The Pleasures and Practices of Virtualised Consumption in Digital Spaces

This conceptual paper, presented at the DiGRA 2005 conference, argues that virtualised consumption, such as buying virtual goods in games, browsing virtual marketplaces, and displaying digital possessions, should be understood as a legitimate and pleasurable form of consumption rather than a failure of marketing. Its central thesis is that virtual consumption represents the latest stage in a historical shift from utility toward emotional, sign-based, and playful experience, and that digital spaces function as liminoid play-spaces where consumers' imaginations are stimulated and partly actualised. The authors contend that the common marketing complaint of cart abandonment misreads consumers who derive satisfaction from imaginative engagement with goods they never intend to materially buy.

The paper traces this trajectory through theorists including Baudrillard, McCracken, Campbell, and Featherstone, describing how post-Fordist economies increasingly sell experiences and how consumption became rooted in daydreams and imaginative anticipation. It draws on Shields' matrix of real, possible, ideal, and virtual forms, and on Turner's distinction between liminal and liminoid spaces, to argue that digital environments allow abstract or idealised desires to be performed and thereby made real within play. The analysis rests on conceptual reasoning and illustrative examples rather than empirical data; it cites published statistics on cart abandonment and eBay virtual-item trade but does not report original survey or sample-based findings.

The authors illustrate their argument with a range of cases: virtual window-shopping on web and game platforms, eBay's auction structure, Amazon's wish lists, BMW and Bulgari's virtual product experiences, the Habbo Hotel room economy, earned and stolen virtual vehicles in Gran Turismo and Grand Theft Auto, and crafted goods in EverQuest. Across these examples, they identify practices such as anonymous virtual flânerie, possession without ownership, and the purchase of digital goods with material or virtual money. The paper concludes that marketers should treat such play as a form of consumption worth understanding, and it raises open questions about how these practices vary across cultures and whether less consumption-oriented societies would produce different games.