Transactional Intimacy in Delta Force: Psychological Effects of Paid Gaming Companionship on Players and Service Providers
Abstract
Paid gaming companionship services for high-risk online shooters have started to provide technical support and emotional support in the form of paid contact. Delta Force is a tactical extraction game; if it fails, one loses all of one's in-game items forever, so there has been a steady increase in both the demand for gameplay support and emotional comfort among players in this game. Most research on emotional labour in service workers has focused on companions; the psychological experience of paying players has not been studied much.To address this gap, this study adopts an exploratory mixed-methods design, combining semi-structured interviews with 18 companions, qualitative analysis of 505 Weibo posts, and an exploratory survey of 50 players with purchasing experience., it can be concluded that paid companionship has increased the satisfaction and sense of achievement of players, but it has also led to a dependence on standardised emotional support and changed players' expectations for non-transactional social relationships. Companions are tired emotionally and feel alienated from themselves because of the combined pressure of high-demand performance and emotional labour. Therefore, this study concludes that the main reason for the difference is power asymmetry; players consider emotional support a paid service, while companions feel it is an expensive form of labour. According to Zelizer's theory of the "purchase of intimacy" and Hochschild's concept of emotional labour, this paper finds that transactional intimacy results in bidirectional cognitive alienation and changes the boundaries of relationships in the digital gig economy.
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