraft (WOW) , thousands of players work together to analyze the game's rules and maximize their rewards. Organized boosting—a paid player service—is widely seen as undermining the meritocratic ideal that ties rewards to effort and skill. Drawing on semistructured interviews with six former providers of boosting services, this study argues that optimization in digital games is not solely a strategic choice, but often a necessity sha…
Two Percent at the Picket Line: Media Coverage of U.S. Union Fights for Streaming Residuals
In late 2023, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) simultaneously struck against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the first dual strike since the 1960s. While several factors drove these strikes, this study focuses on residuals, particularly for streaming services. Streaming platforms like Netflix undermine traditional revenue…
The Inverted Cryptoeconomy: The Search for Endogenous Value in No Man’s Sky
The Galactic Hub Project is a player response to a dehumanizing trend in video game culture. Players adopt blockchain technology to capture and retain the value of player labor, which suggests that players do not necessarily take issue with the reproducibility and aesthetics of procedurally generated content in No Man’ s Sky. This research identifies attempts to safeguard against alienation of play in virtual economies by using HubCoin as an inve…
No prominent works on this page.
The Inverted Cryptoeconomy: The Search for Endogenous Value in No Man’s Sky
The Galactic Hub Project is a player response to a dehumanizing trend in video game culture. Players adopt blockchain technology to capture and retain the value of player labor, which suggests that players do not necessarily take issue with the reproducibility and aesthetics of procedurally generated content in No Man’ s Sky. This research identifies attempts to safeguard against alienation of play in virtual economies by using HubCoin as an inve…
The Business of Play: Financialization and Optimization in World of Warcraft
In World of Warcraft (WOW) , thousands of players work together to analyze the game's rules and maximize their rewards. Organized boosting—a paid player service—is widely seen as undermining the meritocratic ideal that ties rewards to effort and skill. Drawing on semistructured interviews with six former providers of boosting services, this study argues that optimization in digital games is not solely a strategic choice, but often a necessity sha…
Two Percent at the Picket Line: Media Coverage of U.S. Union Fights for Streaming Residuals
In late 2023, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) simultaneously struck against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the first dual strike since the 1960s. While several factors drove these strikes, this study focuses on residuals, particularly for streaming services. Streaming platforms like Netflix undermine traditional revenue…
Speculators Inside the Slop Factory: Shovelware and Financialized Game Development in Roblox
Roblox, launched in 2006 by Roblox Corporation, hosts more than 40 million player-created games and had 85.3 million daily users as of Q3 2024. The platform promotes game creation as an educational tool. Based on interviews with 17 Roblox creators, this article explores how players are drawn into game development. Unlike traditional platform labor, Roblox incentivizes creators through speculative financial gain rather than creative passion. These…
From player to asset: Venture labor in axie infinity
This paper examines crypto economies in ‘play-to-earn’ games via a case study of Axie Infinity (Sky Mavis, Citation2018). High entry costs spawned ‘scholarships’ in which asset-owning managers lease Axies to applicants – largely young Filipino adults – in exchange for a share of earnings. Using scraped data from four Discord communities, we analyse scholarship applications, revealing three strategic framings: (1) Hardship as leverage: Applicants …
Digital Games and Media (3 works) · Advertising (2 works) · Business (2 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (2 works) · Computer Science (2 works) · Economics (2 works) · Law (2 works) · Law (2 works) · Political science (2 works) · Sociology (2 works)