This study conceptualizes a form of gamer activism termed “game-world violation” by investigating the Shining Nikki players’ collective mobilization against a collaboration with an idol to perform the game’s anniversary song. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis of social media posts and interviews, we show how players’ attachment to the game’s protagonist and a sense of ownership over the co-created symbolic world of the game enabled collective mobilization. By using interactional framing analysis, we document the emergence of three distinct mobilization frames to elucidate the process of player mobilization. As a result, players’ mobilization succeeded in forcing Papergames to abandon the collaboration, demonstrating how symbolic violations can underpin contention despite structural power asymmetries. Our findings highlight how the co-created symbolic world of a game can become a site of contention when game producers unilaterally alter the symbolic universe of a game.
Jin et al. (Sun,) studied this question.