In 2018, Valve Corporation, the owner of the Steam gaming platform, made a seemingly minor feature change. It involved that game items obtained in Steam-based games could only be traded between players after a waiting period of seven days after acquisition. This feature change, often referred to as ‘the cooldown’, cost the most active Steam traders several thousands of euros due to the subsequent plunge in market prices. It was implemented as a response to rising public concern regarding the proliferation of so-called skin trading and skin gambling on shady websites. In the time leading up to the event, several critical voices had accused Valve of profiting from illegal gambling with items from the Steam platform. ESPN.com stated that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, one of Steam's most lucrative game titles, had ‘spawned a wild multibillion-dollar world of online casino gambling; it's barely regulated and open to any kid who wants in’, and the Washington State Gambling Commission stated that Valve was ‘responsible for the unregulated Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gambling that's gone on through Steam’ and ordered Valve to take immediate action. In the wake of these critiques, Valve was facing several lawsuits.

But how can a simple time delay cost ordinary users thousands of euros, and how can a simple feature change make a difference on seemingly unaffiliated websites? How is it even possible to gamble with items from Steam-based games? To understand these issues, one must understand the distinct features of the Steam platform economy and design, and how these frame economic practices beyond the platform. In this book, I will explain Steam as a ‘tangled market’, a set of interconnected and mutually dependent market contexts, that creates revenue from microtransactions through the strategic shaping of market interactions on and beyond the platform. Unlike other market platforms such as the App Store and Google Play, Steam does not offer entrepreneurs a system for generating revenue through advertising. Instead, it pushes its microtransaction system as a preferred alternative. And unlike other gaming platforms, Steam, to an unprecedented degree, integrates virtual economies and players’ economic interaction in an effort to intensify and expand the quantity of economic transactions on the platform and let these practices develop beyond the platform.

Dear green place

Part of the escapist appeal of communal growing spaces such as community gardens and urban meadows lies in the sense of different ways of living the city. They offer what the poet Colin Herd, in a poem for a green space map from 2021, might call ‘places in a place’. Urban growing spaces open up a reconnection with natural rhythms and a disconnection from putatively urban pressures of time and space. This is read within a narrative of Glasgow as the ‘Dear Green Place’, a naming which sits strangely against its industrial (and post-industrial) history and its colonial heritage as an important city in the British Empire. Yet the number of parks, river fronts and increasingly long-term stalled spaces reclaimed by nature (like the Cuningar Loop in the East End, or the former Claypitts site in north Glasgow) reinstate a connection between a supposedly natural history and a human one. Glasgow's 425 hectares of derelict and vacant land in 2018, the largest urban concentration in Scotland, offers an interesting view onto this, often reclaimed first by buddleia and other invasive plants, and eventually, if left to it, renaturalized.

In Glasgow, proximity to wild places can be as simple as proximity to abandoned space, which is abundant, especially in poorer areas of the city. The future of such spaces seems to be mixed – with enthusiasm from the Scottish Government for turning such spaces to economic and housing uses balanced against recognition that some spaces are better suited (in the short to medium term) as green spaces and indeed wild spaces (Glasgow City Council, 2019). In the right conditions (environmental, cultural, economic and policy), a place of rubble can become an urban wilderness, with potential to address a range of social issues, not least a limited access for some to urban green space – which can be an acute issue especially in working-class areas of Glasgow. Such a wilderness is a construction, something Jorgensen (2011, p 2) notes when she says that wilderness ‘can be seen as an idea, a way of thinking about urban space’ that centres the agency of the natural world over the human.

Introduction

Phoenix et al's (1991) edited book Motherhood set out a conceptual distinction between the meanings that motherhood has for women (whether or not they are mothers); the practices of mothering, within the circumstances in which they live, and the ideologies of motherhood, which they describe as common-sense ideas which shape theoretical work and discourses and which ‘help construct what motherhood is considered to be’ (Phoenix et al, 1991, p 5). This distinction is useful in thinking through the understandings and experiences of parenthood for the people who took part in our research. It seems obvious to note that, even when separated from their children, parenthood still has significant meaning in people's lives (see also Morriss, 2018). This chapter will also consider how family is displayed and mothering practised at a distance by women who have lost custody of their children. The analysis also addresses ideologies of care experienced motherhood – considering intergenerational support (and the role of professional support and the ‘corporate grandparent’) alongside experiences of stigma and future imaginaries of family lives.

The chapter is organized temporally and begins by considering experiences of becoming a parent. For the most part, I will talk about mothers, drawing on examples from both studies. All of the women in the Pause evaluation had at least one child, as did four participants in Against All Odds?, one of whom became a mother during the course of the study. Only one respondent in Against All Odds? was a father and the chapter includes his experiences, while attending to other participants’ accounts of fathers’ roles and involvement. The second part of the chapter draws on earlier discussions of family display and practices (Finch, 2007; Morgan, 2011) to consider how family is practised at a distance by women who have had children removed into care or adoption, considering how they manage and maintain identities as mothers separated from their children, taking account of different permanence, placement and contact arrangements.

Ambiguity, interpretations and imaginations

One of the myriad reasons to take the politics of communal growing projects as an empirical puzzle relates to the breadth of interpretation of the case studies. This vexes any easy conceptualization of the projects as political or not, without asserting that participants are wrong in their understanding of their action. This is to say that irreconcilable attitudes exist between participants’ views of the projects as completely political, as totally apolitical or somewhere fuzzy in between. I discuss this as the political imagination of the sites, in order to capture the interrelation of participants’ understanding of the sites and their broader concept of what politics means. That a space exists between an understanding of communal growing as commoning and productive of an autonomous space in the city; the strategic neutrality at an organizational level; and a multitude of subjective understandings of politics illuminates some of the challenge, and often operatively fuzzy nature, of collective escape. Some of the productive ambiguity within escape as a concept sits precisely in this muddle of political interpretations, in opening up a space that is fluidly understood and governed to a degree by autonomously negotiated cultures and dynamics.

That communal growing can be both deeply political for some and apolitical for others was indeed partly a question of different conceptions of politics itself in the field. Some were drawing on a broader, feminist-inflected sense of everyday life as political, while others purely identified politics with different levels of the state (local council, Scottish Government, UK Government) and the political party structure. The difference in interpretation was spread across both sites and also related to personal trajectories, project involvement and experiences of protest and politics. This recalls Nettle's argument that: ‘As in many social movements, community gardeners’ collectivity is plural, ambivalent and often contradictory (Melucci, 1996) and does not necessarily coalesce around a clearly articulated political philosophy or model of change’ (Nettle, 2014, p 170). The empirical variation in the political interpretation of communal growing confirmed this plurality, but one commonality emerged: the importance of the spaces themselves and their transformative potential. That transformation is at times imagined apolitically is a notable empirical artifact that requires some exploration; though it recalls the sense from the previous chapter that a commons is often more an analytical label than a lay category (de Angelis, 2017).

In the previous chapter, I observed how the notion of platforms has changed throughout recent decades from signifying a computational system (Bogost and Montfort, 2009) or a programmable architecture (Van Dijck et al, 2018) to a more general principle of organization (Kenney and Zysman, 2020; Stark and Pais, 2020) and a business model aimed at cornering markets and reaching monopoly status (Langley and Leyshon, 2017; Srnicek, 2017; Peck and Phillips, 2020). This can be related somewhat to the general transformation of platform companies and market orders during this time span, such as the change in the game industry from a market order dominated by a few console owners to one dominated by large tech companies from outside the gaming industry. While the platform as a computational system or programmable architecture is easily identified as the key principle of power in a market order controlled by console owners, the large tech companies control the market through their storefronts or extended market places (Doyle, 2013) and through their financial power to dominate the entire market field. One significant theme that runs through this course of development is the integration of retail into platform architectures, and the increasing focus on platforms as markets. Thus, another aspect of platforms which is often foregrounded is that they constitute multi-sided markets (Rochet and Tirole, 2003; Evans and Schmalensee, 2016; Van Dijck et al, 2018) that let different groups of customers meet on attractive terms. The aim of this chapter is to interrogate more systematically what this aspect of platforms involves. Are platforms primarily to be understood as multi-sided markets or do they integrate market components to various extents? Are all interactions taking place on platforms to be considered market interactions or is this classification reserved for specific types of interaction on platforms? And does the notion of multi-sided markets sufficiently address complex market constructions of platforms such as Steam?

In the subsequent sections, I will firstly take a closer look at the notion of multi-sided markets in platform studies. As an extension of this, I will describe and discuss how markets should be defined, as this concept is taken more or less for granted across disciplines.

Playing the field

As Oliver and the other staff at the Woodlands Community Development Trust (WCDT) noted, funding the garden itself, as a garden, independent of any kind of agenda, is a deeply unlikely prospect. Like many community organizations, then, WCDT play the game of funding, becoming a legible organization, playing by the rules and applying to carrying out projects that meet the aims of funders while trying to balance this against their own goals. This is a precarious balance, and one made harder by the increased competition and declining funding within the sector (St Clair et al, 2020). This game, however, what we might call the field of social relations in which the WCDT act, shapes in important ways the daily activities of the organization and the broader political possibilities inherent within it. To understand how politics and justice are curtailed within a collective context such as community growing requires a foray into the practicalities of community organizations and funding context. The contrast between the organizations in terms of their position within this field of action is particularly illustrative here. Their contrasting levels of formalization and the struggle over the meadow highlight the complicities of organizations in depoliticizing community growing as a phenomenon, despite the internal dynamics of autonomy and revaluation described in previous chapters. In this, escape is limited by the context from which it is attempting to turn away, but in which it is still embedded.

WCDT place a strong emphasis on finding funders whose aims align as closely as possible with those of the Trust. This is one of the main teachings of a seminar that Oliver, the manager and main fundraiser at the Trust, expounds to a room of charity colleagues in Glasgow in September 2016. The seminar is itself a fundraising exercise for Woodlands, explored for its capacity to bring in extra funds not earmarked for anything else (known as ‘unrestricted funds’). Oliver's learning emerged from years of practice and missteps along the way, including a brief foray into eco-driving lessons in the early years of the garden.

Eucalyptus trees have evolved to survive fire through high flammability. The potential loss of particularly rare trees was a feature of news media stories during the fires. In the Blue Mountains National Park to the west of Sydney, for example, citizens risked their lives to protect a group of nationally significant Wollemi Pines (the so-called ‘dinosaur trees’).

Talking about climate change: conflicting views (two interview transcripts)

Introduction

‘If the goal is to escape the power of the past, whether that is more likely to happen through forgetting or remembering is still quite open’ writes Helmut König (2008, p 33), referring to the question of how to deal with the destructive power of history. According to the German political scientist, the pendulum between the two poles of remembering and forgetting is not primarily about morality but about which option can be expected to yield the most significant return in terms of the stability of the social order (König, 2008, p 39). The question at stake is how history and memory politics can promote integration processes and, thus, ensure social cohesion. If this were easy to answer, many of yesterday's conflicts would be resolved today. Yet, it is precisely this question that is at the heart of this chapter, which aims to provide an impetus for rethinking the (post-)socialist practice of remembrance in Germany.

In recent years, with the emergence of Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident in 2014 and the landslide electoral successes of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany – AfD) in the Eastern German states, Germany's (post-)socialist past has once again become the focus of attention. Finding the reasons for the advance of the right in the East has been driving scholars and researchers ever since, filling many a bookshelf in the 30th anniversary year of the fall of the Wall and German unification (see, for example, Dahn, 2019; Engler, 2019; Kowalczuk, 2019; Mau, 2019; Pollack, 2020). Moreover, the shift to the right in East Germany has put the question of how to deal with the (post-)socialist legacy back on the political agenda. In April 2019, the German government under the then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, set up the Commission ‘30 Jahre Friedliche Revolution und Deutsche Einheit’ (30 Years of Peaceful Revolution and German Unity) operating under the motto, ‘German Unity is a process that is not yet complete’ (Enders et al, 2021). The Commission's report, published in December 2020, contains recommendations for action aimed at increasing public focus on East Germans’ ‘lifetime achievements’ over the past 30 years.

In this chapter, I will describe and discuss the gradual development of the Steam platform's business model from a classic retail or multi-sided market to distinct ways of monetizing user participation that set it apart from other platforms. Gaming platforms such as PlayStation Store, Xbox Market, and Epic Games Store rely primarily on retail, and major media platforms such as YouTube rest on a relatively classic advertisement-based business model, where content is offered to users and advertisement space is sold to advertisers (Caraway, 2011). The primary difference between these platforms and traditional commercial media is the extensive collection of user data that enables a more granulated analysis and classification of user segments (Fourcade and Healy, 2017; Van Dijck et al, 2018) and the scope of commodification (Ørmen and Gregersen, 2022). Steam, on the contrary, denounces advertising as a way of monetizing games on the platform. That is, the platform does not offer a system for integrating ads with content as a way of monetizing users like the one featured by YouTube (see Ørmen and Gregersen, 2022) or the App Store, and the active participation of players on the platform is monetized in ways that differ considerably from the advertisement business model. On the one hand, passive and active player contributions are used to augment and further the effectiveness of the Steam store, that is, to offer ‘value-added services’ (Jöckel et al, 2008) on the platform. On the other hand, the scope of economic transactions is extended to turn players’ economic action into a source of revenue in addition to retail.

In this chapter, I will describe the way Steam's business model has developed throughout the platform's lifetime and argue that the monetization of its social connectedness is based on shaping and reorganizing social interactions as market interactions. That is, by ‘disembedding’ players’ economic action from the player-driven economies and gaming communities in which they originate, and reorganizing them as market interactions, the Steam platform converts the affective value players generate through their gameplay into market value that can be exchanged and put to use elsewhere. In the following, I will firstly provide a little more context of the Steam platform. After this, I will revisit the concept of embeddedness of economic action put forward in Chapter 3 and introduce the concepts of affective value and affective economies.