Ethnographies of the Videogame

Gender, Narrative and Praxis

Helen Thornham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754679783
• eBook ISBN: 9781317140641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the medium of the videogame to explore wider significant sociological issues around new media, interaction, identity, performance, memory and mediation. Addressing questions of how we interpret, mediate and use media texts, particularly in the face of claims about the power of new media to continuously shift the parameters of lived experience, gaming is employed as a 'tool' through which we can understand the gendered and socio-culturally constructed phenomenon of our everyday engagement with media. The book is particularly concerned with issues of agency and power, identifying strong correlations between perceptions of gaming and actual gaming practices, as well as the reinforcement, through gaming, of established (gendered, sexed, and classed) power relationships within households. As such, it reveals the manner in which existing relations re-emerge through engagement with new technology. Offering an empirically grounded understanding of what goes on when we mediate technology and media in our everyday lives Ethnographies of the Videogame is more than a timely intervention into game studies. It provides pertinent and reflexive commentary on the relationship between text and audience, highlighting the relationships of gender and power in gaming practice. As such, it will appeal to scholars interested in media and new media, gender and class, and the sociology of leisure.

Chapter 1 Introductions: Videogames, Gender, Ethnography

DOI: 10.4324/9781315580562-1

The increasing necessity to include videogames within discourses around new media has resulted in the proliferation of videogame theory in the past fifteen years. However, this research has tended to focus on the text itself and more specifically, what is ‘offered’ to gamers (King and Kücklich 2006 : 6). While this has produced an engaging and provoking discipline, mediations with, and of, the games have tended to be conceptualized in relation to what the game does to the gamer (see Perron and Wolf 2009), often including the gamers body (Gregersen and Grodal 2009), or emotional/cognitive engagements (Järvinen 2009 , Genvo 2009), but usually as a site of effect or, at the very least, affect. Despite attempts to include the gamer, then, one of the critiques leveled at videogame theory is that it continues to produce technologically-deterministic accounts of gaming, ignoring, or undermining the fact that ‘the context in which the game is used or played affects and shapes its value’ (Newman 2004 : 38). Such techno-deterministic accounts work to construct gaming along very particular lines – as solitary, as temporally finite, and above all, as a powerfully affective medium. While it is not within the scope of this book to offer an all-inclusive account of videogame theory, these issues will be detailed further below, not least because they situate and contextualize this project. It is important to note at the outset, however, that all these approaches and implications which situate power exclusively with the game ‘itself’ are contested here, and consequently such arguments are represented somewhat critically below. Indeed, by comparison with such approaches, this project finds that gaming is a social activity arcing well beyond the immediate moment of gameplay. Further, gaming is defined, not only, or primarily, by the game, but by the power dynamics in which, and through which, gaming is experienced. My central argument, then, is that gaming needs to be reconceptualized, not in relation to what the game offers the gamers, but as a gendered, corporeal and embodied activity, framed by, and deeply contingent on, techno-social experiences. As the product of four years of interpretive ethnographic investigation into 11 shared gaming households, perhaps these arguments are inevitable. Indeed, a final criticism of much videogame research is that there are too few investigations into gaming over a prolonged period of time. This project speaks to such shortcomings and, it is hoped, not only advances the arena of videogame theory, but, through the focus on new media in domestic contexts, also advances the disciplines of game theory, new media theory, performance theory, feminist new media theory and ethnography. In what follows, I therefore discuss the current landscape of videogame theory insofar as it applies to this project, before suggesting alternative approaches which facilitate, rather than curtail, an understanding of the cultures of gaming as something embedded, embodied and both deeply pervasive and powerful.

What Videogames?

As Wolf and Perron note, much of the earlier work within videogame theory, and their earlier (2003) edited collection, was concerned with ‘justifying the existence of videogame theory in academia’ (2009: 2). Indeed, the early 2000s, saw approaches to the videogame which conceptualized it as a visual and interactive text and theorized comparatively in relation to film, most obviously in terms of representation, and diegetic narrative (for example, Wolf and Perron 2003 , Ryan 2001 , 2004 , Aarseth 1997 , Murray 1997 , King and Krzywinska 2002). Later research from the mid-2000s onwards focused more specifically on the games themselves, arguing for their uniqueness and employing a range of approaches to conceptualize them. Here, a wider and richer discourse was employed (for example, theories of play, actor-network theory, assemblage theory, new media theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, design theory) and games began to emerge as complex sites of negotiated mediation, investigated in their own right as art, media, design, narrative, and mediatory forms (see Bogost 2006, 2007 , King and Kücklich 2006 , Newman 2004 , 2008 , Dovey and Kennedy 2006 , Edery and Mollick 2009 , Juul 2005 , Taylor 2006, Atkins and Krzywinska 2007). While this has produced a diverse and engaged field of videogame studies, the tendency, as suggested above, continues to be towards a more technologically determined account, figuring the dynamics of the game as primary interest and conceptualizing both the gamer and the gamers body, emotions, and/or mind as something ‘done to’ by the game.

The gamers’ body, then, continues to be problematically conceptualized, or quite often (and in keeping with new media theory), simply negated. This is not a new phenomenon and even at early inceptions of videogame theory, we see a continuing concern with the issue of the body as a problematic site of contention, where the possibilities are of uncontrollable explosions in violent or erotic climax. Janet Murray, writing in 1997 , for example, discusses the careful tension between arousal and immersion, suggesting that the level of engagement the gamer experiences has to be, ‘carefully regulated’ if the immersive experience is ‘not to be pornographic and if it is not to lead to frustration or to inappropriate explosion’ (1997: 119). My argument, by comparison, is that the gamer’s body should be included as central to considerations of gaming – not as a problematic anxiety, but rather as both a lived and conceptual intervention in game theory which forces an acknowledgement of the corporeality of gaming experience. Indeed, as Dovey and Kennedy argue, the body ‘is always committed or engaged in gameplay’ (2006: 107). Indeed, as they outline, inclusions of the body into game theory have raised a series of crucial questions around reducing the dialectic between what we could call a technological approach which investigates the affective and immersive experience of gaming, and a phenomenological approach, which focuses on the sense of corporeal connectivity to the virtual world (Dovey and Kennedy 2006 : 106). In some senses, this book also attempts to both reduce and address this dialectic. Such a dialectic is somewhat exacerbated, however, by continued engagements within videogame theory which focus solely on the affective and immersive experiences produced by the game, undermining a more phenomenological understanding of gaming. These affective or immersive experiences of gaming are exacerbated by a number of key assumptions about gaming which also need addressing at the outset.

The first issue I want to discuss is the assumption that PC and videogames can and should be discussed as the same medium. Indeed, within videogame theory, the videogame tends to be bracketed with the PC and other digital games, strengthening and expanding ‘game theory’, but problematically also assuming the rhetoric, language and features of the computer game (Dovey and Kennedy 2006 , King and Krzywinska 2002 , 2006 , Carr et al. 2006 , Poole 2000 , Atkins 2003). The collapsing of the two mediums also allows a stronger focus on the text itself, particularly the programming, and diegetic elements, which has developed videogame theory in new and innovative ways. Moving ‘into’ the virtual world of the game, however, re-evokes the gendered rhetoric of first wave new media theory, which conceptualizes the gamer along colonial, gendered and Cartesian lines. Indeed, with the exception of feminist new media theory, early writings on cyberspace and virtual reality implicitly and problematically evoke gender binaries even as they explicitly ignore them. Further as feminist new media theorists have noted (Braidotti 2002 , Grosz 2001 , Thornham 2007) the gendered binaries evoked often construct the feminine as the corporeal, the terrain, or the matrix through which the male subject travels. The binaries of feminine-object/passive and masculine-subject/active re-emerge as the body becomes negated, undermined or discarded in favour of a disembodied identity:

Cyberspace is opening up, and the rush to claim and settle it is on. We are entering an era of electronically extended bodies living at the intersecting points of the physical and virtual worlds, of occupation and interaction through telepresence as well as through physical presence. (Mitchell 1995 : 167)

Picture yourself a couple of decades hence, dressing for a hot night in the virtual village. Before you climb into a suitably padded chamber and put on your 3D glasses, you slip into a lightweight … bodysuit, something like a body stocking, but with the kind of intimate snugness of a condom. (Rheingold 1991: 346)

While contemporary videogame theory does not take the possibilities of the game to such extremes, the concept of the single user, exploring the world of the game nevertheless persists. Similarly when we consider the metaphors of ‘coupling’ and ‘mapping’ employed in the extract below, as well as the sense of a body enhanced and affected by the technology, there are clear similarities between early and contemporary accounts of virtual reality:

When coupled to a properly programmed game system, however, [the interfaces] also provide a mapping functionality that allows us to perform a wide range of actions in relation to that game system and its virtual environment. Importantly this means that the combination of controller and gamer system provides both physical affordances and intentional affordances, the latter often designed to yield a sense of augmented embodiment. (Gregersen and Grodal 2009 : 69)

As feminist new media theorists remind us, however, these are explicitly male fantasies of virtual reality, not only because of the kind of fantasies outlined, but also because of the specific metaphors used to explain the experience. They describe the fantasies as penetrative sex without ‘real’ consequences (see Grosz 2001 : 42–5), and the metaphors of virtual reality ‘opening up’ and ready to be ‘mapped’, carry distinct sexual innuendoes of a feminized matrix ready to be penetrated. These are, as Sue Thornham notes, promises of disembodiment and fantasies of re-embodiment, but such re-embodiments are through ‘autogenesis’ where the ‘imagined body remains male’ (2007: 135). Indeed, as Dovey and Kennedy have argued:

These strands in what we have identified as a ‘dominant technicity’ are deeply gendered, offering a particular masculine identity a valuable cultural space in which to create imaginary, controlled worlds. (Dovey and Kennedy 2006 : 76)

In relation to the videogame, it is the power of the penetrative and autogenic fantasies of possibility, which translates so readily across. Although videogames evidently do not map completely, or even unproblematically, onto the writings around digital technology and cyberspace, it is evident that the fantasies offered, and the metaphors of penetration and domination, persist across the technologies. Such fantasies and metaphors are little helped by a continued focus on the immersive qualities of the videogame, which exacerbates the concept of entering into the world of the game in order to colonize, dominate, and explore it. Thornham’s suggestion that, ‘we need … to re-anchor [the body] in the material and the embodied’ (Thornham 2007 : 135) becomes problematic when PCs and videogames are collapsed together, which along with fantasies and rhetoric of immersion, also produce further assumptions worth exploring here.

Indeed, as Newman argues (2008 : 23), the merging of the PC and videogame assumes a one-to-one and solitary relationship with the technology as the norm. The focus on the one-to-one relationship with the game not only oversimplifies the discourses and cultures of gaming, it also undermines the contexts of gaming, and facilitates a focus once again on the text. The second consequence of such bracketing, as suggested, is the assumption of a solo gamer. For PC gaming, such assumptions may seem obvious when we think of the dynamics of engagement which physically facilitates a lone gamer sat at their desk facing a PC. Even here, as Newman has argued (2008 : 23–45), such assumptions negate the online social aspects of gaming as well as the discourses, dialogues and cultures of online games. For videogames, however, the bracketing together of PC and videogames and the assumption of the solo gamer is much more detrimental to our understanding of these games and consoles. It undermines the context, design, set-up and ethos of the console, which is mediated through the television set, and experienced as both solo and social. The videogame, as both a virtual reality and a domestic technology, sits uneasily within discourses of the PC and discourses of domestic technologies. It is neither television, nor an arcade game, nor a PC, but is mediated through the television set, and offers some level of virtual reality experience. Here, my argument in keeping with James Newman , is that gameplay has to be understood as ‘an activity that takes place within a social setting’ (Newman 2008 : 24) not only because this is how it is understood by gamers, but also because of the design of the technology, which mediates it through a socially situated and embedded television set. Indeed, as I argue, gaming is carefully constructed and monitored as a social activity for the gamers of this project, who see solo gaming as excessive, nerdy, and abnormal. For the gamers of this project, then, the stereotype of the lone gamer as isolated, unbalanced, and socially inept is a very real production and serves, as I argue, to create normative gaming practice as insistently social.

Bracketing PC and videogames together also, as suggested, affects how we conceptualize gaming per se. Gaming is frequently conceptualized as an activity occurring within a specific temporal framework – one where the gamer physically engages with the game being played. There is little room, within such a conception, for an account of gaming which arcs beyond the immediate moment of gameplay. Yet for the gamers of this project, games signify well beyond the immediate moment of gameplay. Not only are games returned to, repeated frequently, played in a variety of contexts, and rarely abandoned after ‘completing’ a game: they also re-emerge in the conversations, memories, reflections and praxis of gaming. Many of the gamers of this project play the same, or similar games, with one another over the four years of research, either slowly progressing every time they game together, or repeating key elements or moments in the game. Platform games, once ‘completed’ are returned to, side chapters are re-investigated, and gamers concentrate on other issues, such as building up the strengt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introductions: Videogames, Gender, Ethnography
• 2 Constructing a Gendered Gaming Identity
• 3 Articulating Pleasure: Gender, Technology and Power
• 4 The Practices of Gameplay
• 5 Bodies and Action
• 6 Pleasure and the Imagined Gamer
• 7 Conclusions: Towards a Theory of Domestic Videogaming
• Appendix 1: Index and Statistics of Houses and Household Members
• Appendix 2: Index of Interviews
• Bibliography
• Index