Encountering the Platform Game: Player Resistance Formations and the Reproduction of Consumption in Multiplayer Online Battle Arena Games

Abstract

The homogenized identity of game players provides fertile ground for platform studies to transcend the producer/consumer dichotomy and examine the process by which platforms shift the “labor–capital” contradiction. This study traces diverse player feedback triggered by grievances in the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game Honor of Kings, interrogating the co-constitutive process between protracted resistance formations and the iterative refinement of gameplay mechanics. We propose the concept “reproduction of consumption” to foreground how users’ spontaneous acts become technologically mediated through algorithms into instruments of user proliferation. In contrast to other forms of game/labor, which we call labor or create within games, it exhibits the exploitative nature of unpaid labor in the sense of “playbor.” Thereby, extending resistance research to digital gaming, we argue that technologically mediated resistance formations constitute pivotal digital labor driving consumption reproduction in platform games, advancing critical understanding of how platforms shift labor–capital contradictions.