Economic imaginaries are no mere abstractions or illusions, they shape the design and reception of games as technologies and as commodities, facilitating and scaffolding certain kinds and parameters of play whilst never fully determining them. They mesh the material characteristics and operations of the game (as both interactive media software and operationalised business model) with the symbols, action and characters from the game’s virtual world, and – not least – with the imaginations of players themselves. Imagination and economics (endogenous and exogenous) interact and co-constitute with and across each other at global and hyper-local intersections.
