When a video game development company creates a skin, a character, or a bundle of digital items, it is not merely producing aesthetics or playable experiences—it is also building an entire economic system: it defines a virtual currency, sets an exchange rate, and organizes a circuit of value. Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends (LoL), does not sell items directly; instead, it offers Riot Points (RP) as an intermediary currency. This move—currency and rate—drives the formal economy.
Yet a quick Google search shows that players do not limit themselves to this official channel. Websites exist where accounts, rare skins, coaching services, and even bets are bought and sold. These informal economies operate through diverse payment methods (credit cards, digital wallets, cryptocurrencies) and, although considered illegitimate by the company, they persist and thrive. This raises an important question: what does this tell us about value, design, and player agency?
In this post, I would like to explore the idea that informal economies on platforms like LoL are not accidental deviations, but rather necessary shadows of formal design. To do so, I have been thinking about the notion of digital porosity: that blurred boundary between play and work, between the formal and the informal, which is becoming increasingly permeable not only in LoL but in many other video games that depend on these complex sociotechnical networks. Far from being mere “corruptions” of the system, these economies reveal fundamental tensions about who defines value, how scarcity is negotiated, and what role trust, risk, and unrecognized labor play in players’ everyday experience.
The Illusion of a Closed Economy
Riot Games constructs an artificially closed economy in which it holds jurisdiction over virtual property, establishes membership restrictions, and enforces penalties on secondary markets. Following Foster (1965), we might speak of an “image of limited good” designed from above: exclusive skins, scarce ranks, disappearing items. These are ways in which a company seeks to capture the value generated by players—not necessarily to protect them.
But Foster already warned that every closed system has escape valves. In LoL, the informal market is one of them. Players do not simply exchange goods; they also exchange status, reputation, and risk. When they buy accounts with high ranks, rare skins, or hire a coach, they are responding pragmatically to a structure that imposes scarcity without offering legitimate exits. The time and effort invested cannot be converted into real money within the formal system; informal economies thus emerge as practical responses to this constraint. Far from playing a passive role, players exercise their agency in a space characterized by informality, risk, and potential sanctions.
This tension between control and overflow is precisely a porous boundary between what the platform authorizes and what players do, where both sides constantly cross each other. It seems important to note that there are no completely closed or open systems, but rather oscillations between control and overflow.
It is important to distinguish these digital informal economies from what is traditionally known as the shadow economy or parallel economy. While the latter typically refers to economic activities not declared to the state—with tax and labor implications—digital informality on platforms like LoL operates on a different register: it does not evade taxes (since virtual goods lack a clear tax status in most countries), but rather evades the rules of a private company. More precisely, this is a contractual informality: players violate the Terms of Service, not necessarily state laws. This distinction is key because it changes the type of sanction (ban vs. fine or imprisonment) and the type of agency involved, as actors are constantly negotiating with private power rather than with a state. In other words: the shadow or parallel economy is a shadow of the State; digital informality is a shadow of corporate design.
Can We Go Beyond the Formal/Informal Binary?
The distinction between formal vs. informal, legal vs. illegal, controlled vs. deviant is limited, essentially because it produces two seemingly opposing fields that are, in practice, deeply intertwined. To overcome this dualism, Guyer (2016) proposes the notion of platform: a combination of architecture, standard applications, and spaces for novel performances.
Thinking of LoL through Guyer’s lens as an economic platform would mean investigating how elements with different—even contradictory—logics are assembled: an exchange currency (RP), a currency of time and effort, informal account markets, coaching systems, ranks and the status they provide, unfavorable real exchange rates (especially in countries like Mexico). With these initial elements, we can notice that players navigate these components, identify opportunities, and build innovations from below, but always in dependence on the stable elements that the platform itself offers. This mutual dependence—where the formal feeds the informal and vice versa—is a key feature of digital porosity: there is no pure inside and outside, but rather a continuum of practices oscillating between legitimacy and sanction.
It is crucial to distinguish Guyer’s proposal (2016) from Srnicek’s “platform capitalism” (2017), although we will certainly find points of contact. Srnicek describes digital platforms as infrastructures that extract data, monopolize markets, and position users as providers of unpaid value. In LoL, we do indeed see this logic: Riot extracts time and attention, and players generate value (competitiveness, community, content) without receiving direct monetary compensation. So far, Srnicek’s diagnosis is useful.
However, this perspective tends to make us think of platforms as totalizing structures that capture and discipline users. This reading, while valuable for understanding the concentration of power, obscures a phenomenon I want to highlight: users are not merely agents from whom data is extracted; they also improvise, divert, and create circuits of value that the platform does not control. Guyer (2016) allows us to observe how users take advantage of stable structures to generate novel practices. In this sense, we might think that platforms are powerful, but not omnipotent. Informal economies are precisely the proof that corporate design never fully closes the system, and that players find loopholes to redefine value for themselves. In this vein, informal economies are not accidents, but rather a field of inter-economic conflicts (Hobbis & Hobbis, 2022), where players produce morally meaningful practices in their context, which may well include forms of building ties, reputation, or horizontal access to scarce goods.
Trust in the Grey Zone
I still find it striking that much of these exchanges occur between strangers on the Internet. How is this possible? I think a key element in this process is trust. Following Szabó & Gupta (2020) and Cook et al. (2009), we can say that players evaluate two dimensions in their anonymous counterparts: competence (technical skill) and motivation (willingness to act in the other’s benefit). A buyer of an account may spend a considerable amount of time verifying ranks and skins; likewise, someone hiring a coach looks for genuine commitment and will reject anyone who shows signs of offering obvious advice just to make quick money.
Since Riot Games offers neither guarantees nor arbitration, players turn to what McKnight, Cummings, and Chervany (1998) called cognitive trust: decisions based on available information in forums, comments, and reputation histories. In this way, the seller’s identity becomes collectively anchored. In the absence of formal institutions, trust expands the radius of action toward strangers who will likely never meet face-to-face. Ephemeral transactions make that trust even more crucial. Trust is, in this sense, the glue that makes digital porosity possible: it allows exchanges to cross the boundaries that the platform attempts to keep closed.
Figure 1. In various online video games, players invest real money which is then exchanged for digital items. Original photo by ZuckerPop via Pexels.
Value as Condensation of Labor, Status, and Risk
If we continue along the reflective lines of Graeber (2018) and Appadurai (1991), we can say that value is not an intrinsic property of digital objects. A Diamond-ranked account does not possess value in itself; rather, its value resides in the hours of gameplay it represents, the social recognition it confers, the scarcity surrounding it, and the risk of sanction implied by its transaction. What is forbidden—that which may disappear—thus becomes more prized. This dynamic is another manifestation of digital porosity: value is not fixed unilaterally by corporate design, but is negotiated at the boundary between what is permitted and what is sanctioned.
This would allow us to notice how a skin or an account acquires a social life (Kopytoff, 1991), in the sense that it accumulates stories, memories, and singular achievements. Players oscillate between singularizing their accounts and commodifying them. This tension between the common and the singular is central to informal markets; behind it lies a political struggle: who holds the power to define what is valuable and how it should be exchanged?
Digital Informality as Active Expulsion
Portes, Castells, and Benton (1989) clearly pointed out that informal economies are not merely marginality nor should they be read solely as individual survival strategies; it is more accurate to think of them as structural processes of lack of regulation. In LoL, pluriactivity is the norm: a player can be a consumer, a coach, an account seller with a purely capitalist perspective all at once, without existing forms of collective organization regulating what can or cannot be done.
In this regard, it becomes pertinent to recall the notion of active expulsion (Sassen, 2015) produced by policies, techniques, and complex systems. Companies’ terms of service, their monitoring and banning systems appear here as algorithmically sophisticated forms of expulsion. Paradoxically, the more regulation there is, the more it seems to increase players’ motivation to seek alternative routes. In this sense, the formal and informal are pieces of the same puzzle. This paradox is characteristic of digital porosity, where formality engenders its own disobedience. Attempts to close the system always generate new openings in a cycle that is never fully resolved.
Closing (for Now)
Throughout this journey, I have tried to show that informal economies are expressions of a digital porosity that produces fusions—where playing and working become blurred—but also frictions, which we can notice in the contradictions and wear that players learn to navigate. It is in these frictions that informal economies emerge.
This is merely an initial reflection, and some of the arguments I share here should be taken with caution; some of the examples I have considered are illustrative, but they can help shed light on a theoretical problem: how to explore a framework for thinking about value as a condensation of labor, status, and risk in situations where trust occupies a central place in environments of uncertainty mediated by digital technologies. On the other hand, it is important to consider informality not as an anomaly that must be regulated and/or corrected, but as a necessary byproduct of platform design.
When young people participate in the informal economies of any video game, they are not merely exchanging digital objects; they are also navigating the interstices of a digital economy that includes and excludes them simultaneously. From anthropology, we have here a privileged object: digital informal economies as everyday laboratories of value in suspension.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Iván Flores and reviewed by Contributing Editor Kanikka Sersia.
References
Foster, G. (1965). Peasant society and the image of limited good.
Guyer, J. (2016). Legacies, logics, logistics: Essays in the anthropology of the platform economy.
Hart, K. (1973). Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana.
Portes, A., Castells, M. & Benton, L. (1989). The informal economy: Studies in advanced and less developed countries.
Sassen, S. (2015). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy.
Szabó & Gupta (2020). Trust in collaborative economies.
