Managing fairness: Reward distribution in a self-organized online game player community

Abstract

Reward distribution is essential to the wellbeing of self-organized online game player communities. This paper adopted a case-study approach to investigate how a particular player community managed fairness in sharing rewards among members. The results found that the community primarily relied on a raid point based auction system for reward distribution. Perceived fairness was managed as various written policies focusing on two dimensions: behavior regulation and resource management. The guiding principles of fairness management were identified and articulated. So was the role of structural features of the game and the community in triggering policy discussion. Finally, the implications for future research was discussed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.