Ethnographies of the Videogame

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Ethnographies of the Videogame Gender, Narrative and Praxis

Helen Thornham

Ethnographies of the Videogame

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Ethnographies of the Videogame Gender, Narrative and Praxis

Helen Thornham City University London, UK

© Helen Thornham 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Helen Thornham has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Union Road Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Thornham, Helen. Ethnographies of the videogame : gender, narrative and praxis. 1. Video games--Social aspects. 2. Video gamers-Psychology. 3. Video gamers--Sex differences. I. Title 306.4'87-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thornham, Helen. Ethnographies of the videogame : gender, narrative and praxis / by Helen Thornham. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7978-3 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-9940-8 (ebook) 1. Video recording in ethnology. 2. Video games. I. Title. GN347.T5 2011 306.4'87--dc22 2011013274 ISBN 9780754679783 (hbk) ISBN 9780754699408 (ebk)

Contents List of Figures    Acknowledgements   

vii ix

1

Introductions: Videogames, Gender, Ethnography  

1

2

Constructing a Gendered Gaming Identity  

19

3

Articulating Pleasure: Gender, Technology and Power  

47

4

The Practices of Gameplay  

77

5

Bodies and Action  

101

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Pleasure and the Imagined Gamer  

125

7

Conclusions: Towards a Theory of Domestic Videogaming  

149

Appendix 1: Index and Statistics of Houses and Household Members    161 183 Appendix 2: Index of Interviews    189 Bibliography    205 Index   

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List of Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 A.1 A.2 A.3 A.4 A.5 A.6 A.7

Chart of housemates movements from Brighton to Brighton 2 and London 1   Chart of the household in Leeds as the housemates changed   Chart of housemates movements from Manchester 1    Chart of households that did not change during the research   Brighton 1: Gaming hours per week   Brighton 2: Gaming hours per week   Leeds 1 and 2: Gaming hours per week   Brighton 3: Gaming hours per week   Belfast 1: Gaming hours per week   Manchester 1: Gaming per hours per week   London 1: Gaming hours per week  

12 12 13 13 163 165 169 171 175 177 181

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank colleagues at City University London for the sabbatical leave and teaching support, without which the book would not have been possible. Special thanks to Sarah Edge, Ned Rossiter, and Máire Messenger-Davies for keeping me on track at the University of Ulster, where the research for this book began. Thanks also to Caroline Bassett for her support and encouragement in the value of this research, and to my gaming households who contributed so willingly and enthusiastically to all the weird requests during the four years of the project. Thanks, too, go to Sue Thornham for the tea-time debates, encouragement, and the use of her personal library, and, of course, for setting the standards. Finally, thank you Dunk, for all the support and the space, and for pretending to listen, even when you had far better things to do. 

Helen Thornham

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Chapter 1

Introductions: Videogames, Gender, Ethnography 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 Krzywinska 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

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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 mid2000s 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, actornetwork 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 Krzywinska 2006, Newman 2004, 2008, Dovey and Kennedy 2006, Edery and Mollick 2009, Juul 2005, Taylor 2006, Atkins and Kzywinska 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

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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

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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

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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 strengths and capacities of the avatars rather than moving through the game. Further, games are evoked even when they are not being immediately played, in discourse, memories and reflections, and in the continual comparison with the current game being played. Gamers playing Pro Evolution/ISS 5(2005), for example, continually compare it, not only to previous versions (2004, 2003), but also to FIFA (2002), evoking the earlier and competitor games even when playing the former. Similarly, gamers who play GTA: San Andreas (2004), continually compare it to the earlier Vice City (2002). This suggests that the temporal restrictions of conceptualizing gaming as a solitary and immediate activity negate not only the longevity of such games, but also their meaning, for the gamers.

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The final implication relates to videogame effects, and my argument is that claims of videogame effects, which figure the game and the technology as extremely powerful, are exacerbated by the assumptions outlined above. Indeed, the bracketing of PC and videogames, the temporal aspects of gameplay, and the assumption of the solo gamer exacerbate this profoundly detrimental and destructive approach to gaming not least because they oversimplify gaming and locate power and influence with the game itself. Indeed, the one to one relationship, which is established as the norm through the bracketing of PC and videogames, places the game as the powerful component in an immersive and engaging relationship. The rhetoric of immersion, escapism and movement into the virtual world exacerbate this, as the body and mind become something done to by the game. Contemporary engagements with the design and diegetics of the game also add to such conceptualizations simply because they focus attention on the game itself to the detriment of the gamer and the context or the cultures of gaming. And as Newman has commented, such assumptions are not only the preserve of videogame theory; they continually make an appearance in the popular press: The idea of the isolated, socially inept player is so pervasive and so inexorably bound up in the vision of the obsessive, unbalanced, dangerous gamer, that it is often seamlessly invoked in the discussion and reportings of acts of violence and aggression such as the school shootings in Columbine and Paducah. (2008: 5)

It is not only the ‘affect’ side of gaming, which needs careful consideration then. This second approach (supported by socio-psychological work in this area) leaps directly from physical/cognitive affect to social effect in an, often sensationalizing, account of gaming. One of the most renowned examples of this approach can be seen in the ongoing work of Craig Anderson et al., culminating in the cowritten collection of 2007, which draws from the empirical research of three complimentary research projects to argue that ‘children who consume violent media incorporate aggressive concepts and behaviors into their typical behavioral repertoire, and thus become more aggressive over time’ (2007: 9). Indeed, their earlier project (Anderson and Dill 2000) linked the Columbine Massacre to the videogame ‘Doom’, and suggested that playing violent videogames produces short and long term violent tendencies in gamers. This report was cited after its publication in a number of press releases, including The Guardian (26 April, 2004) and resulted in Stephen Poole’s ironic response in the same paper that: If you love blowing the heads off realistically animated digital people, or even, as in the fabulously violent new Soldier of Fortune, keeping track of kneecappings versus headshots and groin wounds, you’re going to grow up into an extremely ill-balanced individual. Some time, you’ll probably get hold of a real gun and shoot all your friends. (Poole: 2004)

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The familiar criticisms leveled at such socio-psychological and effects work more widely (see Barker and Petley 1997, Barker 1984, Newman 2004, 2008, Buckingham and Willett 2006, Buckingham 2007, Buckingham 2008), are also applicable here. Indeed, the research undertaken by Anderson et al., and detailed in the 2007 book, describes laboratory tests which ask participants to engage in temporally specific PC/laptop gaming, before correlating such gaming with survey responses indicating wider social, cultural and game preferences. The link created between wider media cultures and the immediate moment of gameplay are tenuous at best, and rely on interpreting the actions of the gamer as evidence of violence tendencies. Participants are assumed to have little conception of the differences between fantasy and ‘reality’ – their actions are taken as evidence, rather than play, for example – and they are rarely afforded the scope to interpret, negotiate or discuss the game in ways which would take into account their conception of the causal affects of gaming. Wider surveys of generational trends in media use are correlated with findings of gaming practice to claim the trends have a causal effect. In short, this work fails significantly in, ‘considering the contexts and practices that characterize media use and the interpretive practices … through which meaning is generated’ (Newman 2004: 62). There is little correlation between what, how and when people game and the games themselves, or the settings in which they are played. Similarly, there is a completely unfounded link between the games themselves and events occurring post-gaming which are based on laboratory studies of gaming and are therefore similarly divorced from the actual dynamics of gaming as a domestic leisure activity. As Edery and Mollick have noted somewhat ironically, if we were to base our analysis on the assumptions within such work, ‘games can be linked to just about anything – including acne, adolescent flirting, and the rising cost of gasoline’ (2009: 27). Finally, these accounts prioritize the medium over the gamer, once again conforming to technological determinism and failing to adequately account for what occurs prior to, during, and after gameplay. Interpretative or negotiated positionalities are ignored in favour of a hierarchical system of cause and effect (or affect). Clearly this is not an adequate approach to a medium where social gaming is consistently discursively prioritized by gamers, when gamers see the technology as a social support, and when their understanding of the ‘social’ includes the technological as always-already implicit to it. Broadly speaking, then, we can see that while this body of research (partly represented here) speaks to a diverse and emerging field, it rarely addresses what we could call the cultures and contexts of gaming. Indeed, this is noted by many of the theorists above, who suggest that the field of videogame research is far from complete (Dovey and Kennedy 2006, Newman 2008, Perron and Wolf 2009) In some respects the lopsided nature of the field reflects the continued need to justify games research, and the increasing trend towards the dynamics and design of the game itself (see, for example, Perron and Wolf 2009) could be seen as a direct consequence of attempts to engage with what makes gaming both unique and worthy of study. Further, the account of videogame theory represented here has not incorporated the very real attempts to engage in empirical research, which has

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usually focused on the inclusion of game designers, and some level of engagement with gamers (Cassell and Jenkins 1998, Kafai, Heeter, Denner and Sun 2008, Kerr 2006, Kerr, Kücklich and Brereton 2006, Dovey and Kennedy 2006, Rutter and Bryce 2006). Such research has tended to focus on gaming and gender, asking the serious question about the exclusionary gendering of gaming. While such issues are also crucial for this project, and equally vital for the discipline, gender needs to be understood as something more than ‘simply’ a shaping factor, not least because it is embedded and enmeshed in wider power structures which are negotiated and performed. Indeed, as Cassell and Jenkins (1998: 19) and Carr et al. (2006: 171–2) both suggest, female gamers tend to respond with ‘what they are supposed to say’ (Cassell and Jenkins 1998: 19) when they are interviewed, which suggests wider issues around the social power dynamics framing and affecting identity positions from which gamers speak. Indeed, research that has focused on the socio-cultural dynamics of gaming (Schott and Horrell 2000, Crawford and Gosling 2005, Lin 2008) has found that gendered power relations play an important, if not crucial part, in framing gameplay itself, articulations of it, and the potential for it. Indeed, longer-term investigations like the one undertaken for this project, or Valerie Walkerdine’s recent research into children and videogames (2006, 2007) demonstrates that gender is a nuanced and embedded concept in which, and through which, gamers are complexly invested. This project, then, speaks directly to these issues, addressing conversations about gaming, the practices of gaming, and reflections on gaming. The intention is to argue for a wider conception of both gaming itself, and the cultures of gaming, well beyond the immediate moment of gameplay. More specifically, my argument is that games are embedded in cultures of domestic technologies and the power dynamics of households, and that to approach gaming as a text in and of itself underplays the sedimented and nuanced meanings of games as signifiers of gender, identity, and power. Games are not played or experienced in a vacuum, but are contingent upon other relations, and other gaming experiences, which frame and produce the practice and meaning of gaming. Considering these arguments, the book focuses on the narratives gamers offer about gaming, actual gameplay, and post-gaming reflections over four years, and argues for an ontological narrative approach to the study of the videogame. It therefore serves as an intervention into videogame theory methodologically and conceptually, not least because it focuses attention on the gamers, rather than the game or technology. Indeed, as Perron and Wolf note, the videogame is, ‘a complex object of study, and one that involves a performance’ (2009: 11). Considering this, it is a cultural studies legacy, feminist new media theory, and new media theory more widely that are primarily called on to think through the performances (discursive, embodied, reflexive) of gaming. Indeed, the project finds close methodological alliances with Valerie Walkerdine’s recent research on children and gaming (2006, 2007), as well as a longer history of feminist ethnography (Ang 1989, 1991, 1996, Walkerdine 1997, Skeggs 1997, Hermes 1995, Gray 1992, Morley 1992, 2000). Similarly, it draws on a range of feminist and material new media theory to think through the practices and cultures

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of gameplay (for example, Grosz 2001, Hansen 2006, Bassett 2007, S. Thornham 2007). My central argument is that we need to incorporate an understanding of the lived relations of gaming into both the field of videogame theory, and this is possible through interpretive ethnography and an ontological narrative lens (discussed in the following chapter). Asking gamers what they think about gaming, recording them game, and asking them to reflect on those recordings of gameplay, methodologically produces the consequent assertions of the book. However, rather than present the households as definite and finite indicators of the meaning and use of the videogame in their home, I use them primarily as a spring board for further theoretical discussions. This is for a number of reasons. The first is that the aim of this research is to open up ways of talking about the videogame beyond how it has been discussed within videogame theory to date. If I used the conversations with the gamers as final authoritative voices, it would have closed down certain avenues, which need to be developed. The second is because after four years of research, it became clear that the politics of each household played a major role in contributing to gaming subjectivities. During the research, the make-up of each house changed, as did the politics, so that opinions and performances shifted. This meant that a further theorization of the relationship between technology, the social and subjectivity needed to be developed which would not have been possible if I had concentrated overly on the content of each conversation. Third, there is an issue around the re-presentation of material. Although it is interpretative ethnography1 I employ as a key methodological practice, I am aware that in the writing up of practice, of movements of individuals, of conversations, of emotional states, and of fluctuations in pleasure, the movements can become fixed. Focusing on the meanings of gaming and gameplay for the participant gamers’ in this project produces some striking outcomes, not only for what is suggested about normative gaming habits, but because gamers forcibly underline that videogames are not novel as a technology: they have always been part of gamers’ lives, memories and social experiences. Better Approaches? The concept of ‘interpretative ethnography’ is my methodological and analytic tool, then, and is defined by Ien Ang when she argues that ethnography is primarily about a politics of interpretation: It is not the search for (objective, scientific) knowledge in which the [ethnographic] research is engaged, but the construction of interpretations, of certain ways of understanding the world, always historically located, subjective, and relative … it is in the dialectic between the empirical and the theoretical, between 1  As defined by Ien Ang (1989: 104–5).

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experience and explanation, that forms of knowledge, that is interpretations, are constructed. Here then the thoroughly political nature of any research manifests itself. What is at stake is a politics of interpretation. (1989: 105)

It is an interpretative method I employ, then, premised on a number of subjective and relative factors such as feminist politics, shifts in writings about the videogame during the research, interests in performative (gender) roles, the gaming body, reflexive ethnography and the dialogue with each house during the research. It is not textual analysis, which suggests the creation of the subjects involved in the research as objects of study to be ‘read’. Instead, it is interpretative, and therefore generative and relational. It follows my own theoretical, emotional and analytical engagement with each housemate and household. The result is an engagement with theories of technology, subjectivity and the social, which, as Ang suggests, is forged through the dialect of experience and explanation. The discourse of feminist ethnographic research and the discourse of interpretative ethnography more generally, also highlight the longstanding engagement with domestic technology to which this project also speaks. For the interpretative ethnography of the 1980s and 1990s, one of the primary motivations was to investigate the impact of technology on the home and the relations between subjectivity and technology (see Silverstone and Hirsch 1992, Ang 1989, 1991, Morley 1980, 1986, 1989, Gray 1992). The premise of this research, it could be argued, was that technology would somehow alter the domestic sphere. However, what emerges from it was a strong ‘uses and gratifications’ theory, which discussed how the technology was mobilized in and through domestic relations. Such research found that the domestic was not static or passive until the arrival of the technology, but was caught up in relations and subjectivities, which utilized and mobilized the technology before, during and after its arrival. Similarly the technology did not straight-forwardly and transparently impact onto the domestic, but was always already embedded in, contingent on, and produced through the power relations of each household. In theses senses, there are strong correlations between this project and earlier investigations into domestic technologies. The Households The 11 households,2 which form the core of the interviews, reflections, and the recordings of gameplay, incorporate adult gamers between the ages of 21–35 living in shared households across the UK. I initially started with four households: one in Leeds, one in Brighton, one in Manchester, and one in Durham. These were demographically chosen because I wanted each housemate to be financially autonomous, and the power dynamics within each house to be negotiated along social rather than familial lines. The power dynamics of a family home, for 2  See Appendix 1 for statistics on each household.

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example, where it is usually a parent who purchases a PC for specific (perhaps ‘educational’) reasons, and decides the location of the PC, also regulates gameplay in terms of time, place and genre choices (see Facer et al. 2003, Livingstone 2002, 2009, Buckingham 2007, 2008). Such a home therefore also introduces quite different parameters in terms of the relations of gaming. I wanted households that were already established, where the places of gameplay were negotiated ones but where the power dynamics were established along social rather than financial, age-related or familial factors. This was initially to ‘simplify’ the power relations, which could frame gaming within each household. The age bracket (adult gamers between the ages of 21 and 35), is also an under-researched one for gaming, where focus has tended to be on young people or children and new media (see Newman 2004: 62). In terms of the initial decision to focus on this age group, statistics are also on my side. According to a 2005 survey conducted by the BBC, the average age of gamer in the UK is 28, and 51 per cent of gamers are in the 35–50 age group.3 Indeed, as Perron and Wolf have suggested more recently, ‘the average game player is now 33 years old and has been playing games for 12 years’ (2009: 2). Although these statistics clearly do not indicate type of console, frequency of play or other contingent factors, they nevertheless do indicate the need for research into this group. Although all the houses had videogames as prerequisites, by which I mean technology mediated through the television set, they also often also had computers, laptops, handheld devices and sometimes other videogame consoles in their rooms. The decisions to play in the living room, and more importantly, the claim that it was social gaming that was pleasurable, occurred despite the material possibilities of gaming alone. In other words, these gamers had the opportunity to game alone in their bedrooms but they claimed this was not an activity they undertook or enjoyed. To take the example of the all-male house in Leeds, three of the four housemates owned videogame consoles: all three consoles sat under the television screen in the living room. When Bob gamed alone in his room, he took his Xbox upstairs and connected it to the TV in his room. This act alone meant solo gaming in his room was more of an effort (in terms of time, the physical act of taking it upstairs, telling his housemates why he did not want to game downstairs), and unsurprisingly, this activity did not happen as frequently as social gameplay for Bob. Indeed, Bob is quoted in this book as claiming never to game alone, even though he was observed engaging in solo gaming. The point is that solo gaming not only had a material dimension to be negotiated; there were also social and cultural dimensions (and I argue that solo gaming means something quite specific for the gamers in the all-male household) which made solo gaming difficult. Gaming alone on the PC was theoretically easier than gaming alone on the videogame console because all four housemates had either laptops or PCs in their rooms. Certainly solo PC gaming was observed along with videogaming in 3  According to the BBC survey of 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ ups/05/ entertainment_ gaming_in_the_uk/html/4.stm (accessed: 25 June 2007).

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BRIGHTON 1 11.2004 – 07.2006 HOUSEMATES: Simon, Sara, Steve, Ben

LONDON 1

BRIGHTON 2

07.2006 – 09.2008

07.2004 – 09.2008

HOUSEMATES:

HOUSEMATES:

Sara, Chloe, Clare

Joe, Simon, Lorna

Figure 1.1

Chart of housemates movements from Brighton to Brighton 2 and London 1 ORIGINAL LEEDS HOUSEHOLD 01.2004 – 02.2005 HOUSEMATES: Nathan, Al, Duncan, Heung, Ben, Lena

LEEDS 1

LEEDS 2

02.2005 – 09.2005

09.2005 – 09.2008

HOUSEMATES:

HOUSEMATES:

Duncan, Al, Bob, Ben

Duncan, Al, Bob, Ricky

Figure 1.2

Chart of the household in Leeds as the housemates changed

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MANCHESTER 1 12. 2003 – 09. 2004 HOUSEMATES: Rach, John, Simon, Hannah

LEEDS 3 09.2004 – 09.2008 HOUSEMATES: Rob, Rach

Figure 1.3

Chart of housemates movements from Manchester 1

BRIGHTON 3

DURHAM 1

BELFAST 1

04. 2005 – 09.2008

12.2005 – 12.2006

02.2006 – 09. 2007

HOUSEMATES:

HOUSEMATES:

HOUSEMATES:

Beth, Michael, Celia

Grant, Cam (Duncan from Leeds as Interviewer)

Jess, Sarah, Connor

Figure 1.4

Chart of households that did not change during the research

the four years I visited this house, but again the claims were usually made that solo gaming on the PC was unpopular. As suggested above, the fact that videogames are mediated through the television set is a crucial factor often overlooked by videogame theorists, who tend to bracket video and computer games together. I am not claiming, however, that gaming is the sole preserve of the television screen, or that gamers only play videogames. I am suggesting that gaming in the living room is conducive to certain relations with the screen, with each other, and with the location, which more readily align videogames with research on the television than with the PC. I am also suggesting quite simply that where, when, and how games are played matters. Gaming alters the dynamics of the living room space, producing competitive gaming atmospheres for example, and it continues to negotiate power relations within each household. As the movements of the individuals between houses were quite extensive (and was not presumed at the start of the research) I became interested in the

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changes the households underwent as they moved and as the power politics in each house changed. Consequently, I followed key household members as they moved households and I continued to visit, record, and interview the all-male house in Leeds through their changes, firstly as Heung and Lena moved out (making it an ‘all-male’ house) then as Bob replaced Nathan and Ricky replaced Ben. The most noticeable changes have been recorded in relation to Sara’s retrospective comments about her time in Brighton, and the variations of Simon’s performances of masculinity and authoritative, competent gamer. Some of the households, such as the Belfast household and the Manchester household (in 2003) were only visited once. This was due to a combination of changes in households and logistical difficulties in arranging further visits. Despite only a single visit, these visits lasted a number of days and although I was not able to return to record them game, they do nevertheless offer interesting insights into preconditions to play and memories of gaming. Many of the interviews quoted here include friends who were visiting at the time I was present. I quote Ricky in the all-male house (interview 2.1), even though he was not a housemate at the time, and Joe and Lorna when they were visiting Simon, Sara, Steve and Ben in Brighton (interview 1.3).4 This can cause some confusion in terms of when these interviews took place in the ‘greater scheme’ of the project. Consequently an index of interviews can also be found in the appendices at the end of the book. One of the aims of frequent and prolonged visits was to make my presence less intrusive in terms of changing performances and gameplay. Finally, although there is an evident frequency in terms of key people I quote (Sara, Simon, Bob, Lorna, Beth, Duncan), it should be remembered that within each visit were a number of interviews and recordings. I quote the households at length throughout the book to give a greater ‘flavour’ of the households and their conversations. It also indicates the ‘routinized, repetitive, banal[ity]’ (Meagan Morris 1990: 16) of social communication in the quotidian. Finally, they are quoted like this in order to give the households more presence in an otherwise theoretical book, and in order to demonstrate that much more is going on than can be accommodated here. The length and frequency of the interviews and recordings have also been indicated in the appendices at the end, along with details of who was present for each recording. They are referenced according to visit, rather than according to the interview because it is easier to map their relationship changes from visit to visit rather than from interview to interview. The ‘methodologies’ of the research shifted as the project developed, both in order to reflect my own interests and as a result of what gamers were interested in and their narratives of gaming. Consequently, the changes in terms of direction and methodology were negotiated ones. I insisted, for example, on recording gameplay in the latter two years of research, having found nuances between what gamers ‘admitted’ about their abilities and interests and what they actually ‘did’ upon 4  See Appendix 1 for information regarding household members and Appendix 2 for interview details.

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observation. This was most apparent with the female gamers, who claimed lack of knowledge and competency but then, when watched, gamed fluidly, progressed through gaming levels and clearly enjoyed what they were doing as well. Female gamers also claimed they gamed less frequently than their male counterparts, but they did not take into account when they made this claim the hours they spent on the sofa in the living room shouting instructions and directing gameplay. I asked gamers to watch themselves game because I became interested in these discrepancies and how they would narrate them. I also became interested in the corporeal elements of gaming, and the relationship between the body, technology and the social. This was primarily as a result of watching gaming scenarios where gamers would gesture, shout and physically jump while gaming, yet in other instances remain perfectly still with only their thumbs and fingers moving. I was interested not only in ways to theorize this relationship, but also in what the gamers would make of their own gaming bodies. The cross-media comparisons gamers made tended to be with television rather than the PC, and I was also interested to see if these comments continued to be iterated once they watched themselves as gaming ‘audiences’. There was another incentive here as well: gamers insisted that it was always the social, which was important to gaming scenarios – that the game was a social support rather than an immersive medium. But my observations (and latterly the recordings) highlighted how, during gaming, gamers often ignored the rest of the room, concentrating instead on the game. Questions often went unanswered unless they related to what was directly going on in the game. Yet when I asked gamers about their memories of gaming scenarios, they remembered a socially inclusive space, where interaction and conversation were with friends and housemates and immersion in the game was infrequent (often it was not ‘remembered’ at all). This raised questions about changing conceptions of the social, because gamers felt they were socializing even if they were observed and recorded as ‘immersed’ in the game. This therefore returned us to questions of corporeality and feelings of familiarity and togetherness. My initial conception of the social as a communicative (verbally, physically) space clearly did not mesh with gamers’ conceptions of the social which was understood more in relation to ‘being there’. This is why I return to theories of technology, corporeality and place in order to ‘think through’ both my initial misconception and what is actually going on in these instances. Showing gamers the recordings of themselves gaming added a further dimension because gamers responded (despite lapses in some cases of up to three months since the initial recording) by narrating the game. All they could see on screen, however, were frontal shots of themselves gaming. Yet they ‘read’ their bodies in relation to the game, responding to the recordings by continuing to narrate the game. This raised issues about screen relations, questions of interpretation and the durability of the game beyond the playing of it. It also raise crucial issues around pleasure, not only in relation to the game, but in relation to gamers’ desire to narrate (the game). These replays of gameplay often resulted in confusion. Gamers were uncomfortable with seeing themselves on screen, and could not relate their memories of the gaming

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scenario (as sociable, as communicative) with what they saw on screen. Again, this suggested that their sensory and emotive memories of the gaming scenario, which were more corporeally based, were not recognizable visually on screen. The power of the screen was called into question both in relation to gaming scenarios, and in relation to the replays. Rather than question the visual, gamers started to doubt their memories of gaming in the face of visual ‘evidence’ and this highlighted some wider issues about the position and prioritization of the visual in our culture. What started as an interpretative ethnographic investigation into gamers and their habits therefore became a wider investigation not only of what happens when technology is ‘domesticated’ but also of the relations between technology, place, and the body. I locate these relations around ontological narrative and around issues of performance because it became increasingly apparent that the way the gamers orally narrated the game, the ways it could be said that their bodies narrated the game, and the way the practice of gaming narrated the game (and vice-versa) were all negotiations with, and performances of, wider (social) power dynamics. It was not just the power dynamics of each household, and who imagined whom in relation to (being perceived as having) the most authority within each household; it was also the power dynamics of social performance, the gendered relations, and the implications of and for knowledge, which were being performed and negotiated. It should be remembered throughout this book, that narrative and performance are both active negotiations. They have a historicity and are sedimented into more durable power relations, but they are also temporally, spatially and contextually located in that moment of performance. This means that when taken as a whole the conversations, interviews and recordings of gameplay indicate shifts in these relations over time, but they also reflect those relations as they were being negotiated at the time of performance. This is an important point because one of the aims of the project was to theorize praxis into the relations of technology, corporeality, and place: gamers’ narratives are not just ‘stories’ of gaming experiences and memories: they are enacted. This Book As suggested, this project is an attempt to explore the cultures of gaming for adult gamers. It is not meant as a finite or complete account of gaming. Instead, the book is intended as an intervention into the existing technologically-determined and celebrated accounts of gaming. As suggested, focusing on the meanings of gaming and gameplay for the participant gamers in this project produces some striking outcomes, and suggests we fundamentally need to rethink how we conceptualize not only the technology, but also the social. Chapter 2 investigates the discourses and cultures of gaming, focusing on the initial rationales and justifications gamers offered for gaming. The aim of the chapter is to investigate not only the cultures of gaming per se, but also to argue that videogames have a long and complex history within the gamers lives. Further, not

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only are videogames deeply embedded in gamers memories and quotidian lives, they are also used by the gamers in very particular ways. Through the memories of past gaming experiences, gamers construct a contemporary identity as a particular kind of gamer, which in turn frames and affects the dynamics of the households. Some gamers claim agency, knowledge, power and autonomy over the game, offering rational, logical explanations for owning consoles, and constructing the game as a supportive tool, to be utilized and owned by themselves. In many ways, such gamers are constructing themselves within the traditional boundaries of Cartesian masculinity, ‘as both hero and in control, a rational, autonomous cogito … a central fantasy of knowledge, capital, power’ (Walkerdine 2007: 145). Other gamers are affected by the technology, offering little agency or control, suggesting they are the subjects of other powerful influences (siblings, housemates). This in turn, constructs them as less powerful within the house, appeasing other housemates and valuing the technology in a different way. Taken together, I argue that such discourses and memories of gaming offer insight into the meanings and conceptions of gaming, and therefore enable us to understand the lived and gendered cultures of gaming. Chapter 3 similarly focuses on the discourses of gaming, continuing the themes from the previous chapter and developing them specifically in relation to gender and the problematic articulation of pleasure. Gaming is articulated in very different ways by the gamers. The male gamers, for example, variously appropriate the techno-rhetoric of ‘gameplay’ and ‘playability’ to claim cultural capital, positioning themselves well within a wider culture of videogames. The primary claim for the female gamers, however, is a position of exclusion from such cultures, often claiming that gaming is ‘for the boys’ and not for them. While this is not to suggest the female gamers game any less than the male gamers, it becomes increasingly clear that certain gendered positionalities are being claimed in relation to the game which has consequences for ‘actual’ gameplay. Such claims are relational, and depend to a large extent on, to use Judith Butler’s phrase ‘who is imagining whom’ (2004b: 10). In this sense, gendered articulations are enmeshed in the lived and imagined power dynamics of each household – the social and the symbolic of interaction. This chapter therefore not only frames engagements with the technology, it also helps us understand how gaming produces and reflects gender in potentially highly problematic ways. Moving from articulations and discourses of gaming, to gaming practice, Chapter 4 is premised on the recordings of gameplay filmed during the research project. The recordings demonstrate that far from offering an immersive experience where real world anxieties can be forgotten, gaming continues to be lived, negotiated and embodied in specific contexts. Social gaming, as it is primarily experienced by the gamers of this project, suggests that gaming needs to be reconceptualized as a performed, lived and embodied experience – one which has a long history of relational significance for the gamers. When gaming, gamers reflect, negotiate and produced gendered power relations, performing in ways that embed gaming technology into the social power dynamics of the household. This

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chapter therefore raises some serious critiques for videogame theory, not only around assumptions of solo gaming as the norm, but also around the immersive potentialities of the game. Chapter 5 looks specifically at gaming bodies during gameplay, arguing that gamers enact power relations while they play. My argument is that gaming should perhaps be seen more in keeping with Giddens’ notion of ‘practical consciousness’ (1984: xiii) than the affective experience offered by videogame theorists. Drawing on a range of new media theory, from the cyborg to actor-network theory, I argue that the gamers body, like conceptions of the social, should not simply be seen as a site of affect, or read as a sign to be interpreted. Instead the lived, embodied, imagined and enacted body, which is always-already inclusive of the technology, produces, performs and imagines mediations with the game in contradictory, unexpected, and negotiated ways. Gaming not only needs to include the gaming body, then, it also needs to incorporate imagined, ‘protensive’ or fantasized elements, not least because, while gamers may be impelled to act, such imperatives may never fully be realized in anticipated or expected ways. Chapter 6 is concerned with the final stage of the research project, the reflections of gamers made by the gamers upon watching the recordings of themselves game. These reflections of gameplay by the gamers produce a unique space in which the gamers can comment on the recordings of the gameplay. However, despite initial attempts to rationalize and explain the recordings, gamers became increasingly uneasy that the recordings did not seem to reflect their feelings during gameplay. The disquiet gamers expressed at seeing the recordings raise some crucial methodological and theoretical issues for the project as a whole, particularly around the conception of the body, technology, fantasy and gaming. Chapter 7 offers conclusions for the research project and the methodological and theoretical issues that emerged from the project. While the chapters progress relatively chronologically in terms of a pre-gaming, during-gaming and postgaming timeline, it is important to stress that the themes of gender, fantasy, the body, technology and narrative are enmeshed throughout the book. Indeed, one of my central arguments is that gaming incorporates the discourses of gaming and the reflections on gaming as well as the practice of gameplay. The power dynamics of each household continue to be negotiated, lived and contested in each section of the research project, suggesting that the durable signifiers of gender, of power, and of technological knowledge, continue to frame, mediate and narrate gaming well beyond the immediacy of any particular game. Gaming is neither a solo experience for these gamers, nor is it temporally specific. Instead, gaming is social, it is routine, repetitive, relational, and embedded in these gamers lives. It is remembered, replayed, and re-enacted. In short, gaming is meaningful, and it is meaningful for reasons well beyond the immediacy of any single game, or momentary gaming scenario.

Chapter 2

Constructing a Gendered Gaming Identity1 As I suggested in the previous chapter, gaming is meaningful and the fact that games matter to the gamers was obvious from the initial stages of the project. Further, the games matter to the gamers not only because they are pleasurable and engaging activities, but because they function as particular tools or devices used to position and construct the gamers within each household. This chapter therefore investigates the initial comments and memories gamers offered. Indeed, the initial interviews and conversations with the gamers demonstrated that gamers were carefully articulating certain elements of gaming in order to stake a claim for themselves as competent (or otherwise) gamers. These initial claims, rationales and justifications not only tell us about the meaning, value and uses of the videogame for the gamers of the project, they also (and perhaps more interestingly) tell us about the gamers themselves: their values, alignments, logics. Further, in keeping with the arguments cited in Chapter 1, the extracts here highlight that gaming is much more than playing the game: they also operate, as Newman suggests, as ‘cultures of talk, discussion, sharing and collaboration’ (Newman 2008: 23). The initial comments, then, are useful for ‘setting the scene’ for both the major themes of the project, and the power politics of each household. What is noticeable about the various constructions of an adult gamer identity is that a certain type of gamer is being constructed. Furthermore, this is not the gamer who enthusiastically and mindlessly ‘loses’ themselves into the machine, or becomes so immersed in the game they lose all sense of time, reason and logic. Instead, the interviews below indicate clear paradoxes in the way games are simultaneously set up as escapism, fantasy and play by producers, advertisers and some theorists of the videogame, but are addressed by adult gamers as serious, rational and logical pastimes. These paradoxes suggest that some intriguing convolutions are going on to justify gaming for UK adults. They also highlight the fact that, despite the majority of gamers being adult in the UK,2 there is still a perceived necessity not only to justify gaming, but also to justify it as something other than pleasure, escapism or entertainment. Indeed, one of the most interesting ways to highlight 1  Some of the material and arguments quoted in this chapter were originally published in Thornham, H. (2009) ‘Claiming a Stake in the Videogame: What Grown-Ups Say to Rationalize and Normalize Gaming’ in Convergence, 15(2): 141–59. 2  As suggested in Chapter 2, the average age of gamer in the UK is 28, and 51 per cent of gamers reside in the 35–50 age group according to the BBC survey of 2005: http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/ entertainment_gaming_in _the_uk/html/4.stm (accessed: 24 May 2007).

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the socio-cultural ‘meanings’ of the videogame is to explore how games are talked about, and what they signify for gamers. The narratives gamers offer indicate the particular ways subjectivity is being constructed for gamers, and what it seems to be premised on. Utilizing theories of narrative and performance, I argue that the stories gamers construct, position them well within a masculine tradition of logic, reason and causality. These are rarely emotional accounts. Instead, gamers draw on capitalist, class, social and familial structures to argue that the initial console purchase was the rarely the result of desire. Purchase was borne out of necessity, logic, or because of a particular and unique moment in the gamers’ life. In turn, such performances, and claims to and of knowledge and reason, indicate certain (desired) positionalities within each household. What we see within these narratives, then, are the imagined power dynamics of each household. Furthermore, the constructed position each gamer claims is not only the result of the content of each story: it is also the consequence of the narrative structures they utilize. Ultimately, I suggest that videogames are being claimed as normative pastime for a certain ‘type’ of person, which similarly closes down not only how videogames can be used in the home, but also possibilities of talking about or experiencing the kind of fantasies initially premised for the videogame. The ‘justification’ of the videogame by gamers therefore forms the bulk of this chapter. I focus on two main issues: how gamers initially rationalize the possession of the console, and how they explain gaming scenarios and experiences. Although justifications in terms of rationalizing the technology occur regardless of gender or sexuality, there are marked differences in prioritization, manner and meaning within each category. It becomes increasingly apparent, however, that certain modes of justification lend themselves to stereotypically gendered categories. This is not to claim any notion of essentialism for gendered individuals; rather it is to suggest that the power dynamics in each house (which are constantly being negotiated) seems to encourage certain gendered performances, providing an environment where certain performances are more durable than others. Such narratives are not only constructing the gamers in particular ways, then, they are also reflecting and producing power dynamics of the households. In many ways, then, we can read these comments in relation to the concepts of symbolic interactionism (see, for example, Goffman 1959, Waskul and Vannini 2006) insofar as the gamers are clearly constructing themselves in particular ways. However, perhaps a more useful way to understand such comments is in relation to Butler’s concept of ‘who is imagining whom’ (2004b: 10), which she discusses specifically in relation to gender when she argues that: Terms such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are notoriously changeable; there are social histories for each term; their meanings change radically depending upon geopolitical boundaries and cultural constraints on who is imagining whom, and for what purpose … Terms of gender designation are thus never settled once and for all but are constantly in the process of being remade.’ (my italics. 2004b: 10)

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My argument is that such a conception of performance, which includes an imagined dimension, facilitates a better comprehension of the nuances of power negotiations, as well as the conscious and unconscious attempts at performance in keeping with imagined identity. It is a concept I evoke throughout the book in order to discuss the socio-political power dynamics framing, producing, and reflecting performances. The final issue to emerge from this chapter relates to the technology. It is clear from the stories gamers offer that games have both longevity and nostalgic (pleasurable) meaning for the gamers of the project. Contrary to much new media theory, then, where technology is often addressed in its novelty, these comments suggest there is a clear history of technological relations and mediation, which shape and construct how gamers feel about that technology today. Further, in the discussions of first-ever gaming consoles, it becomes apparent that these are also inherently social memories: they are as much about people, places and events, as they are about technology. Finally, as with as with much theory on performance and identity (for example, Butler 1993, 1997, 2004b, McNay 2000, Hall 1987, 1997, Skeggs 1997, Foucault 1969, 1976), these are also constructions, performances and reflections on, and of, power politics: they produce and provide the frameworks for their subsequent actions. In keeping with Caroline Bassett’s argument that we need to get beyond social and technological determinism and instead find mediation between the two dichotomies (Bassett 2007), this chapter argues that technology and the social are embedded, if not intrinsically enmeshed. Modes of Narration As suggested above, it is both the content and the mode of narration, which establishes the gamers as owning particular kinds of knowledge and experience. Indeed, all the extracts below suggest that gamers normalize gaming within their lives through a specific mode of telling which figures it as always-already an intrinsic part of their identities. In a similar vein to Annette Kuhn’s work on memory (2002), then, the memory-work we see below (of which gaming is an intrinsic part) is an active production, which constructs the speaker as authoritative and the logical conclusion of the history and memory being narrated. In other words, the narrative structure of causality lends itself to justifications of present-day gaming. These memories of gaming facilitate a space in which gamers can prioritize certain gaming elements, which, in turn, suggest allegiances and preferences reflective of their socio-cultural and political narrated, and performed, identity. These are workings through of subjectivity – momentary claims and performances of agency. As always in processes of negotiation, and as social and cultural relations, language and narrative are in continual processes of generation and becoming (see also Volshinov 1973: 81): they are not fixed or closed structures. As with the speaker who claims momentary agency through the act of speaking, the complete story of a memory of past gaming scenarios (for

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example) may be similarly ‘petrified’ at the moment of production, but it is also fluid, mutable and open to change. We can see this in Chapter 3 with the disputes over solo gaming, where Bob’s claims are queried by Duncan and Carl, in turn generating new narratives and new causalities. As Somers and Gibson suggest, narrative is an ontological condition of social life, which is itself ‘storied’ (Somers and Gibson 1994: 38). As they argue: [I]t is through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities. (Somers and Gibson 1994: 58–9)

Indeed, Somers and Gibson argue that it is the temporal positioning of narrative, and relation to time, which makes the events in a story meaningful (1994: 59). Bob’s logic of his ‘story’, which accounts for his current gaming habits, for example, is meaningful precisely because he places the events into a temporal logic. For Somers and Gibson, this is accounted for in the way that events become episodes so that each event is imbued with a temporality. The event is also positioned in relation to further episodes so that there are always multiple temporalities going on. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon: the point has similarly been made, for example, in relation to, for example, Foucault’s (1986) work on history and de Lauretis’ (1984) work on narrative. As Foucault has suggested (1986: 10), the ‘causality’ of history is culturally constructed into relevance, and the prioritization offered within the narrative is as much to do with the narrators’ own performed identity and the socio-cultural moment and context of that performance, as it is to do with the narrated events. In this sense, the narrative structures produce the narrator as authoritative and rational, but it is the speaker who offers a logical causality and frames of reference for the events within the narrative. The process of making these events meaningful is specific to both the socio-cultural moment on a micro level – the moment in which it was spoken – and a wider cultural mode of talking about the past (and we can see resonances here with Judith Butler’s work on gender performance 1990, 2004b). In some senses, then, these narrators are also performing the role of historian, which as Carolyn Steedman argues, is a socio-culturally specific re-presentation: [T]he historian goes back through time, finds something, considers it, looks at it this way, and then that: gives it meaning. Then, with these bundles of meaning, the journey is taken again, forward this time. Things are put in order, and it is the order they are put into that gives them historical meaning. They are held together in a particular configuration that explains them; a causal configuration. (1992: 49)

The equation of linearity with causality, and the construction of this as a meaningful personal history do a number of things. Not only does it situate the events in a public domain, both through the process of recounting and the topic of the narrative; it

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works to position the narrator within more public events being discussed. It also facilitates an imagined or temporary agency through the recourse to wider modes (discourses) of telling (these are, perhaps the meta narratives to which Somers and Gibson refer, 1994). While this position is temporary and constantly has to be (re)produced, the recourse to a wider, public mode of history or telling, inclusively invites participants into a recognizable format (as audience, of public event, of historical document). Although tenuous, agency is nevertheless momentarily performed, acknowledged and claimed by the speaker, and responded to (in various ways) by the ‘audience’ who are ‘interpellated’ (to use Althusser’s term) into the power relation. For the gamers below, the public events are recognizable school experiences, common social situations, and a culture of purchasing at the shop, ‘Dixons’. But, perhaps more importantly, these memories are socially inclusive devices, which allow the other conversationalists recognizable points in the narrative, with which they can identify. They are also, of course, clearly pleasurable: Sara: well I had a Game Gear, coz I used to go round to one of my friends houses, and she had a Game Gear, and we used to have, she used to have all these really girly parties and everyone would go round and do makeup and put cucumber slices on their eyes and stuff. I didn’t really know what was going on so I used to sit in the corner with my Game Gear and play that Interviewer: [laughs] so you’re saying Sara: and then I got one for Christmas, and we used to go round the neighbours house every Christmas day so I could take that around and play that Interviewer: so, any social occasion Sara: exactly Interviewer: you’d be in the corner with your Game Gear Simon: it would be an escape route Sara: yeah any social awkwardness overcome through the Game Gear (1.2) Bob: there was always one boy at school, there would always be one spoilt kid that had loads like. I think Andy Holmes had fucking all of them like Duncan: yeah Al: they always used to turn up when you had your last day before Christmas

Ethnographies of the Videogame

24 Duncan, Bob: yeah

Al: when you were allowed to bring your toys in Duncan: yeah Al: there would always be these flash buggers wandering around with their Tomytronics and or whatever, and you know, you’d be fighting over who would have a go on them and stuff Interviewer: yeah Al: you’d come in with your crap board game [everyone laughs] (2.4) Grant: nah we missed out on the Atari didn’t we, we never had one of them? Cam: there was all the kids at school always had like the new … I used to remember like Grant: I didn’t like the joystick like Cam: … do you remember like, what’s it called? Cligovision and all that stuff Grant: yeah, don’t think we had that either. Think we went straight from that white thing to the Spectrum didn’t we? Cam: aye Grant: coz there’s a few came out when the Spectrum came out wasn’t there? Cam: yeah we used to go to Dixon’s for that Grant: Oric Cam: Oric yeah Duncan: I don’t remember them Grant: you used to type in ‘bang’ and the TV would go ‘pppuuugghshh’ [laughter] Grant: you’d type in ‘laser’ and it’d go ‘psshew’ (4.2)

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As well as the public and shared histories of school, of social awkwardness and ‘Dixons’, these narratives also have specific shared places in them. They are what Annette Kuhn terms ‘memory maps’ (2002: 18) and are in a sense ‘grounded’ in the places (real or fictional) in which those memories occurred. The recounting of a specific place has the effect, as suggested above, not only of ‘making real’ the location as a specific place of meaning, it also encourages a shared experience both because of the public nature of the location and in the manner of telling. This is most notable in the first interview (2.4), where three of the conversationalists went to the same school. The fourth person (Al) went to a different school, yet the memories of school life are shared ones, and the clichés of behaviours and recognizable school events facilitate a shared memory, which also produces a temporally specific inclusive space and moment. As a ‘memory map’, the public and socio-cultural performance of the memory also works to frame the private contents of what is produced in the social, temporal and cultural moment of performance. Even the first interviewee, Sara, uses the public event of socializing, ‘go[ing] round to one of my friends houses’ (1.2) in order to offer an insight into what is actually a comment about her own (self perceived) social identity. By comparison with the two other interviews, however, where the public location is used to invite shared rememberings of either the technology or the place of that technology, Sara offers a much more private statement. Further, her reply (to me) that ‘yeah any social awkwardness overcome through the Game Gear’ (ibid.), could be read as shifting the focus away from possible pleasures and uses of the technology in the past, and more onto her self-perceived social inadequacies of the present. The image Sara provides of a child lost in whirl of ‘conventional’ femininity, where girls practice with beauty products, is not only one of humour, but one spoken by a retrospective, nostalgic adult looking back. The fact that she ‘didn’t know what was going on’, yet in her narrative can offer an insight precisely into what was going on, indicates an easy movement between the child and adult perspective on the event. Arguably, she frames gaming both in opposition to what she perceives as conventions of femininity, and as a personal device to oppose or escape a big social gathering of her peers. Similarly, the tone of the comment is an invitation for her (the child) to be collectively objectified (and potentially laughed at), whilst maintaining her adult persona as a rational, objective and analytical being who can also laugh at her child-self. The similarities with the second conversation are also apparent within these terms. Here, however, there is a much more serious agenda which is produced in part because of the distance claimed between adult-speaker and child-remembered. Bob’s comment that ‘there would always be one spoilt kid that had loads’ (2.4) is not just the envy of a child who does not own the device; it is also spoken as a retrospective adult. It is less about gaming, than about (amongst other things) unfair differences between children and his present-day perception of his own financially ‘impaired’ childhood. Performing as a rational adult retrospectively looking back also works to place the child-self more firmly in the past. This contrasts with Al’s ‘you’d be

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fighting over who would have a go on them and stuff’, which clearly references his memory of his own desire to own or play on the popular consoles. In a similar vein to Sara, then, Al invites an objectification of his child-self as financially and socially inadequate (‘you’d come in with your crap board games’) but the comment is framed within the more public discourse of school events, offering a less personal account which is a statement about a general feeling of inadequacy as a child. As Kuhn suggests, a memory has a specific location, it is a ‘place we revisit, or to which we are transported; it is the road we travel along and also the destination’ (2002: 17). Although memories may be imaginary in terms of physical existence, they are also to a certain extent embodied, and occasionally (as with Grant and Cam) even enacted in the process of recounting. Similarly, it is the body that offers a specific bridge between these places, giving them an embodied and temporally specific resonance in the act of telling. They are meaningful, and their meaning is connected to their embodied performance or practice. The two brothers, Grant and Cam, play off each other, leaving each remark as comment to be filled in or clarified by the other, rather than as an authoritative statement of a rational (male) adult-self. Performing the past is a nostalgic act, which works both as a performance to be enjoyed, and as an inclusive invitation to share in the childishness of the performance as nostalgic adults. Grant’s comment that ‘you used to type in “bang” and the TV would go ‘pppuuugghshh’ ... you’d type in “laser” and it’d go “psshew”’ (4.2) is a sensory invitation towards nostalgia. He becomes emotively involved in a humorous way, which also invites the other two along his inclusive ‘map’. By comparison with the previous (second) conversation, this one is much less an authoritative performance, and there are few claims to a rational adulthood. Instead the places and games are mythologized into nostalgic embodied performance, which is emotively and sensorially captivating. While I will return to the issue of embodiment throughout this book, it seems pertinent to note here that the ‘memories’ enacted by Grant and Cam are as much to do with the body as the content of the story. Indeed, Grant and Cam seem to evidence Somers and Gibson’s concept of ontological narrative. As they suggest, ‘people are guided to act by the relationships in which they are embedded and by the stories with which they identify’ (1994: 67). This suggests a socio-cultural specificity at the point of storying, so that the narratives by which we understand the world and ourselves have a temporality and a locational specificity. Seen here, the sociocultural specificity is the shared memory, which can be ontologically narrated because of the temporal and locational specificity of three people who share the memory being in the same room and the same time. Taken together, these comments suggest that the social and cultural mode of telling is much less tied to the subject or object of the discourse, but is a wider socio-cultural phenomenon. In other words, narrating the past is not only an appropriation (and continuation) of narrative structures through which the narrator can ‘map’ the past, it also enacts those narrative structures, embodying them as normative. What, how and when gamers narrate gaming experiences are therefore enmeshed into a performance which constructs the gamers’ identity as competent

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and also, as a mobile gamer. Finally, it is also worth remembering that these narratives are pleasurable, and that it is the technology that generates and prompts these narratives. The social role of the technology and the way it is understood as always-already social through its implication in memories and accounts of gaming is similarly apparent. Furthermore, what seems increasingly evident at this stage (and in a similar vein to Kuhn’s discussion of early cinema going memories), is that whilst the technology may be ‘new’, the ways of talking about it are not. Narrative Structures and Masculinity Having discussed the modes of narration above, I argue below that these modes – of logic, of causality, of reason – produce specifically gendered subject positions, which then facilitate certain kinds of power relations within each household. As suggested above, rationality, logic and adulthood, is augmented through the logic of a linear, causal narrative structure, but it is also exacerbated by the various rational decisions offered within each narrative in relation to initial purchasing decisions for the videogame console. We not only see embodied performances of identity in the narratives, then, we also see what Somers and Gibson have discussed as a relationality between ‘micro’ and ‘meta’ narratives. This relationality suggests that some narratives are more durable than others and allows for wider power structures within which the speaker is positioned. We can see resonances, then, with a Foucauldian perspective on subjectivity, particularly as it has come to be understood and utilized by feminist theorists. Foucault reminds us that it is power relations on every level, which produce and frame performances when he argues that ‘power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (Foucault 1975: 194). For Somers and Gibson, the durable narratives, which resonate with Foucault’s concept of discourse, are accounted for in their theories of ‘grand’ or ‘meta’ narratives of, for example, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. The act of narration is a negotiation in part between the meta narratives and the micro ones: the relationship between the narrator and the power structures producing dominant or durable narratives (of gender, for example). And it is around the purchase of the initial console, that these negotiations between the narratives of gender, capitalism, rationality and identity, make themselves apparent: Simon: and then I got an Amiga and when they started getting knocked out of the gaming industry, stopped getting made, then I bought a Playstation and, I was that sort of age when you’re, you’ve just started a part time job and you’ve got some extra money and you’re just plain bored and you’ve got quite a lot of time on your hands so it’s, so I bought a Playstation because other people had them and so it was, we could play games and things like that, so it was always the social thing as well and err, yeah so always sort of had it, and then took it to

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university so it was a good social thing then coz everybody would be playing the games. We’d have Worms tournaments and things like that, in the corridors (1.1) Bob: I bought one when I was at uni, I bought my own Playstation One, which would have been about 1996, 1997. I had that for a bit and then I stopped playing it really and I stopped playing games … well when I left uni I stopped playing games prob’ly ‘til I moved to Luton and um bored ... didn’t have a life. So I bought an Xbox. But to be honest, I bought the Xbox coz, I bought it more coz it had a DVD player on it actually than anything else … I thought ‘if I’m gonna buy a DVD player that’s gonna cost me 120 quid which is what they were … Duncan: yeah Bob: I may as well pay 170 and get an Xbox like (2.2)

There are some interesting convolutions occurring in the extracts above. Indeed, it seems that the rational adult is not allowed to enjoy an entirely pleasure-leisure orientated device unless certain frameworks are put in place. Whilst Simon and Bob place these purchases within ‘youth’, ‘social’ and financial parameters, Bob also claims a multifunctional impetus. His ‘[b]ut to be honest, I bought it more coz it had a DVD player on it actually’ (2.2) returns us more specifically to the function of the technology and what it can offer the gamer. The financial or social imperatives accentuate the function of the consoles in terms of supporting social situations, elevating social positions, or precisely because of the multifunctionality of the device itself. The financial and functional imperatives are discourses of adult rationalization, and they offer support of technological innovation, which as adult men, they can appreciate. Consoles are not bought solely because of the desire to own one, or to play a particular game. In fact Simon and Bob both suggest the opposite: it was not desire but boredom. In these explanations, a momentary emotional ‘weakness’ prompts the purchase: it is a temporary flux in an otherwise logical and rational narrative. I’m not suggesting that pleasure, desire and emotion are not there: they clearly are. But Bob and Simon work very hard at excusing their initial decision as a momentary emotional weakness, which they can rationalize when they look back. In many ways the qualities they are valuing here map onto the Cartesian logic of subjectmasculine and object-feminine. The console becomes a useful tool – an object – manipulated, owned and done to by the gamers who recognize its value and use. The construction of the technology as a tool not only emerged in discussions about initial purchasing decisions, it also emerged in wider discussions around why gamers gamed. Indeed, for some gamers, games were rationalized through financial motivations, whilst others argued that they served a social function, enabling friends to keep in touch by providing them with an easy activity together. Simon, for example, argued that games were good ‘ice breakers’, facilitating the relaxation of guests and social interaction by offering a common focal point. For

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Joe, games were similarly useful for offering a common topic of conversation with his teenage students, as well as providing a ‘stress-free evening of bonding’ with his friends. Again, the technology provided the group with a common focus as well as being ‘easy’ because little thought had to go into ‘those niceties’ of usual conversation (1.5). This also works to claim the speakers as the rational authors of their narratives – the subjects who can reflect on emotion, progress beyond it, and use the tools as helpful devices in their wider progression through the more public places of their narratives (from adolescence to University, to the social environment of gaming). As de Lauretis suggests, these narrative structures of linear causality, of action, and of progression, are inherently gendered. Drawing on both Propp (1958) and Lotman (1973), she argues that contemporary narrative structures are heavily influenced by the ‘establishment of structuralism as the epistemological foundation of the “science of man”’ (1984: 116). They produce a mobile subject (a hero) who moves through the spaces and places of the narrative (seen here as adolescence, University) in a progressive and meaningful way. It is clear in the extracts above, that while emotion, pleasure, and desire are here, they are insistently downplayed in these accounts which work very hard at establishing a logical causality based on a public discourse of reason and logic. In keeping with de Lauretis’ hero (1984), then, or Grosz’ conception of the user of new media (2001); mobility and action are conflated with progression, and are gendered male not only because the subject-masculine moves through the object-feminine, but also because the hero of the narrative is ‘the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences’ (de Lauretis 1984: 119). And, as Grosz (and de Lauretis, ibid.) reminds us, while the hero remains the fantasized whole subject, acting onto the world around him, and progressing through it, ‘femininity becomes the space, or better, the matrix, of male self-unfolding’ (2001: 158). Problematic Play As I suggested above, the convolutions the gamers enter into, seem not only result of performing rational masculinity, they also seem shaped by the fact these gamers are talking as adults. While pleasure is a notably difficult concept to articulate (see O’Connor and Klaus 2000, for a critical overview) it seems to be a particularly problematic discourse for the adults of this research. It is worth examining this more closely not least because of the unsettled relationship detailed in these extracts of gaming and adulthood. Gaming as a leisure/pleasure activity – as play – is far from synonymous with adulthood, particularly if we compare it to childhood and play. As a childhood tool, play has been theorized as an important part of recognizing and understanding the resonances of human behaviour and practice through its two components ludus and paidia (see Piaget 1951). While ludus ‘provides an occasion for training and normally leads to the acquisition of a special skill’ (Callois 1958: 28) and therefore resonates back onto the socio-cultural structures

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from which it borrows; paidia ‘intervenes in every happy exuberance which effects an immediate and distorted agitation, an impulsive and easy recreation, but readily carried to excess’ (Caillois 1958: 2). It is a safe environment for intense and immediate emotion. According to Caillois, then, the two components of play create an environment where wider socio-cultural experiences can safely be ‘played’ out. When considered as an adult pastime, however, these arguments become more difficult when either the game seems to offer little insight into human behaviour, or it is an experienced adult who is playing. For the gamers cited above, we could also argue that gaming detracts from the logical productive chronology of their personal ‘history’. It is not just pleasure that becomes problematic, but also the fact that gaming does not productively contribute to the progression narratives they offer. Indeed, Adrian MacKenzie argues that play should be understood as a corporeal and symbolic expression of a subversion of synchronic, formal temporal and social structures. Further, this, he argues, is the main ethos of the (any) game: Play keeps on subsuming not only sacred behaviours, but anything that once belonged to human practice, whether it is practical, economic or military. (2002: 150)

In other words, although play does not alter the temporal structures to which it alludes and which it subverts, it does prioritize this subversion during play, undermining other temporal structures (that is, evening domestic rituals, or here, logical chronology) as less important or meaningful. Play not only alludes to a temporal structure through the process of ‘taking time out’ to play a game. But play also has its own self-referential temporality: ‘it is “played out”’ (Huizinga 1938: 9). We could argue, then, that one of the problems for the adult gamers of this project, resides in the temporal structure of working lives where every hour has meaning or purpose. In many ways, this is exacerbated through the narratives they offer, where linear causality is articulated as progressive (and therefore purposeful). Seen in this light, we could argue that Simon’s narrative of always having owned a console or gaming device, so much so that ‘it’s always been there, it’s the thing you pack up in your box’ (interview 1.1), could be seen as an attempt to dismiss and move on from the pleasurable aspects of the console. Subverting these temporal and narrative structures through play calls into question one of the basic structures of the adult quotidian, and, consequently, is perhaps one of the reasons for the convolutions gamers enter into to ‘justify’ gaming. Although these issues clearly echo discussions around the temporal aspects not just of play, but also leisure time, and work–play divisions, it is the socially and culturally loaded notion of adulthood and play I am interested in here. The prioritization of play over other temporal activities (that is, all other activities) contributes to the establishment of gaming as a derided form precisely because ‘meaningless’ or self-referential play is prioritized. Consequently, perhaps, pleasure and play have little foothold in a linear and causal narrative of progression.

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Finally, it is important to note that these extracts cited tell us far more about the gamer – the performance of themselves they wish to project – than anything about the game or console they are discussing. I think this is partly the result of the peculiar juxtaposition of adult gamer and pleasurable game. It is also partly the result of the dynamics of the interview situation, where certainly in the initial months of recording, gamers were conscious that I was asking ‘serious’ questions about gaming. If we think through these extracts in relation to social interactionism, or Judith Butler’s concept of ‘who is imagining whom’, it is also clear that these are very much performances, and attempts, in the early stages of the research project, to establish themselves as particular kinds of gamers. Of course, what is particularly interesting here is that when invited to discuss long-term pleasure and engagement, it is the wider discourses of public history, of rational masculinity and of logical causality, which are evoked. Again, my argument is that this suggests something about the peculiar position of gaming for adult gamers, particularly in relation to how they can talk about pleasure, fantasy and perhaps escapism. The overall tendency, as emphasized through the extracts above, is to offer distanced analyses of past events precisely in order to present themselves as rational, logical, ‘normal’ individuals. Emotive, illogical, irrational, fantastical, spur-of-the-moment narratives are noticeably absent. Although these rationales are not confined to male gamers, they are the more common rationales for them. It indicates, I think, a particular gendered and adult way of rationalizing the purchase of the console, which underplays the fact that gaming is pleasurable. It also indicates that this reasoning is not the preserve of sexual difference, but of gendered performance if we also see these accounts for female gamers. Valerie Walkerdine, in her research on children and videogames, for example, argues that the successful gamer is a ‘rational masculine subject’ (2007: 32). Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear when we address actual gameplay, that these narratives and performances of rational masculinity bleed into gameplay to produce different qualities, and competencies of gamers. By comparison with the female gamers cited below, although female responses do reiterate similar rationales as the male gamers, they tend not to claim credit for them. Of the interviewees, Rach, Sara and Lorna all reiterated logical monetary reasons for owning the console, but they were repeating the comments made by the men who influenced these decisions: Rob, Simon and Lorna’s brother. Indeed, purchasing decisions for the women tended to relate to the specific influence of someone, and figure the gamer within a narrative of outside influence to which they were subjected. Women Gamers’ Motivations If the identity of rational, knowledgeable gamer is established through financial or functional motivations behind purchasing decisions, then the recourse to the private, and to relationships as the primary motivations, construct a different

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kind of present-day gamer. What we see below, are more personal and pleasureorientated narratives of the reasons for console purchase, also told through a narrative structure of memory work. In a similar vein to Sara’s comments earlier in the chapter, these extracts also position the speaker within a particular kind of social history. What is noticeable, however, is that like Sara’s comments, they rarely evoke the more public history we see in Bob and Simon’s accounts. Rationality is based on relationships, and their influence on the gamer. Power is located with the influencer, not the gamer so that she is constructed as the subject onto whom influence and decisions are subjected: Interviewer: OK so tell me a bit more about your decision to buy the Playstation 2 Beth: my big sister got me addicted to this game called Final Fantasy, something or other so I got really bored I’d read too many books and I went and bought one Interviewer: was that it? Did you wake up one morning and just decide? Beth: Well my sister, the one who’s supposed to know about games told me the Playstation would work with my laptop, but it wouldn’t because you’d need to buy a telly card. And erm that would cost more than the telly, so I thought I might as well buy a telly. So I bought a telly so I could play Final Fantasy on it basically Interviewer: so you bought it specifically to play this one game? Beth: Yes. But when I finished the game I bought the new Final Fantasy game, and then the new one, and the new one … But its fun, and I like it. Also I would have just spent my money on something else useless otherwise so ... (3.1) Jess: it was an Atari fifty-two hundred, I remember that because we both wanted it, but I don’t remember whether one of us wanted it more than the other. Actually I suspect my brother wanted it more than me … it was kind of a status symbol to have and Brian’s always been a social climber at heart … [laughing] whereas I never cared, basically. You know, and I remember it was the most, most kids had the Atari twenty-six hundred (5.1)

The major difference between these accounts and the earlier ones, then, is the absence of a framework of public, universal rationality. Beth’s claim to being ‘addicted’ to Final Fantasy is a personal statement, which places the emphasis on her emotional attachment to the game, rather than on any wider more public motivations. Jess’ comments are primarily about her perception of, and relationship with, her brother by comparison with her perceptions of herself. While Jess’ comments seem more reflective and balanced, both cite other people as primarily responsible for the purchasing decision. Beth goes so far as to

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disclaim authorizing the purchase: it is her sister who is responsible.3 In a similar vein to Aphra Kerr’s research (2003) on gender and gaming, which found that the women gamers emphasized the importance of a brother, father, cousin or friend as the major influence to game playing, it is also the siblings who are emphasized here. What is notable, however, is the fact that Beth cites her sister as the influencer, suggesting, perhaps that it is less the gender of the influencer, which is important, but the fact of being influenced per se. While Jess’ narrative has resonances of the more rational and logical discourses appropriated by the male gamers (above), it is based on knowledge of her sibling, not on any universal claim as such. Although she does indicate a wider social awareness (‘most kids had the Atari twenty-six hundred’), this is framed very much in response to her brother being ‘a social climber at heart’. In both cases, then, it is their familial relationships, which are prioritized, figuring them, first and foremost within the private sphere. Although I am representing the extracts of gaming memories here in a more structural way, especially in relation to how gamers use narrative devices of storying to position themselves in authoritative positions, there is clearly much more going on. Narrating memories of gaming and purchasing decisions positions the game as an always-already implicit element to the creation not just of the narrative, but of the gamers’ identity which is constructed and performed in the moment of narration. To simply suggest that the technology/game is narrated misses a vital point. The technology is narrated and given (causal and logical) meaning through its positioning within the narrative, but it also generates and bears these narratives. Although I will return to the issue of the ‘technology’ in later chapters, it is important to remember that the technology is not a separate entity within these narratives. It is a fundamental social element, which contributes to the construction of the gamers’ present performance. Further, these memories do not address the technology in isolation: they are inherently social. They are as much about the people, places and activities, as they are about the technology. To argue, therefore, that gaming is a one-to-one relationship into and with the technology, or that gaming is primarily about the technological functionality (see Newman 2008), is to miss the point. When invited to discuss the technology, gamers discuss the scenarios of gaming, the multiple interactions, negotiations and interpretations. It seems to me that even in the narration of gaming memories, there are social and contextual signifiers, which need accounting for, not least because, as Newman argues, ‘it is essential to note that videogame experiences are frequently shared by groups, perhaps crowded around a television set in a domestic setting … or around coin-op machines in arcades’ (2004: 95).

3  She is also, of course, answering questions I direct so that the logic of her narrative is also somewhat framed by my line of questioning.

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Pleasurable Technologies If the memories of gaming are always social ones, then, to a certain extent, the construction of the gamers as present-day gamers is also insistently social. This is a key point for the following chapter, where the normative gamer is insistently (and perhaps unsurprisingly) social. In the final section of this chapter, however, I want to explore the moments when gamers did go into depth around the technology ‘itself’ – the games, the functions, the devices. Given the narration of gaming scenarios and social interactions, it seems pertinent to explore where and how the technology is positioned. Further, given that videogame theory tends to focus on the technology itself, and what it facilitates or offers gamers (see King and Krzywinska 2006: 6), the extracts below work to counter such an approach. As we see below, the technology is remembered nostalgically, corporeally, and in relation to its functions. However, it is also always remembered insistently as a social device: Al: erm well I can just remember a succession of those little hand held ones erm other people had them as well and then the next one I can remember was oh I had a friend called Tony Sammons when I was about 10 and he had an Atari Game Station which was the first one I can remember seeing that you plugged into a telly. Like a really early Playstation. I mean it had cartridges that you put in the front so I mean a really early Nintendo or something, but yeah, you just basically plugged it into your telly and then you had, he had about three or four games or something like that and it had like fake wood on it and everything. It was pretty crummy looking. But it just had like basic games on it like Tank Attack I think it was called and a basic shooting game or something like that … and after that one I think err I probably err Mega Drives I can remember, that was much later on then like. I can remember I think I hadn’t really encountered a Mega Drive until my first year at university so I was eighteen and there were a couple of lads in halls that had Mega Drives so we would play on them, ice hockey games and basic car driving games and stuff like that (2.2) Jess: My grandfather, my paternal grandfather, worked for [RCA] in New Jersey, that’s where we lived and I don’t know why he had it, or why he brought it home, but he had this game and it was, course I’m remembering this as a little kid so it was [gesturing] what? Would you say this was a foot and a half? and it was chunky a great chunky thing and it was like, I’m trying to think. It had two almost like telephone key pads, chunky key pads, one on each side of it and I’m trying to remember, little, it seems like at the back middle part was a place where you put the old kind of eight track cassettes and I can’t remember if that’s right, and it connected to the TV and I think there were a couple of like you know, select type buttons … But you used the buttons to manipulate the game and I don’t think there was any kind of joystick or anything like that and it was a beige colour

Constructing a Gendered Gaming Identity Interviewer: we’re talking the seventies then are we? Jess: well let’s see, I was born seventy-two so I guess it would have been about seventy-seven, seventy-eight, it wouldn’t have been much past then because we were pretty little Interviewer: yeah Jess: coz I was about six and my brother was about two and, two or three and we usually would have it sitting on the floor in front of us Interviewer: yeah Jess: and erm I can only remember us having two games: Tennis or Squash. One player was squash and two player was tennis, so really technically it was just one game and it was real, real simple. It was just one bar that would go, you could manipulate to go vertically up and down Interviewer: oh yeah Jess: you know on one side of the court, I don’t, you couldn’t even bring it in Interviewer: ok Jess: and there was a little square ball (5.1) Grant: On a Spectrum, you could just go ahead from the opening screen and start doing a ... Duncan: yeah Grant: ‘Dixon’s is crap twenty goes in ten’ and all of that Duncan: what, you couldn’t with the Amiga? Grant: you couldn’t with the Amiga no coz ‘no disc’ always came up on the screen Duncan: Ohhh that’s right yeah Grant: and you had to put a disc in Duncan: yeah

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Grant: You couldn’t like, boot it or anything, you couldn’t get into it or owt [anything] and the Duncan: was it any good as a computer or? Grant: I don’t think you could use it as a computer could you? Cam: Dave had one as well, Dave Robinson Duncan: Neil had one and all Grant: I borrowed Neil’s err ... can’t remember what it was. The alternator out the back, just for like a week, and his father started ringing up giving me loads of crap coz I hadn’t given it back. And then Jaffa turned up as well when I got the Amiga Cam: [laughs] Grant: I wasn’t even mates with him like! I used to love watching Ben and Carl play Super Cars man, they would always fall out [laughter] Cam: proper radge [crazy/wild] game that Grant: Radge! Radge! [impression of Carl] ‘arrggghhh fucking cars!’ Cam: and they drop mines right in front of us Grant: yeah heat seeking missiles [laughter] Grant: used to radge the hell out of them two (4.2)

The first two extracts quoted above go into some detail about the look and shape of the console, and frame the materiality of the device within fond nostalgic recollections. The shape, feel, and look of the consoles play an important part in locating these memories, which suggests that the materiality of the device can focus the gaming memories through time. Feelings of pleasurable gaming, along with a topographic ‘route’ into the past are enmeshed in the materiality of the console, which has meaning beyond the game itself. It is not simply the games or genres, which are recounted but the console itself, suggesting an investment into, and emotional and sensory attachments to, the device. The material console

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seems to function both as a point on the cartographic route into the past, and a springboard for further memories about pleasure. These recollections of past gaming experiences are also a living through of all the sensory and emotional elements of the ‘original’ gaming experiences. As I have already suggested, narrative is also praxis or ontology. The ‘original’ gaming experience does not exist: the sensory and structural narrative modes of returning to the past create it as such. Indeed, the past gaming experience is entirely dependent on these structures, without which a ‘return’ would be impossible. As Foucault has suggested, narrating the past facilitates the injection of power into an otherwise silent object. It is a process of exposure (the game console is given a public display: it is allowed to ‘speak’), whereby the console is given a solidity (it is actualized as evidence of both the gamers’ present identity and the pleasure of gaming ‘itself’) and staticity (it can be returned to and functions as a locationary device). On one level, these elements are ‘produced’ through a socio-cultural specificity into which a narrative structure, as a means of storying, is culturally embedded. Within this framework, the narrator ‘interprets’ the ‘documents’ (gaming console), giving them meaning for the socio-culturally specific moment in which they are recounted. As Foucault suggests, the evidential aspect of the historical ‘event’ depends primarily on an interpretation of documents – on finding ‘traces’ (1986: 10). On another level, one could argue that the console also generates narratives because it is the praxis of gameplay (and the meaning the gamer invests in the console), which produce pleasurable and sensory recollections. Indeed, if sensory and emotive connections to the material console are embedded in and through narrative, these narratives also therefore negotiate and generate new ways of thinking about past gaming experiences through the act of narration. Narrative not only includes the narrative structures of telling and performative signifiers of, for example, adult rationality, masculinity, femininity, and class; it also continues the sensory and material relations the gamer has with the console as embedded within these structures. When Jess tells me about the ‘chunky key pads’ of the RCA prototype, she is not only generating ‘new’ meanings for the console and gaming, she is also generating her own identity as inclusive of them. She is also continuing the durable feelings of attachment, which she initially found pleasurable and interesting more than 20 years before. Tony Sammons, Neil, Jaffa and Jess’s grandfather emphasize these memories as social ones. It is not only that the games are played in social settings, but that they are remembered as inherent to the construction or continuation of friendships and fond family recollections. While the first two extracts work to position these narratives as memories, continuing on with a brief description of the look, feel or function of the technology, the latter extract dwells on the shared memory of Ben and Carl competing. The people present in the latter interview – Duncan, Grant and Cam – were all present in the past gaming event they are narrating. This is a shared memory which they all enjoy. In other words, there is another layer to this narration: it creates an inclusive space, which is based not only on reminiscences of the people, but on the technology and the social.

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I am arguing that these are not only are social memories, they also work to construct social gaming as the ‘correct’ mode through longevity of play. There is a further point around the fact that the technology is intrinsic to these social memories and also works to construct conceptions of the social as always-already inclusive of the technology. That the technology is an embedded element of social praxis and conceptions of the social is not a new phenomenon for these gamers who enmesh the two as always-already intrinsically related in their discussions of past gaming memories. It becomes increasingly clear, then, that conceptions of the social need to be rethought in order to include technology as intrinsic, rather than as a separate, or more worryingly, opposed entirely to it. Negotiated Performances If the memories and accounts of past gaming experiences are socio-culturally embedded, and negotiate with the power politics at play in the act of narration, then these elements should be examined. It is not only, as Foucault suggests, a matter of giving meaning to past events in order to construct or negotiate present day identity performances, nor is it only a matter of allowing space for the elements within each narrative to narrate and generate further narratives. It is also a matter of the power politics, which shape not only the narrative ‘itself’ but the ability to narrate. Further, as Holstein and Gubrium have argued (2000), such narratives are also identities in process: forms of ‘working subjectivity’ and sites of ‘discursive struggle between narratives of the self and institutional discourses’ (in Waskul and Vannini 2006: 12). Within this context, what is not said also gains significance as silences become similarly indicative of power structures at play. One of the criticisms levelled at symbolic interactionism is the assumption that articulation is not only possible, it is evidence of successful interaction. However, this research demonstrates that for some on the gamers of this study, power relations worked as silencing devices, preventing or framing articulation and performance. Further, while on one level these power relations are the result of symbolic imaginings – of imagined power relations – the gamers nevertheless work to produce them. As I will discuss later, this is also the case for gameplay, where gamers are not only the people holding the consoles, but the people in the room: those encompassed in, framed by, the game. As Newman suggests, ‘non-controlling’ roles are commonplace. Map-reading ‘co-pilot’ or ‘lookout’ secondary player roles are frequently adopted by videogame users.’ (2001: 95). For the gamers of this research, silently observing, commenting sporadically or shouting direction and criticism should also be considered gaming. All of these roles, of course, relate to the power relations of the household. Symbolic interactionism, with its focus on conscious performativity, and the actions of interaction, do not always accommodate this. Initially, then, I want to highlight how narrative performances alter when other people enter the living room space. This emphasizes that it is important to

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include considerations of who is imagining whom within understandings of these narratives. What also becomes increasingly apparent is not only the necessity of relational signifiers for the narratives’ construction, but also the fluid and temporal nature of it and the sedimented layers of its performance. In other words, it is not only that the` content and manner of narration alters, but that these alterations reflect conceptions of the power politics within each house. Furthermore, it is the (imagined) power politics of each household that facilitate or prevent certain narratives within any one context. In keeping with Cooley’s ‘looking-glass body’, then, we could argue that it is ‘the imaginations which people have of one another’ (1902: 87) which shape these articulations – carefully framed within the specific temporary and durable contexts of the power politics of each house. Or, to put it another way, one could argue that the social frames such narratives. It (hegemonically) provides and supports structures through which memories and opinions can be iterated. Further, although these structures may be acknowledged by the gamers (as with Sara), most often, they are neither acknowledged, nor necessarily conscious. Within this framework, the social not only narrates the game, but also the pleasures and opinions of it. One of the most overt examples of the significance of ‘who imagines whom’ comes at a moment during the first interview with Sara when her (then) partner enters the room: Sara: With Micro Machines we’ll all just keep swapping over the … things [analogue controllers] … Interviewer: and how often do you reckon it gets played? Sara: erm, I don’t know it goes through phases. If they boys have got a new game they’ll put it on and play it, most evenings for maybe an hour or two but other than that it might, it could go for like, a couple of weeks without being turned on Interviewer: and what would you do if you came back and they were playing on the Playstation? Would you get involved? Would it bother you? Would you Sara: it wouldn’t bother me, I would watch for a bit, maybe, if it was something like GTA and I could watch and it’s interesting to observe Interviewer: yeah Sara: or if it was a team or multiplayer I might have a go Interviewer: yeah and what about like if there was something on the telly you wanted to watch?

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Sara: I would just ask them to switch it off Interviewer: would you ask them? Sara: yeah and they wouldn’t mind [Simon comes in] Interviewer: so what is it about GTA that you don’t mind watching Sara: because [laughs] I dunno [laughs] Simon: I can leave if you want Sara: no, erm what do I like, like about watching GTA? The fact that there’s a bit of a, bit of a plot, so it’s quite interesting to see how it’s developing? and it’s not just linear, you know if someone can’t move on from that mission they can go off and do something else [laughs] (1.4)

When Simon enters the room, there is a marked difference in Sara’s performance. Not only does she laugh more frequently, she seems to become less sure about what she is saying, asking a question which seems to invite commentary or disagreement. Her positive assertion about her ability to request changes in viewing/gaming programmes is immediately undermined in the face of one of her housemates, when she ceases to offer statements, and instead opts for uncertain suggestions. The fact that he suggests leaving, I think, is indicative of the visible display of their mutual discomfort. She seems uncomfortable because of his presence, and he seems uncomfortable in interrupting a previously inclusive (private) conversation. Her use of laughter to disown what she says is a recurring trope throughout the conversations with this household, and is a performance of a much more passive and considerate femininity. Her narrative makes little claim to knowledge and the laughter indicates that this is a much more personal response. This performance also seems to indicate a minimal possession both of knowledge of the game, and of her pleasures or enjoyments in watching it or playing it. I am not suggesting Sara does not enjoy this game, nor am I suggesting she is not a competent gamer,4 but there are remarkable differences in terms of claiming responsibility for what one is saying, and claiming possession of gaming knowledge. Indeed, if we remember Simon’s performances of rational masculinity when he discussed his initial purchasing decisions of a gaming console (1.1), these performances contrast even more starkly. One of the factors here is, of course, the content of the narrative: Simon talks about past events, and Sara is discussing contemporary gaming here. However, as suggested above, the extract from her 4  See Appendix 1 for hours of gameplay and statistics on household members.

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gaming memories also offers a much more personal narrative which is firmly tied to her perception of her private self. In terms of gaming ‘histories’, education, and employment Sara and Simon have very similar backgrounds, yet their performances in terms of either articulating pleasures, or offering analyses of their past, are markedly different. What this seems to indicate is not only a gendering of the performances, but the extremes of them: it is a very passive (irrational, unknowledgeable) femininity, and a very active (rational, knowledgeable, forceful) masculinity. Sara and Simon are one out of two couples interviewed in the households, and their performances of what seem more extreme versions of femininity and masculinity is perhaps also a result of their heterosexual relationship at the time of the interviews. The fact that I notice their performances could also be attributed to this. Sara is, in many ways, allowed multilayered performances, because I have known her for longer. She can therefore perform multiple identities within our relationship as, for example, long term social friend, Simon’s current partner, host, and intellectual friend. The fact that I knew her prior to her relationship with Simon has framed to some extent her attributable performances, but also accentuated them when they were not consistent with my perception of her and our relationship. Her performance within the house seemed very obvious (and unsettling) both when I was there, and when I listened to the interviews to transcribe them. It became frustrating to witness and (I think) my frustration with her is evidenced in both the desire to re-present it and through the specific focus in the re-presentation. Indeed, in a later interview, she talks about her time in the shared household as one in which she was very aware of herself performing multiple roles, none of which she felt were very accurate representations of herself: My whole life in Brighton was just a performance … I was faking it at work, I was faking it at home. I didn’t know how to be, how to be real anymore. (9.3)

The distance (physical and temporal) from the house (this later interview above took place nine months after she had left), clearly afforded Sara the space to reflect on her behaviour with the same analytical distance evoked by Simon in his discussion of his gaming memories (1.1). However, Sara’s gendered performance is not unique to this household but continues in the all-female household she moved to. It suggests, perhaps, that while certain power structures are acknowledged by gamers; such acknowledgement does not necessarily afford the gamer generative power to affect such relations. Performances of femininity and masculinity also occur in the all-male house where Al performs a comparatively more ‘feminine’ role to Bob’s and Duncan’s (relationally) performed masculinity. To emphasize similarities, the extract below is also a moment when the other household members enter the room. While these performances are perhaps more subtle than those of the Brighton household, it is nevertheless apparent that Al’s behaviour and his claim to knowledge shift when Bob and Duncan enter the room. Indeed, within this

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household Al performs the least competent gamer. However, by comparison with Sara’s rejection of any responsibility for what she is saying by continually laughing at herself, Al does claim some responsibility. In other words, while the content of his narrative suggests less experience and knowledge, the manner of it suggests otherwise: Interviewer: and who has the Playstation now you live here? Al: err I think Chris has still got it as far as I’m aware, back in Cambridge. So I think it was supposed to be half with me half with him when I went came back up to Leeds but it never happened and when I moved into Dan and Elaine’s house they had one anyway, so I was never really that bothered Interviewer: yeah coz I thought you’d never owned one, but you’ve had shares in one Al: I’ve had shares in a Playstation yeah but I hardly ever game now. Just err golf, Tiger Woods Golf coz its great for when there’s four of you sat about having a few beers and that, and play a round of golf and that, its sweet. And even though there’s lots of buttons, it’s very slow paced and you don’t have to hit too many at once, so I’m all right at that [Duncan and Bob come in] Al: I kick this lots [Bob and Duncan’s] arse all the time Interviewer: laughs Bob: what’s that? Al: I’m saying I kick your arse at Tiger Woods Bob: is that right? Al: ahem. Yeah. That’s the only one I ever play. The rest of them I can’t be bothered at all. That hand held Nintendo DS thing that we bought for Ben, I’ve never been interested in playing that at all, these boys have all had quite a lot of goes on it and stuff but I can’t be bothered really, not interested … not like these nerds (2.2)

Indeed, by comparison with Sara, whose statements when Simon enters the room are all framed as questions, Al’s claim to knowledge seems to actually curtail any invitation to remark on his technological inability or lack of knowledge. Even

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though he claims a general lack of interest in gaming as well as experience of only one game, he is only challenged when he suggests he is the more able gamer. However, like Sara’s performance, the competency he performs when speaking to me shifts on the entrance of other people into the room. He resorts to a more comedic manner, insisting on a statement, which is perhaps the least likely of any other possible comments. Furthermore, while he directs his comments at me until the moment when Bob and Duncan come into the room, his statement ‘I kick this lots arse all the time’ is directed entirely at them. It is an invitation for them to interrupt and contest him, which signals his perception of his two housemates as more knowledgeable, more ‘powerful’ gamers. Indeed, as soon as he is challenged (‘is that right?’) he backs down, undermining his positive assertion (‘ahem’) before dragging out and loudly proclaiming ‘yeah’, said in a wholly unconvincing and ironic manner. What is interesting, however, is that, by comparison with Sara above, and the criticism of Steve by Simon (discussed in the previous chapter), Al is allowed to regain some semblance of authority by re-framing his comments into a much more personal assertion. The authority he can claim over detailing his own private narrative leaves his gaming skills as an area of comedic value for the rest of the house. Al uses humour and irony to subtly undermine the more serious performances of his housemates, miming and gesticulating funny gaming sketches throughout the interviews to inject comedy and a light heartedness to the otherwise quite competitive and serious conversations. The role of comedian is one also performed by Sara in her humorous sketching of a child lost in a whirl of femininity (earlier) which works in a similar fashion to Al’s comments to gently undermine the authority figures in the house, subtly offering social skills in opposition to knowledge. The juxtaposition they set up – of social skills in contrast to gaming knowledge – is an important distinction and one I return to in the following chapter. It concentrates gamers’ attention on the present social elements of the conversations, forcing a light heartedness and sometimes even self-reflection. Indeed, what Sara and Al similarly and frequently do is remind the other housemates of the gaming elements of the videogame. Furthermore, Al and Sara’s ability to make people laugh is a very unthreatening role within the power dynamics of the house, inviting people to laugh either at or with the comedian. What these comedic roles achieve, however, is the alleviation of the tension and competitiveness marking the more serious performances. Taken together, these extracts highlight alterations in performances, which depend not only on who is present, but also on the imagined responses of the other housemates. It is not only the case of the ‘narrator’ claiming (momentary) responsibility and meaning for the collection of otherwise disparate events in his/her past. Nor is it only the case of the technology generating these narratives by bearing the emotional and sensory relations beyond the initial playing of the game (which, as we can see from Al’s comments, are not always ‘positive’). It is also the way the social power dynamics of the household facilitates these power relations through the embodied performances of the gamers: through praxis.

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Again, the social frames these performances (and gaming, and the technology) by offering a structure through which to perform – a socio-cultural structure of performance. Yet the social also generates new performances in the space between imagined (symbolic) power and the performance of it. Arguably, if Sara had not altered her performance because she imagined a superior or more aggressive knowledge for Simon, she would not have performed such an overt display of femininity. If Bob had not imagined Al as less competent than himself, he might have reacted more harshly. In other words, within these narratives of gaming are possibilities for change – perhaps the generative or protensive possibilities McNay (2000) acknowledges when she discusses the imagined elements of narrative. In turn, these imagined dimensions of narrative relate to the desire to narrate which, in turn, reflects the imagined interpreter/ audience of such narratives. Such imaginings and desires produce what Lois McNay has referred to as the ‘protensive’ dimensions of subject formation when she argues that the imagined or generative elements of subject formation are vital for understanding the subject’s capacity for/to change. When McNay talks about ‘protensive’ subject formation, she is talking, in many ways, about an imagined (future orientated) space of possibility (the imagined self performing, or the desired narrative). Indeed, she draws out these similarities, when she quotes Ricoeur: Narrative structures are ontological in that they are grounded in the ‘prenarrative capacity’ of life understood as a ‘being-demanded-to-be-said’ inherent to the structure of human action and experience (Ricoeur 1991: 19). Narrative interpretation is central to action in that it is only possible to distinguish it from biological phenomena of physical movement or psycho-psychological behaviour, through the utilization of the networks of expressions and concepts provided in natural language [sic]. (2000: 86)

For Ricoeur, then, the ontological element of narrative is centred on the ‘prenarrative capacity’: the possibilities of narrative, which are not always played out in the act of narrative. McNay makes two important points here, which are intertwined. The first is that narrative has a fantasized or imagined space of possibility and that this space is located in a ‘pre-narrative capacity’. This is important, as I have said, because it maintains a generative and imagined space for narrative. For Sara and Al, for example, their imagined conceptions of housemates are clearly as powerful as any performative role. The second important point is that she follows this comment with an insistence on the sociopolitical relevance of narrative, which relates to Somers and Gibson’s argument above around meta and micro narratives. The desire to story, (in Ricoeur’s words, the ‘being-demanded-to-be-said’), the structure of narrative, and the way we understand action through narrative structures (or, to use Foucault’s phrase, through discourse), are what make narrative socio-political. In the narration and performance, such possibilities are taken up or reduced so that, while conscious

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acknowledgement of the powers structures at play (which are also being produced by the gamers), may suggest agency, in fact, as with Sara, they may have the opposite effect of ultimately silencing her. To return to Sara and Al, then, acknowledging the power structures (as Sara does retrospectively), does not necessarily equate with corporeal, embodied or narrative agency if they have little impact onto individual performance.

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Chapter 3

Articulating Pleasure: Gender, Technology and Power1 If the previous chapter addressed the construction of particular positions in relation to gaming technologies, this chapter addresses what those positions facilitate when it comes to discussing the games themselves. Each section addresses particular discourses of the game, and the position the gamer claims in relation to it. Closeness or distance from the game itself and the pleasures of gaming produces certain positionalities as gamers attempt to articulate what they are enjoying about their current gaming experiences. My argument is not only that particular gendered positions are adopted in relation to gaming, but also that this profoundly shapes gameplay and the potential engagements with, and during, gaming. Chapter 4 explicitly addresses gameplay ‘itself’, but here I address the various positionalities adopted by the gamers and how this shapes any subsequent possible discussion around pleasure, genre or the games themselves. While gamers clearly find gaming pleasurable, how they negotiate and articulate pleasure is partly determined by their imagined and performed gaming identities of in/competent gamer, ir/rational adult, or un/social gamer, (for example). This not only means that such claimed positions have certain individual implications in terms of pleasure and engagement; it also means that normative gaming is being constructed in very particular ways. The initial four sections broadly discuss how gamers attempt to construct a critical distance and/or address pleasure. Humanizing the technology and the techno-popular rhetoric of gameplay and playability produce varying relationships with the games, but continue to construct the male gamers as in control, rational, and knowledgeable. For the female gamers, an initial position of exclusion is claimed, which variously prevents or produces discourses with which gaming can be discussed. Indeed, it is only really as consumers that women can criticize the games or, indeed, claim wider knowledge about them. I argue, however, that while this position may facilitate some level of interaction, it ultimately works, as Angela McRobbie has suggested (2004: 260), to potentially silence these women in profound ways. 1  Some of the material and arguments quoted in this chapter were originally published in Thornham, H. (2009) ‘Claiming a Stake in the Videogame: What Grown-Ups Say to Rationalize and Normalize Gaming’ in Convergence, 15(2): 141–59 and Thornham, H. (2008) “‘It’s a Boy Thing”: Gaming, Gender and Geeks’ in Feminist Media Studies 8(2): 127–42.

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Following this, I address how the more active gamers discuss the pleasures of gaming. Beth’s unique account of FF (Final Fantasy), to which she is ‘addicted’, and Simon’s discussion of the FMV’s (full motion video sequences) in GTA (Grand Theft Auto) provide interesting points of comparison, particularly as they position each gamer very differently in relation to the text. While Simon maintains his critical distance, claiming cultural capital as a wider media critic; Beth offers close identifications, emotional defence of avatars, and romance narratives to which she is deeply, and personally invested. The roles as game critic or consumer, I argue, allow gamers to draw on wider discourses, which, in turn, facilitate the articulation of certain pleasures. What emerges is a gendered relationship: public, techno-rational claims which continue to demonstrate agency and authorship on the part of the gamer and private, identificatory, romance or narrative discussions of individual engagement detailing personal preference. While one discussion claims cultural capital in the kudos of gaming, the knowledge of the game, and the use of gaming terminology; the other is sidelined into personal expressions of desire and pleasure, and consequently dismissed or undermined. My argument, then, is that the different ways gaming, pleasure and the games themselves are discussed allows us to read these articulations not only as frameworks for gaming practices, but also as careful, negotiated productions of gender. In a similar vein to Valerie Walkerdine’s (2007) research on children and gaming, I argue that we can read gaming not only as a terrain on which a certain kind of gender is produced, but also as a place where masculinity and femininity is managed and negotiated. Walkerdine argues that gaming can be seen as a site where ‘the contradictory performances of masculinity and femininity become sedimented’ (2007: 57). Her argument is that this is not only a momentary production or management of gender. The implications for both gender and gaming extend well beyond the momentary production of them. Indeed, when we compare Beth’s accounts of FF with the all male household and their discussion of pleasurable gaming, the contrasts resonate even more starkly. The group attempt to outline what is pleasurable about driving games suggests that pleasure is even harder to articulate in a group setting. We see instead, the evocation of popular gaming terms such as playability and gameplay, which becomes, once again, useful tools for positioning the knowledgeable gamer. This penultimate section, then, asks where pleasure can be located in social settings. And, when compared to the treatment of ‘geek’ gamers in each household, it becomes clear that a carefully regimented normative practice is being constructed. Gaming is being normalized as insistently social, and this I argue, shapes the available pleasures, which can be articulated. Pleasure as identification, as narrative or avatar investment or as emotional involvement in the ethos of the game, is claimed as excessive, geek and perverse. The final section, then, ultimately suggests that it is the social setting of gaming, which is shaping gameplay and how it can be articulated. Gaming is deeply gendered, then, but not because men and women necessarily play differently. It is gendered because the wider utilizable discourses to which each individual can turn to in order to outline

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pleasure, desire, or investment, is deeply gendered. What are ultimately produced, are carefully regimented performances, which continue to produce gaming along traditional gendered, heteronormative lines. It becomes apparent that gaming is not only about a particular game or situation: it is also about pleasure, desire, performance, identification, and depends perhaps most importantly (to reiterate Butler’s phrase), on who is imagining whom. Articulating Technology Given that the articulations by gamers not only indicate constructed positions in relation to the games, but also how they conceptualize the games themselves, it seems pertinent to outline the conversations where the games and technology were discussed in detail. It should be noted that all the accounts represented in this chapter are from actively played games. There is much invested in these comments, then, not least because they are expressions of pleasure, and of (sometimes immersive) engagement. These expressions, not only have the potential to leave the gamer open to ridicule by other housemates, but they are also negotiations between personal and individual investment and social normative discourse. I start initially with the discussion of the game as a manipulative, autonomous figure in a relationship, before going on to discuss the more techno-popular rhetoric employed by the male gamers – gameplay and playability. Taken together, these two sections outline attempts at maintaining critical distance while also attempting to articulate pleasure. They also demonstrate that although the immersive experiences discussed by many game theorists (for discussions of immersion see King and Krzywinska 2006: 24–37, Juul 2005: 190–1, Newman 2004: 103–6, Murray 1997: 97–125) may be experienced, admitting to them is a very different matter. Humanizing technology figures that technology immediately in relational terms, where the game ‘reacts’ or ‘responds’ to the gamer. It is a common trait used throughout the households, and although the gamers initially express annoyance or frustration with the game, the majority of the moments they are narrating are those of sudden and unexpected pleasure. What is interesting in terms of rationalizing gaming, however, is that in order to talk about pleasure, the game has to be talked about on a relational, ‘human’ level. Furthermore, this is a relationship where the technology is clever, manipulative and powerful: it ‘gives’ the gamers these moments in a carefully timed dynamic, in order to keep them playing. The console is not just a programmed machine, then, gamers have playful and frustrating relationships with it: Joe: it knows just when to reward you, just when you’re kind of a bit sick of it you score a fantastic goal and you’re like ‘wow, I’ve won’. (1.3) Beth: I’m usually thinking ‘oh I’ll just play for half an hour’ and then I’m stuck there for an hour and a half. It knows though. Just when you start to think ‘I’ll

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Ethnographies of the Videogame turn it off now’ or ‘I’ve had enough’ it gives you a really cool bit and then you’re stuck there for ages. (3.1) Lorna: but it gets to the point where you get really frustrated, and you’re like ‘I’ve got to do this bit’ and didn’t have a memory card and it knew I didn’t have a memory card. So it did all these nasty, nasty things, like once round there wasn’t anything there, but then the second time, a boulder came at you and you weren’t expecting it so it killed you. So I had to go right back to the beginning, so I gave up [laughs]. (1.3)

While the majority of gamers figure gaming as a relationship at some point in the research, what is interesting is where the gamers place ‘power’ within it. For Joe, pleasure comes from his own ability to advance in a game that cedes power to him and allows him to score, or at least ceases to prevent him from scoring. The game is supportive of his gameplay, which has been frustrated until this point. The game teases him, but eventually gives in to his superior tactics, and rewards him by allowing him to score. It is Joe, then, who advances the game and who is duly rewarded for his excellence. These are moments where Joe wins. He not only wins in terms of establishing control over the relationship, he also wins in terms of attaining the objective of the game. Valerie Walkerdine discusses the necessity of winning in her research on children and gaming, arguing that the equation of action-masculine produces anxieties about failure, which are comparatively gendered feminine (2007: 35–40). While the anxieties about losing are less evident here, it is noticeable that the account offered by Joe is the productive, active account of success. We could read this account, then, as an establishment of masculinity not only because of the ultimate achievement of the gaming objective, but also because of the inequitable relationship with the game, which cedes to Joe, allowing action onto it. Beth and Lorna, in contrast, have different relationships with the game. It is variety that the game offers, and this does not necessarily equate with progression (indeed, in Lorna’s case, it resulted in the cessation of gameplay). The power relation is figured differently, with the game providing variation rather than rewarding them. They not only conceive their own ability differently (despite being competent and frequent gamers), but the relationship they have with the game is much more negotiated. It is the game, arguably, which is figured as the more ‘powerful’ partner in their relationships. Just when the gamer decides to cease gaming, the game ‘offers’ them something more. This is quite a playful relationship based on the mutual desire of machine and gamer to keep playing. Furthermore, it is the promise of pleasure – pleasure deferred – which keeps them entertained. This is the promise of pleasurable fulfilment before the ‘end’ of gameplay, and a large part of the pleasure is in the expectation of the fulfilment of it. What is also interesting is not only that pleasure has to figure in a relationship which is based on power, but that the machine has to be rationalized as fulfilling gamers’ needs and desires. In some senses, figuring gaming as a relationship normalizes it, to

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the extent that pleasure becomes non-threatening and contained. These are not the rampant urges of sexually available individuals; they are not the immersive, or penetrative ‘loss’ into virtual reality. Rather, they are figured as normal, social relationships in which desire and pleasure are both simultaneously contained and fulfilled: they are the closed, safe relationships of heterosexual couples. Gameplay and Playability The second ‘mode’ of discussion about games relates specifically to the male gamers and the techno-popular terms ‘gameplay’, ‘playability’ and ‘interaction’. These are terms often found in gaming magazines, and I argue that the gamers utilize them frequently as expressions of cultural capital. Generally speaking, ‘gameplay’ is used interchangeably with ‘playability’ and refers to diegetic narrative, as well as graphics, control, ease, and possibilities within the game. Interaction is, by comparison, the social situation in which gaming is performed, as well as investments in characters, identifications and desire to progress. As we see from the accounts below, the particular rhetoric used by the gamers creates an analytical distance between them and the game, continuing performance of knowledgeable, rational gamers while also facilitating a space where pleasure can potentially be discussed. Further, what becomes increasingly clear is not only that gaming rhetoric is conducive to other (gendered) performances of expertise, rationality, and analytic distance, but also that the terms have very different (often confused) meanings and explanations for the gamers. The extracts below are quoted at length in order to highlight not only the level of confusion, but also the range of answers offered: Joe: I’m not that interested in the graphics. If you want good graphics you don’t play this. Coz the graphics are good, but they’re not amazing. Like if you want good graphics you’d play GTA or something. It’s all about playability Interviewer: and by playability what exactly do you mean? Joe: what I mean about playability is that ... Simon: you can do a lot with the ball with out just, it becomes quite instinctive, coz you know what you’re doing with it, you can just watch the game and stuff Joe: but it also feels like you have absolute control over it. Like if you’re playing a fighting game, you know if you can get someone who can sort of tap on the buttons and you play with someone who’s played it for years, they can do pretty decently. Whereas if I play someone who’s never played, they’d be rubbish because there’s all sorts of subtle things you can do. Its whether the computer or the game is very responsive to what you do, you know

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Interviewer: so it’s to do with having control? Joe: what they do and then what works and what doesn’t work and things like that … (1.6) Ian: Tetris, Tetris is the best example of playability because there’s no graphics, there’s no story the gameplay is so good Interviewer: is that not to do with how long you’ve been gaming? Ian: Yeah. Yeah Interviewer: so when you say ‘the playability is better on Micro Machines what you actually mean is ‘I’ve been playing it for a long time’ Ian: no Interviewer: or are you saying something technical? Ian: playability, playability, playability is just the game like. What you have to do in the game whether it’s good or, it’s personal choice like. But playability itself is like, basically the game itself. You know, forget all the fancy graphics or whatever. It’s just what you have to do in the game Interviewer: what’s the difference between playability and gameplay? Ian: well. That’s, that’s, you know. I don’t really know. I guess they’re the same thing Sara: isn’t playability about how easy the game is to play and how enjoyable it is to play? I mean this is very enjoyable to play but you have to put more effort into it than something like Micro Machines Ian: yeah Interviewer: so [to Ian] what you mean is gameplay? Sara: [to Ian] what do you mean by ‘gameplay’? Ian: [laughs] I don’t know! (9.2) Cam: I nah, I got Jet Set Willy on my phone Grant: Chuckie Egg

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Duncan: Chuckie Egg’s still alright though Grant: what’s the other one? Jet Pack Duncan: arrghh that’s rubbish, and what was the other one, err. err Grant: Jet Pack 2 … Duncan: err. Speed Ball Grant: that’s alright like, Speed Ball aye. Yeah that was alright that Duncan: quality Grant: see it’s all about your gameplay, sod your graphics Duncan: it is like, yeah. Totally Cam: totally Grant: totally man. (4.2)

It is hard to distinguish between ‘gameplay’ and ‘playability’ from the descriptions above. One of the most striking elements about the responses above is the level of the description of the games ‘themselves’, which are offered as definitions of the terminology. This highlights, I think, not only the inadequacy of the language, and indeed themselves in terms of describing an emotive or sensory experience, it also suggests that once positioned within constructions of rational logical masculinity, they actually have very little recourse in terms of available discourses to describe what is pleasurable about the games. The extracts are divided into two halves, the first two extracts tells us something implicit about ‘gameplay’ and ‘playability’ which refers to the length of time the gamer has gamed, and therefore gamers competency and familiarity with the game. The latter extract, more familiar iterations, are moments when the speaker uses the generic term ‘gameplay’ to produce a particular response. Here, the term also signifies longitude of play and knowledge about terminology and rhetoric, but the terms are utilized for a different result. The speaker is not challenged when making these points, even though (as highlighted through the first two extracts) the term is by no means clearly or universally understood. In other words, the terms signify as an inclusive tool, whereby the speaker can claim authority through its iteration and demonstrate their knowledge of gaming terminology, and the other members of the group are conspiratorial in this: the terms signify cultural capital. It is an easy demonstration of knowledge, which goes unchallenged because complicity signifies inclusion into the knowledgeably created gaming community.

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The initial extracts therefore tell us less about understandings of the terms than the power politics of the group. Further, by comparison with King and Krzywinska’s definition of gameplay as ‘the particular set of non-real-world tasks, goals or potentials set for the player’s enjoyment within an on-screen arena, performed according to a set of pre-established rules and as a result of which a number of different outcomes are possible’ (2006: 9); these definitions seem to be much more subjective feelings of knowing and being able to play the game. They also seem more about the gamers’ own competency levels. If they cannot ‘pick up’ the game so that it becomes ‘instinctual’ then the game has poor ‘gameplay’. Instinctual gaming is, of course, a way to talk about how easy they find the game without undermining the skills of the gamer. It also highlights (as with the extracts earlier) gaming as both a relationship and, like Joe’s account earlier, a relationship they are good at. That playability is tied to the amount of control you exert within this relationship with the game not only implicates their (heteronormative) language of gaming as a relationship of power (the game is responsive to the gamer who is in control), it also works to ‘naturalize’ gaming itself alongside power dynamics, positioning these men as always dominant. Framed in this way, then, enjoyment of a game cannot be related to ‘how easy’ it is, because this would suggest an inferior position for the gamer as well as highlighting his inadequacies in relation to skill, control, and of course, the relationship in general. Positions of Exclusion As we saw with the comments above, the women gamers articulate a very different relationship with the game, and this seems to be premised on the location of power within the relationships they describe. For example, although emphasis continued to be placed on social gaming, the women gamers tended to position themselves, and gaming, as primarily affected by other people’s decisions. In other words, the female gamers do not tend to stake a claim for a particular kind of social gaming because they were ‘simply’ joining in with other gamers in their household. Further, the female gamers all initially spoke about gaming from a (produced, assumed) position of exclusion, which consequently shaped what and how they could talk about gaming. The position of exclusion, I argue, not only has detrimental consequences for actual gameplay (see Chapter 4), it also works to abdicate them from imagined/‘actual’ pressures to perform. It also impacts onto the kinds of knowledge women gamers can claim. I suggest below, for example, that one of the only positions available to them, having excluded themselves from gaming in general, is as a consumer. While this position may facilitate the fantasies and pleasures I outline later in the chapter, because it makes gaming an inherently personal experience, it also means they cannot claim the wider, generic, knowledge frequently articulated by their male counterparts.

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It is not that these gamers game any less than their male counterparts, or are any less competent, but they are actively working to exclude themselves from the (potentially) competitive atmosphere of social gaming by proclaiming an initial lack of interest or unsuitability to the genre. Furthermore, I am not suggesting that these assertions are wholly the product of the female gamers, but are instead enmeshed into wider marketing, discursive and visual elements of the games. What is apparent, however, is that this obvious gendering of certain games and genres is wholly the preserve of the female gamers in terms of vocally suggesting reasons for non-participation. I am suggesting, therefore, that rather than highlighting anything about competency, ability or pleasure, these extracts, in a similar way to the male gamers above, tell us something about a hegemonically constructed femininity, which is both purposeful but also detrimental to possible gaming scenarios: Obviously it’s a football game and … for the boys ... if I started playing the game, Joe would basically describe what to do, so he’d be like, ‘you’ve got to press that to do that de de, de de, de de’. (1.3)

Lorna’s comment, typical of many female interviewees, highlights the initial aspect of gaming I want to concentrate on, namely the relationship between genre and gender. While the first objection to ISS/Pro Evolution seems straightforward enough, the second relates to interaction during play, and has a number of nuances. Of course, in many ways the initial comment produces the second because it works to exclude Lorna from the game and therefore place her in an inferior position to which Joe can dictate action. Furthermore, while I am not disputing the validity of Lorna’s comment, it is clear from her ensuing suggestions not only that she plays Pro Evolution competently, she excels at it: I actually scored one of the best scores that he’s ever seen anyone score in ISS. (1.3)

Lorna’s careful re-positioning of herself both as subject to Joe’s instruction and as an excluded demographic in terms of the genre re-negotiates her success at the game in relation to their relationship. In fact, her success is not only the result of Joe’s instruction, but her comments deny any competitiveness of gameplay or knowledge about the game. It is a very interesting shift which enables her to proclaim competency as a carefully constructed novice gamer who excels because of Joe’s instruction, while completely erasing any element of competitiveness or challenge to Joe’s ‘authority’. Her description of gameplay also subtly re-aligns her with the women in the room through mimicking Joe’s instruction as quite patronizing. This is a very subtle gesture, however, which serves the multiple purposes of constructing her role as less authoritative and knowledgeable than his, and subtly undermining his position through the slightly patronizing tone and the creation of him as a stereotypical male partner. Her alignment with the other

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women in the room through this shift suggests some interesting things not only about her perception of them (as less competent, unknowledgeable gamers) and of herself as having to play this role; but also about her perception of femininity, and more specifically, her perception of femininity in relation to gaming. Lorna’s comments are not unique for the female gamers interviewed. Indeed, gaming seems to require a wider socio-cultural negotiation with certain stereotypes beyond the immediacy of ‘actual’ gameplay. What becomes increasingly interesting is why these female gamers make such assertions when they not only game, but are competent gamers who find gaming pleasurable. It suggests that these caveats about gendered games and gaming, are working to negotiate a space from which female gamers can speak without being immediately dismissed or ridiculed. It is also a position claimed though an insistence on individual and personal inclination. These are not claims to wider knowledge, nor are they political and the only expertise such claims offer the female gamers, is expertise over their own preference. That this is a necessarily excluded and personal position from which to speak emphasizes the imagined power politics at play here and also, of course, the very real relations between imagined and ‘actual’ power. As well as basic proclamations about gaming being ‘for the boys’, there is a more nuanced gendering which encompasses design, marketing, the look or feel of the console, use, and the visual representations of on-screen avatars. The scope in terms of arguments for the gendering of the videogame suggests that excluded positions relate not only to a particular genre, but to the entire discourse of gaming: The guys’ll carry on going and carry on going until they kill the monster, whereas girls’ll do it for a while and then think ‘well isn’t there another thing I could do?’ (3.2) It is more marketed at boys .. just how, the way it looks has been blokey, black, sleek machine sat in the corner of the room bursting entrails of wires. And the games are more blokey. (1.4) Its a boy thing. (9.2) It is for the boys. (1.3) Girls don’t use it.. the way blokes do. (1.2)

All the statements above position the female speaker in an excluded position from the game. They also create normative gaming as the explicit preserve of their male counterparts. Yet all the women quoted above competently and frequently game. Furthermore, the games they talk about (Pro Evolution, Final Fantasy, GTA, and Tomb Raider respectively) are all games played by the speakers. These are not comments regarding competency, pleasure or ‘actual’ gaming habits, but performative comments working to create a space in which the speakers can game.

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It is the perception of inclusion for male gamers and exclusion for female gamers, which is striking. These comments are not, of course, abstracted from the power structures in which they are spoken. Although they support them, there is clearly negotiation particularly if we think about Lorna subtly undermining Joe’s authority and even ability to game. It does raise an interesting issue around gamers saying what they are supposed to say. This is a concern initially raised by Cassell and Jenkins in their study of young female gamers (1998: 19), and reiterated by Diane Carr (2006: 171–2) in her later study. They all suggest that when young female gamers are asked about gaming preferences, they often respond with an assertion supporting acceptable performances of femininity rather than ‘actual’ preference. What they are supposed to say clearly resonates quite forcefully in adult female gamers as well, suggesting that socio-cultural power dynamics of gaming and gameplay have not only persistently worked contrary to notions of femininity but that, despite inroads of research, they continue to do so. Preference, opinion and gaming habits are also often undermined when it is a female gamer who is speaking, so perhaps it is unsurprising that they continue to offer caveats before expressing gaming opinions. One exchange in Sara’s Brighton household is a good example of this, where Sara claims throughout the conversation that ‘I really, really quite like the dance mat’ (1.3). Finally, her (male) housemate loudly and incredulously highlights the fact that she has never actually played it: ‘you said you were too tired to play and you wouldn’t have a go!’ (1.3). This exchange recurs between Sara and her other housemates and is interesting for a number of reasons. First because Sara clearly had never been on the dance mat during social gameplay and therefore Ben becomes incredulous that she is claiming preference for it. In other words, it is not just gaming per se that ‘counts’, but social gaming. Secondly, there is an evident pressure to express preference, but the preference must also be socially vetted, and stand up as socially verifiable. Third, it is interesting because the preference Sara claims in this exchange is a typically ‘feminine’ one (a frequent statement from male gamers is to insist that dance mats are for women or young children). It is a ‘safe’ option for Sara, but she is nevertheless undermined for it. Finally, it is interesting because of what it suggests for the dynamics of the house, whose members seem far more interested in exposing and confronting the ‘lies’ of other housemates, than supporting them. It is a frequent (bullying) tactic, which undermines the authority of the speaker, leaving them with little opportunity to continue. In many senses, then, we see the same ‘outing’ of Sara as Ricky at the end of this chapter. Sara responds this time by saying, ‘I like the idea of it in theory’ (1.3), but in later conversations her defence of certain games begins to mirror her other housemates’ defences, and she starts to insist (following on from Simon) that games are good ‘ice-breakers’. In a later interview in the all-female house, Sara also commented retrospectively on gameplay:

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Expressing preference seems tied, then, to a negotiation with the group dynamics and to identity performance, which is loaded with temporal and social, cultural and political nuances. These claims seem primarily integration techniques into the conversation, or exclusionary techniques away from gaming. Cassell and Jenkins’ (1998) concern about female gamers saying what they’re supposed to seems entirely valid. But it is also clear that similar contextual or social frameworks are also at play for the male gamers. It was clear from observing these households game, and recording them prior to, during and after gaming, that the wider discourses of genre and gender, claims to rationality and claims to knowledge, have certain implications for what, when, and who can game socially. For the women gamers, certain genres equated with shifts in the social dynamics, making them less eager to play those games. Similarly, the wider assumptions both about certain genres, and about the technology itself being gendered, hegemonically positioned the women within a less equal power relation to both the male gamers, and the technology itself. It’s clear to a certain extent that the women perpetuated this unbalance in their discussions about gaming being ‘a boy thing’, even when they negotiated it through active play. Rhetoric of Consumption2 One of the only avenues available for a knowledgeable critique of the games was, as I suggested earlier, as a position of consumer. We continue to see a personal discourse here, but there is also an element of criticism offered particularly around the stereotyped figure of the avatars. However, in keeping with Aphra Kerr’s research (see Kerr 2003), the women tend to argue that although they may find the avatars, genres or technology problematic or offensive, it would impede minimally onto gameplay:

2  Some of the arguments and material of this section originally appeared in: Thornham, H. and McFarlane, A. (2011) ‘Cross-Generational Gender Constructions: Women, Teenagers and Technology’ in Sociological Review, 59(1): 64–85.

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Sara: I think it’s more marketed at boys. Just how, the way it looks has been blokey, black, sleek machine sat in the corner of the room bursting entrails of wires. And the games are more blokey [pause] Interviewer: So are you, I mean you said Micro Machines was good because you get to be a woman as well Sara: yeah [laughs] Interviewer: is that important to you? Sara: it’s not hugely important but it does suggest that maybe the makers have thought that it appeals to boys and girls. I mean you can’t be a woman on GTA or whatever and something like Lara Croft is just designed to be a male fantasy figure [laughs at herself]. Yeah I guess it does matter to me. I wouldn’t want to play Lara Croft I just think she’s so wrong. And I always choose the woman thing on Micro Machines [laughs]. (1.4) Hannah: I actually find the female characters quite offensive. Like, I’d not say it to Simon who has got all the games, but the Final Fantasy women and Lara Croft – you know what I mean? All these games with skinny, tiny kick-ass women, they’re supposed to be liberating. They just annoy me Interviewer: Would it stop you playing the game? Hannah: I’d probably play – just to keep Simon happy. I wouldn’t buy it though. (6.1)

There are a number of ways we can read these comments (see also Thornham 2008: 131–4 and 2011: 76–8). The first relates to performative concepts of femininity. There is clearly a disjuncture between what they say and do here, when their criticism does not frame decisions to play that game. This first reading echoes much research around the performative aspects of femininity (for example, Butler 1990, Ang 1991, Gray 1992), which suggests performativity is embedded in socio-cultural structures and depends very much on ‘who is imagining whom’, to reiterate Butler’s phrase (Butler 2004b: 10). Indeed, Sara laughs self-consciously when she makes more critical claims, softening their effect and undermining the authority with which she makes them. Hannah makes it clear that while she is critical of the female avatars of Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider, she would not voice these opinions to her male housemate. Both housemates are very aware of the context in which they are speaking, offering perhaps contradictory comments as they negotiate the social arena. The second interpretation relates to the emphasis placed on housemates and peers. In a similar vein to the extracts of gameplay in the following chapter, the

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gamers emphasize appeasement and care of their housemates and friends over their own criticism of the games – qualities Walkerdine claims as distinctly feminine (2006: 520). They also acknowledge the problematic construction of the visual and verbal discourse of gaming (‘black sleek machine’) and the avatars (‘skinny, tiny’ ‘so wrong’) but both gamers either laugh at the suggestion this could influence reaction (and undermine and dismiss this notion) or claim it would not prevent gaming. And, as suggested, the criticisms are offered from the position of a consumer, where, in keeping with the post feminist tradition, economic choice and freedom can be exercised. We could argue, then, that talking from a position as consumer allows the women to offer a critique of the women avatars, genre and technology. However, such criticisms are carefully bracketed with proclamations about normative gaming practices to suggest that, although the images are problematic, they would not necessarily prevent gameplay. In turn this frames such statements as individual and personal reflections with limited power to affect actual gaming dynamics (and in this sense, there are similarities with McRobbie’s notion of postfeminism 2004: 260). The wider discourse they draw on, then, produces very different effects when we think of the male gamers above. For the male gamers, their individual identity is complimented by their knowledge and expertise of gaming, continuing to produce them as autonomous and in control. For the women gamers, agency is continually negotiated and carefully positioned, and if we think of the previous chapter, temporary. In the face of other housemates, and actual practice, their criticisms and assertions become more tenuous. Indeed, we could argue, that knowledge, expertise and competency become undermined in the effort to perform, what Walkerdine has deemed traditional feminine qualities of ‘care, co-operation, concern, and sensitivity to others’ (see Walkerdine 2006: 520). Beth and Final Fantasy If the male gamers position their analyses in techno-popular rhetoric of gameplay and playability, and the female gamers position themselves as consumers, there are also rare moments of much closer, personal accounts of identification and pleasure, which should be acknowledged. In this section, I focus specifically on Beth’s account of her engagement with the FF (Final Fantasy) series, which she has been a long term gamer of. The game she discusses is Final Fantasy XII, and her accounts offer a stark contrast to both the male gamers and the female gamers above, who seem, comparatively, distant and analytical. Starting initially with her account of the avatars, I then discuss how she describes the narrative of the game, before comparing it to Simon’s accounts of similar episodes: Beth: so there’s Yuna, who’s supposed to be very naive and save the world. Not too keen. Never liked the good girls. Rikku, who is a bit of a monkey. And Paine who is mysterious and seems to know all the baddies. I like Rikku: she’s

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like a monkey. Rikku’s about sixteen and Yuna’s supposed to be about eighteen I think.. well that is the age isn’t it? Between sixteen and thirty is the age you go of and do stupid adventurous things. You couldn’t have somebody who was about ninety! That would be a bit ridiculous! They would be able to do any of the funny kicks! Interviewer: and what do you reckon about the fact they’re all white and skinny? Beth: err, well I have to say, if I did as much running as they did, I’d be skinny [Interviewer laughs] what?! They run everywhere! I enjoy beating the bad bosses! It’s funny! And you can make them dress up in silly clothes Interviewer: ok, so you enjoy dressing up, dressing them up Beth: and killing people! Interviewer: so it’s kind of like Barbie but with a very angry edge? Beth: yeah! But without the ridiculous body image Interviewer: of Barbie? Beth: of Barbie Interviewer: you don’t think they’re as bad? Beth: well no, they’re just thin women! They’re just skinny women. I know lots of skinny women. (3.1)

Beth defends her attachment to the FF women in the face of my questioning, arguing that of course the women would be skinny if they were this active. She refuses at this point to recognize that it is a computerized and constructed game she is talking about, and discusses the avatars as they were ‘real’ people, telling me that she ‘knows lots of skinny women’. It is a defence of Rikku, Paine and Yuna’s body shape and dress, which is developed as a defence against a critique of their overly-thin body. Contemporary discussions around the figure of the avatar in videogame theory concentrate on the stereotyped construction of the avatar’s ‘body’, which the gamer both objectifies and plays with (see Carr 2002: 171–81). Unlike the suggestions in earlier accounts of cyberspace (for example, Turkle 1995: 12, Rheingold 1991: 346, Mitchell 1995: 12), where the on-screen avatars are constructed as fantasized images of self-identity; videogame theory argues that avatars both conform to ready-made gendered, raced and sexed bodies but complicate issues of objectification through play. Lara Croft, for example, has ‘sex-doll proportions’ (Carr 2002: 171), but, as Carr suggests we manipulate,

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engage with, and control her in perhaps contradictory ways (ibid.: 176). Beth’s account above, where she moves from statements about herself as autonomous (‘never liked the good girls’), to identification (‘if I did as much running as they did, I’d be skinny’), to defence (‘I know lots of skinny women’), demonstrates some of these negotiations not least through her multiple, perhaps contradictory, positionalities adopted in relation to this game. She also, as the extract below demonstrates, constructs a particular romance narrative – a particular context – for the game, which provides further avenues of investment on her part. Indeed, the avatars goals become hers and the platform game becomes the fulfilment of a romance. Although the romance narrative is part of the diegetic story, Beth takes it further, developing it in accordance with her own fantasies/pleasures: Beth: well he’s not a baddie but, basically what happened, what you saw was eons ago, this guy and err the woman, and a woman who looks a lot a lot like Yuna and who wears, who has Yuna’s original Dress Sphere, which is, basically depending on what they’re wearing, the three main characters have different abilities and um the original one, the one she wears all the time used to belong to this woman called Lenne, oh it’s probably not pronounced like that, but anyway, and umm.. she’s starting sometimes to take over Yuna on occasion. Because her boyfriend’s come back, and the thing is they were killed at the foot of Vegnagun a long time ago … And they were trying to be together. So when Yuna saw him in a vision he wanted Yuna to be with him, as Lenne. So he’s angry that he was killed and separated from his love for a thousand years so he wants to activate Vegnagun and blow up the world. The two faction leaders are trying to stop him Interviewer: what do you think is going to happen? Beth: I think Yuna will try and protect the world as it is now, but I think she’ll have to battle with herself to do it, or not herself but, to do it. Because the woman, the one that’s occasionally taking over her body doesn’t want to destroy the world because Yuna gave this unifying concert because Yuna was a famous pop star. She gave a unifying concert because all the factions were falling apart. They’d lost their leaders and were just killing each other so she gave this concert and Lenne sang through her and sang this amazing song that unified the world coz they put it up on screens everywhere and it had a hypnotic effect. So we assume that the woman, Lenne, wants to unify not to destroy but obviously, the man she loves wants to destroy, so who knows? (3.2)

The romance narrative Beth highlights here references the main storyline of the game, but is also an indication of her pleasures in storying it and the emphasis she places on the romance narrative above other narratives (revenge, rescue, friendship and teenage angst). Her narrative (by comparison with the storyline of the game) is a merging of both what she has gleaned from the game, and her own opinions

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on it. It is the loss of a lover, which prompts Yuna’s quest, and the aim of the game culminates in the recovery of both lover and heterosexual relationship. However, while the heteronormative romance is a common trope of both videogames and other media, it is interesting that it is insistently this narrative, which is highlighted in detail throughout the interviews with Beth. In other words, her investment in this narrative surpasses its function within the game as simply a structuring device. She adds commentary of her own (‘he’s angry that he was killed’) and interprets the threat of its dissolution (and therefore the threat of failing to complete the game) as the mis-direction of Tidus’ romantic intentions. The fact that he wants Yuna to be with him ‘as Lenne’ threatens possibilities of resolution not because it affects the ability to complete the game (the aim is the romantic resolution) but because Tidus potentially does not desire Yuna, but her previous incarnation Lenne. Despite Yuna’s completion of all the tasks and missions within the game then, the resolution for Beth remains dependent on a romance narrative which she not only subscribes to, but clearly identifies with, and takes pleasure in recounting. It is a very similar account when we compare it to Janice Radway’s work on the romance novel. For Radway’s romance narrative, the female heroine’s social identity is initially destroyed, and the story centres on her recovery of it through the re-establishment of her in a more sexual and emotionally fulfilling role within a heterosexual relationship (1984: 134). However, it is not only the similarity in terms of romance narrative itself, but in the way both Beth and the Smithton women of Radway’s research identify with, and use, the narrative as a means of escaping the quotidian. As Radway suggests in her introduction, one of the most surprising realizations of her research was that the Smithton women ‘constructed the act of romance reading as a “declaration of independence”’ (1984: 7). It was the event of reading as well as the text, which produced this, facilitating time and space away from their daily routines (ibid.). Seen in this light, Radway offers a plausible explanation for the multiple positions adopted by Beth in relation to the game, as well as potential comparisons with videogame theorists, particularly criticisms leveled at the representations of the avatar, and the problematising of these criticisms through the event of gaming. Simon and FMV’s If Beth offers a range of positionalities in her account of FF above, it is noticeable that Simon’s comments of the same episodes Beth discusses are markedly different. Simon discusses the full motion video sequences – the moments where the avatars within a game ‘act’ without any intervention from the gamer. This is the ‘unifying concert’ to which Beth refers above, where the side chapter concludes in an FMV of Yuna singing and ‘unifying the world’. There are a number of issues I want to address in drawing a comparison between Simon and Beth’s comments. The first relates to an issue already addressed in this chapter: what these positions facilitate for the gamer. I argued earlier that, by comparison to the women, the male gamers

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can continue to speak as autonomous and in control, whereas the claims made by the women produces tensions between identity-as-gamer and identity-asconsumer. In a similar vein to the male gamers above, I argue that by comparison with Beth’s multiple positions, Simon maintains a position as critic, drawing on wider cultural capital to cement this performance. The second issue relates to the design of these episodes. As Newman has suggested, such episodes are often considered dull by gamers, yet they are key moments for outlining the ‘narrative’ of the game: ‘they are designed to deliver a story line and delivery expositionary narrative’ (2004: 89). We could argue, then, that the value placed on these episodes relates to the value they hold as narrative for the gamers. In keeping with the earlier comments by the male gamers, narrative rarely figures in accounts of what makes gaming pleasurable. Instead what tends to be valued is the more interactive qualities – ‘gameplay’ and ‘playability’ – the experience of playing the game. In other words, gaming continues to be conceptualized as something done to by the gamer. Narrative, we could argue, insofar as it directs the gamer in terms of aims and character storylines, fits uneasily into these conceptions of the game because it places information and power with the game. Finally, the comparison is interesting for what it continues to suggest about the problematic articulation of pleasure, and in particular the fantasy of ‘being someone else’: Simon: [GTA] is set up like a film as soon as you start playing it, so you’re in the film and once you’re in the game you can do anything you want to do basically. It’s as close as you’ll get to being someone else I think, at the moment. There are options to follow the missions or you can just go round and do whatever. But in Final Fantasy you play it for like two seconds, then you get another stupid video which is repetitive and not even that filmic. In GTA it’s just like an extension of the game, and it doesn’t last that long so you almost feel like you’re playing the game even when you’re watching it. There’s no like division between the game and the sequence so you’re character could be talking to someone in a room and then you realize ‘oh I’m controlling you now’. Whereas usually it would cut away to another clip of film or something like that which is what it’s like in Final Fantasy. It’s separate and clunkier. (1.1)

Although Simon’s explanation of the difference between the FMV’s in the two games are perhaps far from eloquent, the account above does offer some insight around what Simon values within a game. For Simon, pleasures of the game seem to reside in demonstrations of its technical qualities, which, for him, are measured in relation to filmic qualities. It is a multimedia informed analysis of technical ability. It also, of course, draws on wider cultural capital and works to establish him as technically aware, an experienced media analyst, and a film and visual media expert. He enjoys the freedom to ‘do anything you want to do’ both because of the pleasures this offers the gamer in terms of variation, and also because of what it suggests about the advancement of the technology. Highlighting the possibilities

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of ‘being someone else’ as a positive virtue of gaming is a reflection of videogame discourse more generally, and is a comment on how savvy Simon is in relation to knowledge about current desires and the language of the videogame industry. His comment about being as ‘close as you’ll get to being someone else’ is striking both in its resonance with first wave new media theory and in how different it is from anyone else’s comments about what is pleasurable about gaming. The fantasies of ‘being someone else’ are not only highlighted in Rheingold’s flâneurist approach to cyberspace (cited in Chapter 1), but are also reminiscent of Sherry Turkle’s account of the pleasures of cyberspace, ‘play[ing] a role as close to or as far away from one’s “real self” as one chooses’ (1995: 12). However, although Simon’s comment initially seems closely allied with Turkle’s work on virtual selves, when compared to Beth’s extract and the conversation below, it is clear something else is also going on. Simon’s comment seems more an attempt to rationalize a close identificatory pleasure using the techno language of cyberspace, than it is a confirmation that he feels like ‘someone else’. The oscillation between emphasizing the technical aspects of the game, and the close identificatory pleasure he is trying to rationalize seems, in fact, more akin to Jackie Stacey’s work on stars (1994), where the viewer engages in a play between identity and difference with the onscreen personas. The major difference between Beth and Simon’s account, arguably, is not the nuanced positions in relation to the game, but the overall effect this has for the legitimacy of either gamer as autonomous, rational and critical. Fantasy-Reality In many ways, Simon’s resort to the language of cyberspace is similar to Bob, Duncan’s and Carl’s’ notion of, what they term ‘fantasy-reality’ where the juxtaposition of the two terms highlights exactly what is at stake (rationality, masculinity, the ‘real’ itself) in admissions of identificatory pleasures. The extract below is an excellent example of the three men trying to explain identificatory pleasures in a conversation where the terms fantasy and pleasure do not (cannot) figure: Duncan: I might have picked this conversation up at the wrong point, but, it’s, I think games are about trying to … it’s like fantasy-reality though isn’t it like? Bob: yeah, yeah Duncan: like you want the realism of like feeling like you’re there, but you don’t want it to be like as hard, as hard as it is in the real life. That’s gameplay Bob: that’s exactly what I was saying. Exactly, totally

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Carl: it’s got to be a skill that you can … Bob: coz there’s no point in … Carl: its like a skill in … Duncan: but what I’m saying is like … the Formula 1 games and that, like you’ve got all the drivers there and that and all the cars Bob: you’ve got all the speed and the sounds and everything but … Duncan: and if you want to be Michael Schumacher and be in there, then you can be but you don’t want it to be as hard as it is Bob: as hard Carl: you don’t want it to be so realistic that you’ve got to be, you’ve GOT to be Michael Schumacher [laughter]. (2.1)

Their recourse to notions of skill and complexity within the game is clearly more familiar territory for them. Although Duncan also suggests close identification ‘if you want to be Michael Schumacher … then you can be’, it is immediately framed within a more rational language of difference. Within these parameters, fantasy and identification are positioned opposite logic and rationality so that the very tenuous suggestion of pleasurably identifying with ‘Michael Schumacher’ has to be immediately reconfigured as undesirable and importantly, not the impetus of the game (in fact, this identification would make the game too difficult). Here, feeling like you are Michael Schumacher is not as important as the ‘playability’ of the game and what is interesting about the latter two extracts is that while identification clearly is an undercurrent to these conversations, it is never overtly discussed. Instead the extreme of feeling ‘like’ the avatar on screen is placed in contrast to a feeling of control over the game: it is a choice between total identification and total control. Simon takes pleasure in the more seamless merging between FMV and controlled play – for aesthetic reasons, while Duncan, Carl and Bob seem to be suggesting that actually, the fantasy would make the game impossible. To be Michael Schumacher would make the game too difficult. Furthermore, their understanding of, and identification with, Michael Schumacher is one caught up in their understanding of the ‘real’ him and his skills at driving. Although they talk about ‘fantasy’, then, it is not the easy fantasy of Beth’s creation of a world for her characters and herself. Instead it is already imploding under the weight of their logical conclusions: that to be Michael Schumacher would mean you would have to be (‘unrealistically’) very good at racing. Although these latter conversations appear much more technical or ‘reasonable’, they nevertheless seem to be discussing close identificatory pleasures. There is

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clearly something to be noted about permitted responses, and perhaps in a similar vein to the positions of the female interviewees, the men here also seem unable to overtly discuss certain elements of gaming from their performative position of logic and rationality. What is also clear from the latter extracts is that the very admission of immersion or character identification seems, crucially, gendered. So that by comparison with Beth, where the narrative offers emotive and structuring pleasures, the latter extracts are recognitions of the game’s technological, aesthetic and visual qualities. This means that gender, positionality and language are all enmeshed in the spoken narrative, and the slippage between what can be admitted to socially by comparison with ‘actual’ pleasures is quite significant. Outing the Excessive Gamer When we look at how abnormal, excessive gaming is conceptualized and discussed by gamers, it becomes clear that the negotiated responses above are managements of much more than masculinity. Like Foucault’s discussion of (homo)sexuality (1976: 42–5) perverse gaming constructs the parameters in which normal gaming can and should be experienced. Indeed, we see below the ‘incorporation of perversions and new specification of individuals’ (Foucault 1976: 42–3) in the specific outlining of what constitutes abnormal (and therefore normal) gaming. Although constructed as an extreme, it is nevertheless related and embedded in the power politics of each household as the less powerful household members – here Ricky (a visitor to the house at the time of the conversation), Bob (a new member of the household) and Steve (the youngest household member) – are all ‘outed’ as geek gamers. The implications of what this means, however, extends far beyond gaming habits and bleeds into other identity signifiers – particularly sexuality, but also adulthood and masculinity. What it means to be a normal gamer becomes increasingly apparent here, as the careful and tenuous management of masculinity is contrasted with its ‘other’: Interviewer: Do you want to just introduce yourself and tell us your age and what you do? [laughter] Ricky: I’m going to the pub! [laughter] Ricky: I’m Ricky, I’m 28, and that’s about it really. I work with Alex Interviewer: Do you game?

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68 Ricky: I do, yeah

Steve: you’re talking to a man who actually books holiday time specifically so he can buy a new game and play it to death [laughter] Al: which he’s actually just done … the other day … a week and a half … Interviewer: so what game was that? Ricky: err Gran Turismo Interviewer: And why did you buy that game? Ricky: I like driving games Steve: that’s not the only thing he likes Al: tell me Ricky, why DO you spend so much time on your Playstation? Interviewer: you like driving games? How many hours do you reckon you have spent on that particular game? Rick: no idea. A lot [laughter] Steve: all those hours, cooped up alone, just you and the machine … Carl: what version of Gran Turismo is it? Ricky: err oh I’ve got the old one, you know the … is it … Carl: I don’t know. It’s a quality game like Bob: [to Carl] have you not played Toca though? Toca’s the daddy Carl: No. I don’t have time for games unlike you geeks [laughter]. (1.2)

The part playful and part mocking suggestion here is that solo gaming carries connotations of a social perversion, which is related to the fact that Ricky takes an ‘abnormal’ amount of time off work to game, and because of the fact that he games alone. There are two issues here then. The first is around temporality, and what

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constitutes an acceptable amount of time for gameplay; and the second is around solo gaming, and what this implies for the social, even sexual, inadequacies of the gamer. ‘Geek’ gaming, it seems, is excessive gaming, laden with signifiers of the lone, perverted male, essentially fulfilling all his abnormal pleasures and desires through the technology (‘just you and the machine’). It hints at a failure of masculinity establishing the relationship with the technology rather than, for example, people. It hints at perverted sexuality, if not homosexuality, because it constructs the norm as social and as heteronormative. And, as the extract below suggests, geek gaming is also emotionally and temporally excessive: Simon: Steve used to get really excited. We played one game where we were like, three goals behind and then we scored three goals, and he was jumping around the room and all Joe: he was like hugging us and everything. Weird. But we don’t do that Simon: Yeah it was a bit over the top. He plays everything, and watches the football on the TV, plays on the internet and stuff Joe: that’s not all he does on the internet in his room. Alone Joe: [to Simon] I think I’m more expressive than you in that sense. Like if I’m playing, I like to really, I do a lot of waving my hands about and holding my hand out. I think Simon doesn’t like to show his emotions too much, but I’m more emotional Simon: but for me it’s just a computer game Joe: yeah. It is just a computer game, but I mean for me, that’s the thing but also, I care more about winning than you do [to Simon]. But like Chris [mutual friend] he’ll really, really show his emotions when he’s playing Simon: yeah, he talks to his players as well, and tells them what to do. He’s like ‘get it out! Get it out!’ Joe: [laughs] Simon: but he’s controlling them anyway, you know? It’s over the top Joe: yeah. I still beat him. (1.5)

‘Geek’ gamers, (gamers like Ricky in Leeds, and Steve in Brighton), devote hours and hours to solo gaming, neglecting their ‘real’ social lives in the process. In

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fact, they are socially abnormal, either through choice of game genre, or because of the disproportionate amount of hours devoted to gaming. They also have, as Carl suggests one evening visiting the all-male house in Leeds, ‘a massive social deficiency’ and ‘questionable sexuality’ (2.1). Geek gaming is constructed at best as abnormal, and at worse as some kind of failure of masculinity. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 1, this conception of the gamers is bound up in popular constructions of gaming as violent and damaging: The idea of the isolated, socially inept player is so pervasive and so inexorably bound up in the vision of the obsessive, unbalanced, dangerous gamer, that it is often seamlessly invoked in the discussion and reporting of acts of violence and aggression … The player is not merely socially withdrawn and incapable because of videogames. Rather, their condition is caused by videogames. (Newman 2008: 5)

The isolated, socially inept player, then, does not only emerge in the wider popular press: it also emerges at a micro, discursive level, indicating perhaps the pervasiveness of such an image. It is also interesting, of course, that the threat which they link to ‘geeks’, sexual perversions and homosexuality/femininity, are precisely the conditions on which gaming as pleasurable is based: immersion, escapism, fantasy fulfilment, and pleasure. King and Krzywinska have noted, for example, that immersion is pleasurable precisely because it provides opportunity ‘for other preoccupations and anxieties to be forgotten’ (2006: 33). This research, however, seems to suggest that the other ‘preoccupations and anxieties’ to which King and Krzywinska refer, actually shape gaming, ensuring they bleed into, and inform any mediations with the game. Further, if we consider that one of the major presumptions of videogame theory to date is that games are experienced as solo activities (see Chapter 1), then these findings are even more profound not only in terms of the implications for videogame theory per se, but also for what they suggest about everyday conceptualizations of games and gaming. Indeed, the ‘geek’ gamer is not only constantly referenced, but also actively constructed as a threat to normal gaming. We can read these extracts, then, as an indication of the tenuous nature of heteronormativity and the fact that it is constantly perceived as threatened. In the face of this threat, ‘normal’ gaming has relentlessly to be performed. Indeed, as Ien Ang and Joke Hermes have noted: Articulations [of gender] have to be made again and again, day after day, and the fact that the same articulations are so often repeated – and thus lead to the successful reproduction of established gender meanings, gender relations and gender identities – is not a matter of course; it is, rather, a matter of active reproduction, continual re-articulation. (1991: 319)

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In the face of both the rhetoric of possibilities of new technology, and social and political cultural movements such as feminism in the last fifty years, what is surprising, then, is not only the strength and resilience of these stereotypes, but also the rigid and confining parameters of performable masculinity. ‘Normal’ gamers, by comparison, take pleasure in the social event of gaming. They enjoy social aspects of gaming, which are carefully regimented as heteronormative and framed within other, stereotypically heterosexual (white, macho) activities like, for example, drinking, sport and team play, and competitiveness. ‘Normal’ gamers can enjoy the cult value of games and can also appreciate the technological aspects, but while they can enter into a discussion about technology, it remains within the framework of popular gaming language – of ‘gameplay’ and ‘playability’. Normal gamers retain a critical distance from the game, drawing on wider frameworks of rationality, economics and logic to explain interaction. Intense pleasure, identification and ‘immersion’ verge on ‘geek’ territory, so that although ‘normal’ gamers enjoy gaming, they frame pleasure within ‘real’ social activities and emphasize an active social life. It is not the fantasy or escapism of the game which is pleasurable. Instead, pleasure takes place in a very ‘real’ place and time. Finally, for ‘normal’ gamers, games are useful in their function as social devices (as with Simon, Joe, Bob, and Duncan) and provide a safe environment in which male gamers can perform close (homosocial) relationships with one another without any threat of perversion. One of the most frequent statements in relation to gaming is therefore the insistence on a social context for gaming. Bob’s ‘I never play it on me own, I never touch it’ (2.1) is a familiar trope throughout the conversations of an insistence (overt or subtle) that gaming is only enjoyed, and should only be enjoyed as a social activity: Bob: for me, [cough] I never play it on me own, I never touch it. I’ll only ever use it if I … [Duncan pulling faces] Bob: when have I ever?.. no that’s just me, I don’t ever play on me own never Duncan: what you … ? Bob: that’s my Xbox and it’s down here. I don’t have Playstations hidden in my room unlike you two Duncan: what you’ve never, never Bob: never!

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72 Duncan: you do when

Carl: you used to geek that driving game out! Duncan: [coughs] and that golf game. Tiger Woods! Bob: no yeah I played two player Duncan: no you didn’t! You were, when you lived down the road, you were saying how you used to, you played it before you went to work and then you played it after you got back from work Bob: yeah but that’s before I lived here [Duncan laughs] Duncan: I’m not saying, I’m not saying you mostly … Bob: since I’ve lived here I’ve never played anything on my own. (2.1)

What becomes clear from the extracts above (and was certainly witnessed during the time I spent with the households) is that although lone gaming clearly does occur, admitting to it is an entirely different matter. The insistent defence by Bob that he does not game on his own is actually a defence about much more than gaming habits. It is a defence against the suggestion that Bob is abnormal, that he cannot maintain a heterosexual relationship, so is gaming alone, excessively. It is a defence of his social skills, his attractiveness, his normality, and his general sociability. Social gaming is all about the ability to move on a wider social and cultural scale: it is about performance, sociability, attractiveness, mobility within the group, and mobility beyond it. Solo Gaming The few admissions of solo gaming should be mentioned at this point. Of all the gamers of the research, only Ricky and Duncan, when interviewed alone, admitted to, and articulated pleasures and rationales behind solo gaming. It is interesting, however, that despite admissions of solo gaming, gaming is still a social consideration. Similarly, although both interviewees claim to game on their own, they always suggest this is not the preferred gaming mode: Duncan: I usually come home at 4 and that’s when I have a bit gaming. Coz usually no one else is around then but sometimes Ben, sometimes people are here and we can have … that doesn’t matter to me when I play

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Interviewer: When people are here? Duncan: Either Interviewer: You just play when you come in? Duncan: Yeah Interviewer: Why do you reckon you play at that time? Duncan: Err, just you kind of like [cough] a lot of reasons. One reason, one thing is that if somebody else is there and they don’t want to play then you’re just kind of hogging the front room sort of thing. Erm and sometimes Ben finishes at 4 o clock at the same time as me so it just coincides, so if there’s a game we’re into we both, we both play and take turns sort of thing and again we’re not hogging the TV coz Al doesn’t really play too much like. (2.4) Ricky: I’d say, for me anyway, the multiplayer is more enjoyable because it’s a bit more of a laugh, because you’re watching other players’ shots and stuff like that. And the one-player game is more, for me anyway, it’s more about progressing rather than enjoying the game [laughs] which sounds stupid but … so I want a go at the bigger tournaments against the bigger players and there is a lot, you know you have to go through certain stages in smaller tournaments where you win it quite easily and it’s a bit boring, but you have to go through that to get to the more enjoyable parts in the game, in the single-player. Whereas the multiplayer … it’s quite nerve wrecking and the way Tiger Woods works is that, it makes you, if you’ve got a defining shot, like a match-winning shot or a pressure shot, you’ve got to do it to keep in the lead like, and it does this heart beat on the screen and it makes your controller vibrate so it builds up the tension and the pressure of the shot like. And it makes you more, you know, if you’re just a couple of shots ahead, and you’ve got a difficult, tricky wedge onto the green, then you don’t really think about it, whereas if you’re level on shots, or you’re one behind or one in front, you have to make it. It makes you think about it more and you’re more hesitant about taking the shot. You check it, and double check it and stuff like that. And you don’t get that with the single player. You get it a little bit, but not as much Interviewer: so it’s the competitive environment? Ricky: yeah, yeah, definitely. And it makes you feel the pressure, the importance of the shot. (2.5)

While Duncan claims only to game alone because he does not want to disturb his housemates’ viewing choices, Ricky goes even further and suggests solo gaming

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is not even enjoyable, it just progresses him further in the game. They both suggest that it is social gaming, which is preferable, with Duncan willing to cease solo gaming as soon as his housemate comes home, and Ricky claiming only social gaming is enjoyable anyway. In other words, although these housemates ‘admit’ to solo gaming, there is, they state, no pleasure invested here. There is no threat of ‘immersion’ or losing themselves in the game. The overarching theme continues to be rational adult male filling up some time with a bit of gaming until something or someone with whom to interact ‘properly’ comes home. It is interesting, however, that these two admissions of solo gaming come not only from heterosexual adult males, but also from the inhabitants of the all-male house. In other words, while rational masculinity continues to be strongly and rigidly enforced, there are nuances and negotiations in terms of performance. Although rational, logical justifications for gaming do seem the particular preserve of adult male gamers; the fact that these justifications have to be continually performed and produced indicates a much more tenuous position which has to be constantly reaffirmed. Yet despite the changing nature of ‘masculinity’ as a discourse, what is interesting about these performances is that they continue along very rigid, sometimes aggressively macho, normative lines. In relation to videogames, where the promise and novelty of ‘new technology’ purportedly offers radical new ways to conceive and perform identities, this result is similarly surprising. Although I discuss the actual games being played in the following chapter, the rigid parameters, which seem to frame available positions for male (heterosexual) performances seem to also frame gameplay. It is not just the rigid parameters in relation to videogames but also in relation to how gamers perform socially, which further indicates the necessity for a major shift in videogame theory from what is ‘offered’ to gamers, to how, where, when and with whom games are both played and enjoyed. Returning to the Home The underlying (sometimes temporal) power politics of each household are loaded with expectation and assumption about the role of each person within the house and what they will say in that role. This reflects more broadly onto the wider sociocultural politics of the make-up of the households and is worth reiterating. The fact that these households are adult shared houses is, of course, conducive to a certain power politics not based on age or family relationships. The power relationship between housemates is also reflected in the shared rooms of each house in terms of the activities, objects and performances within each room. Kitchen, living room and bathroom not only structurally support the power politics of each household, they also facilitate their continuation. Gaming is not exempt from these structures. Focusing on how gender stereotypes are reflected and supported in avatar selection, or citing differences between men and women in terms of privileging certain narratives or visual choices on their own, offer an inadequate analysis of the politics

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behind any initial choice of game or performances during gameplay. Even King and Krzywinska’s suggestion that ‘contextual factors generally are liable to recede from attention in conditions such as extended or more intensive play’ (2006: 210), becomes problematic if ‘intensive play’ can never be achieved because of where, when and with whom games are played. As Sara retrospectively said in a later interview: Gaming is just another way to play out roles. It doesn’t give you a space where you can do what you want or be who you want. It’s how I chose to bond with people in Brighton, but it didn’t change how I interacted with them. I was still ‘the Girl’ and didn’t know what I was doing. Here, though I don’t have to do that any more. (9.3)

Returning videogames to the home, and discussing them in terms of their sociocultural and discursive importance or shaping, is therefore a vital and necessary act if the (to borrow John Storey’s well utilized phrase), lived cultures or cultural practices of videogames are to be understood. This move also offers a more nuanced and socio-political account of gaming, which encompasses primarily the consumption, but also the production and marketing elements of gaming. However, this move is also problematic in terms of maintaining the technological elements of the ‘technology’ within the domestic. Consequently, the final point relates to domestication or social shaping of technology, and asks why the reorganization of the relationship between technology and sociocultural politics often results in the loss of autonomy, agency or even one could say, the ‘technology’ of the technology in question. Caroline Bassett’s comment below reiterates not only the importance of the novelty value of technology, it is also a warning about cyclical approaches to technology more generally. It is a stark reminder of the continuation of public/private power dichotomies within academic discourse, as well as the gendered rhetoric of technology: Over and over again we succumb to the sense that the new technology of our own time is exceptional … the case for the autonomy of technology is very often explicitly made or implicitly adopted in the analyses of new technologies, while the case for the social shaping of technology, which reorganizes this relationship, tends to re-emerge as technologies lose the patina of the new, as they become ‘old’. (Bassett 2007: 52)

When we think of the comments cited in this chapter, it becomes clear that the re-organization of the relationship between social and technological is also reiterated in the discourses of gamers themselves. While Bassett is discussing a much wider phenomenon of how we address technology, the various constructs of technology we see cited here are occurring at more micro levels. Accounts from gamers invariably construct the technology along social lines (as a supportive tool or function), and address it as a relationship within which the gamer has agency, power and autonomy. In turn, this undermines or underplays the technological

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elements of the game – not only what (to use King and Krzywinska’s term) is ‘offered’ (2006: 6) to the gamer, but also how those offerings are experienced, mediated and made meaningful. Finally, then, Bassett’s comment reminds us that technology is not just re-imagined in discourses which in turn reflect and produce power politics of the households: it is also a complicit contributor to mediatory, corporeal and lived experiences. And it is to these relationships and mediations that the following chapter turns.

Chapter 4

The Practices of Gameplay If technology is a complicit contributor to mediatory, corporeal and lived experiences it is worth investigating such experiences further. Indeed, having discussed the articulations of gaming, this chapter focuses on ‘actual’ gameplay. One of the most interesting elements about this research is the relationship between ‘imagined’ gaming in terms of what gamers say about it, and ‘actual’ gameplay. Following the interviews, I was interested in whether gameplay reflected or undermined their initial claims made during the earlier conversations. The recordings of gameplay, on which this chapter is based, therefore form the second ‘step’ of the research into the gaming households. The camera was positioned on top of the television set, and was programmed to record the events in the living room for hours at a time. Gaming occurred during these hours of recorded activity, but was not the sole occurrence in the living room. Other domestic leisure activities also formed part of these recordings, from conversations to texting, eating, and general movements within the living room and outside it. What became interesting was therefore not only how the power politics of the household played themselves out during the recordings, but also the relationship between technology and the social, between place and performance, and how the actions of the gamers contributed to, but also generated the social. The recordings of gameplay therefore facilitate a number of things. Fundamentally, they shift the focus from what is said about gaming, to the actions of gaming. This emphasizes issues of temporality, location, technology, and the body along with a number of conceptual themes also developed in this chapter: the theme of praxis; Bourdieu’s understanding of the habitus and field; and Ricoeur’s notion of ontological narrative.1 Gameplay brings all these elements together and, through an ontological narrative lens, offers a way of theorizing the action of gameplay. This is quite a complex manoeuvre, but is necessary for a number of reasons. First, it further extends the conception of narrative beyond spoken rhetoric or fixed structure. Indeed as we saw with the previous two chapters, narrative is not only spoken content, it is lived, embodied and enacted. And, as Diane Carr reminds us (2006: 165) gaming needs to include the gamer and the practice of gaming alongside theories of the ‘text’. This chapter therefore attempts to do this by focusing specifically on the action and activity of gaming. It is a manoeuvre made possible by Lois McNay’s (2000) re-interpretations of both Ricoeur’s (1980, 1  I am also including the way these theorists have been interpreted by McNay and Bassett here in relation to subject performance and understanding technology.

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1983), and Bourdieu’s (1980, 1990) theories of narrative; by Butler’s (1990, 1993, 1997b, 2004a) conceptions of gender performance and agency; feminist new media theory (Grosz 2001, Braidotti 1994, 2002, Sobchack 1995, Hayles 1999, Haraway 1991, 1997, 2000) and by feminist poststructuralist theory more generally. It is also made possible through Caroline Bassett’s (2007) understanding of narrative, which re-interprets Ricoeur (1980, 1983) in relation to approaches to new digital technology. Second, it allows for the practice of gaming to be conceptualized as generative praxis, which in turn helps us understand the power relations at play on both subjective and social levels. Third, focusing on actual gameplay continues the themes of performance and power from the previous chapters, which continue to be negotiated by gamers during gameplay. Ontological narratives therefore continue to be theorized in relation to the praxis of narrating gameplay, but whereas the previous chapters focused on preconditions of play, it is ‘actual’ gameplay, which is the focus here. All of the gamers cited in this chapter are playing Grand Theft Auto (GTA), which is not a multiplayer gamer. I did not stipulate any particular game during the research, preferring instead to record gaming and games being habitually played. GTA is clearly a popular game, and was played contemporaneously in the majority of the households during the research. For GTA, gamers take turns with the controller and this also means that gaming has a temporal position within the social, one gamer at a time plays until their character ‘dies’. The temporality of individual gaming means that gamers are freer to participate in other activities in the house, but what is noticeable about these extracts, is that all members of the house stay in the living room and participate in gaming. Focusing on GTA therefore allows us to investigate a range of relations with the game, as gamers play and watch, as they control the avatar and wait their turn. A final note in relation to the gamers and the game is that all the gamers are competent at this game: they have all played it before, frequently. Indeed, the extracts here are taken not only from sections of prolonged gaming (in both cases gaming has been going on for over an hour), they are also taken from recordings mid way through my stay in each house. In other words, these are experienced, competent gamers who have already spent many hours familiarizing themselves with the game. Their performances of competency, then, are all the more apparent. I move from the question of gender and performance to the material elements of gameplay, arguing that the technology and the place of gaming need further consideration. This locates gaming into a legacy of ethnographic and audience research, which collectively argues that the materiality of the technology bears and produces meaning. Indeed, it is apparent from the recordings of gameplay that the game, and the technology, holds significance for the gamers. Videogames are mediated through the television set – a fact often overlooked by videogame theorists. Yet this mediation has profound consequences for gameplay, not least because of the way the television itself is always already appropriated into households as socio-cultural, gendered and symbolic. Indeed, when we consider the problematic articulation of pleasure and play discussed in Chapter 2, we could

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argue that these uncomfortable articulations emerge in part due to the material significance of the technology. In a similar vein to the television, gaming technology signifies as a leisure and pleasure device for the gamers, and while these qualities may sit uneasily with those of adulthood, they do fit with conceptions of the home, and in particular, the living room. Further, it is clear from the recordings of gameplay, that gamers allow the technology affective and effective force in terms of the interactions during gameplay, and consequently produce the technology as discursively significant. My argument is that this, in part, emerges from the long-term materially powerful position of the television set, and consequently, the videogame, for the gamers of this project. This leads us onto a further point: the conception of the social ‘itself’. It became increasingly clear as the research progressed, that the gamers conception of the social was very different from my own. For the gamers, the social not only relied on, and embedded, the technology: it was also premised on the notion of being there rather than on what is ‘said’ or ‘discussed’. Following from this, if physical co-presence and repetitive routine define the social, it returns us to questions of definition, and asks whether the false binaries between technology and the social, constructed by new media theorists and game theorists (see Newman 2008, Bassett 2007 for discussions of this), are actually detrimental to understandings of either term. Following this, I argue that the social has to be defined not only as intrinsic to the technological (and viceversa), but that it also has to be understood as embedded into familiar routines, the presence of familiar people, and a familiar place. The final section returns us to the concept of narrative in order to productively think through these recordings of gameplay and it is Bassett’s thinking through of the relationship between narrative and technology, which is useful here. In each extract, we see the game ‘interrupting’ the conversation and consequently generating new conversations and narratives. This suggests, then, that a certain amount of agency does need to be afforded to the game. Of course ‘agency’ per se is problematic because it suggests that the technology has autonomy in and of itself, returning us to media effects discourses and underplaying the fact that technology is also socio-culturally embedded. Drawing on McNay, Ricoeur, and Bassett, I argue, that ontological narrative is perhaps a useful way to accommodate these performances, relations and articulations in ways, which maintain a sense of agency or power for the technology, but also accommodate the power dynamics of the households. Gender, Power and Gaming Although gamers continually placed emphasis on the social function of technology in their discussions of gaming, actual recordings of gameplay demonstrate that the game has more power and agency than was perhaps initially claimed. Clare, for example, asserted that she is neither interested in the game, nor that she identifies or interacts with on-screen avatars. Instead, she argued that, ‘It’s the external

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situation which is fun, not so much the game. Then gaming is more sociable; it’s not as boring … I don’t tend to play it that often and when I am gonna play it are when there’s loads of people here’ (9.2). However, when we compare this comment to the extract taken from the recording of actual gameplay, below, we see that Clare is interacting more with the game than she perhaps consciously allows for or admits in discussions about gaming. Furthermore, in complete opposition to her previous assertions, it is actually the game, rather than the social ‘extradiegetic’ situations, which she is primarily interacting with, taking pleasure in, and identifying with. This disjuncture between what is asserted about gameplay and what occurs is a familiar one for the gamers interviewed, and part of the motivation for me to record gameplay. It highlights some interesting questions around imagined and actual gameplay, in terms of the prioritizations of social gaming. It also raises questions for videogame theory, particularly the assumption that upon gaming, gamers ‘lose’ a sense of place or time (see King and Krzywinska 2006). Clare’s comments, then, offer a useful starting point to think through not only how technology continues to be mediated, and, indeed, narrated. They also offer us a useful starting point for thinking about ontological narratives of gaming. Indeed, I argue below that these accounts of gaming not only narrate ontological relations with the game, they are themselves, in fact a kind of ontological narrative because they narrate the relations and tensions that facilitate and produce gaming. In the extract below, Sara has the controller, and Clare and Chloe are watching her game, waiting for their turns: Clare: what time is it now? Sara: five in the morning [game time] Clare: oh pants. See it’s not, it’s only enjoyable when there’s something to do! Interviewer: a mission you …? Clare: it was about to get enjoyable then, but we can’t do anything for seven hours! Interviewer: but is that something to do with when you’re playing or watching? Sara: seven minutes Clare: oh! [laughs] err. [to H] well I’m not playing the game but ... Chloe: [to Sara] there, those Sara: I’m trying to find something to … there!

The Practices of Gameplay Chloe: the fence Clare: I think … see I’m not playing the game but if I had the shovel I’d be digging up the back garden! Sara: [laughs] no but I can whack people with the shovel look Chloe: yeah Clare: can you? Go on then! Hit him Sara: how do I get a target? What do I press Chloe: ‘L1’? Interviewer: so are you comparing what Sara’s doing to what you would be doing? [to Clare] are you enjoying watching? Clare: Yeah. Maybe. No it’s only frustrating when, it’s like when you’re sat in the passenger seat and someone’s driving and you [shouts] Take his money! [points] and you kind of [shouts] oh for God’s sake, Sara! Sara! Chloe: [laughing] Sara’s taking out her frustration Clare: [pats Sara’s arm] Sara you didn’t get his money! Sara: yeah but he’s over the fence Chloe: climb the fence! Clare: [to Interviewer] so it’s not Sara: what for twenty dollars? Clare: yeah! Pinch it! [Sara steals the money] It’s just when there is something to do you kind of want to get involved Chloe: you might as well just give it back! Sara: [laughs] Clare: in terms of driving around, bashing into things – I would be doing that. It’s not exciting

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Sara: that’s why I like watching people who actually know what they’re doing Chloe: you’ve played this game loads Sara. What are you talking about? Clare: no but then even if, even when Chloe’s doing it and she’s just driving around, it’s not exciting! Sara: I’m still rubbish! Interviewer: so what is it that’s exciting then? Clare: she’s got a gun! She’s got a gun! Sara: coz I stole it from the man Interviewer: is this exciting? Clare: well it’s not exciting to watch but it’s something different from just driving around bashing into lampposts Sara: oh thanks. Sorry I’m not entertaining you. How do I change the thing? Oh Clare: oh there you go! See Sara’s found out a new thing, so that’s interesting! (9.3)

This extract is quoted at length in order to demonstrate the multiple interactions, interruptions, and negotiations that constitute gaming. Clare, in particular, interrupts herself, other people, the game, and me, in the extract above. Her self-interruption is an interruption seemingly ‘caused’ by the events on screen. Ironically, the content of the conversation revolves around the frustration she feels when watching other people play, firstly because of the powerlessness she feels when they play badly and secondly because she wants to get involved. The consequent enactment of her statement not only gives it validity, it also indicates something about the power of the game interrupting the ‘serious’ extra-diegetic conversation. We could argue, then, that the game causes an alteration in Clare’s attention and narrative. Seen in this light, the game should be afforded affective agency, if it ‘has’ the power to cause interruptions and disruptions to the conversation and gameplay. Indeed, this is how Assemblage theorists would conceptualize the above extract, arguing that the technology is just one of many performative components of the assembled or ‘territorialized’ (DeLanda’s 2006: 16) entities. Indeed, for Manuel DeLanda, developing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1978) Assemblage theory, language and articulation are simply components in relations of exteriority with other material and expressive components. The relations of interiority, which are the primary assemblages, make the exterior

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relations possible (seen here as articulated interactions between housemates). The development of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblages by DeLanda talks about relations of exteriority defined by the linkages between components which form ‘logically necessary relations which make the whole what it is’ (2006: 10–11). Relations are only ‘contingently obligatory’ (ibid.), however, and are more to do with the ‘territorialization’ of components than agency or conscious production (and here we can see the notion of context and temporality coming into play). Seen in this light, Clare’s performance is the territorialization of the internal and external motivations that, in this particular context, facilitate such a performance. For Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages explain ‘all the voices present within a single voice’ (1987: 88). They do not limit a particular performance to a single or linear explanation, but attempt to incorporate a full range of ‘voices’ or influences/compulsions/motivations. They include the conditions of possibility for enunciation as well as the performances of them (to use a cultural studies discourse) and we can relate this to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and field, where habitus is the ‘living through of norms inculcated on the body’ (McNay 2000: 36). Whereas Deleuze and Guattari discuss ‘voices’, Bourdieu explicitly links the conditions of possibility (the ‘many voices’) to praxis. Bourdieu therefore links performance explicitly to the body – a living through of praxis. Transformations of assemblages do have a corporeal element for Deleuze and Guattari: they ‘appl[y] to bodies but is itself incorporeal, internal to enunciation’ (1987: 91). Finally, for Deleuze and Guattari, the assemblages are ‘in constant variation, are themselves constantly subject to transformations’ (1987: 90). They are subjected to power relations (to use another cultural studies term) and are generative. Although these theories are not easily comparable for discursive and linguistic reasons, this surface juxtaposition outlines how DeLanda’s reconceptualization of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory might be appropriate for thinking through the practice of gameplay, particularly given the inclusive approach to technology. While such a reading is useful for including the technology within the relations it discusses, and indeed one of my arguments in this chapter is that the technology should be considered as intrinsic to the social, such an approach does not readily accommodate the way Clare is making the technology mean. In other words, attempts at and towards individual agency (however tenuous) also seem important in our understanding of such gaming scenarios. Agency or power at an individual level, however, can be somewhat lost in the more abstract workings of Assemblage theory, where more durable power relations are diffused in the ‘contingently obligatory’ territorialization. It seems to me, however, that these extracts of gameplay indicate durable and significant gendered power relations, which transgress the immediacy of any individual act of gaming. Further, while the game is clearly being played in the extract above, the game is also being used to support Clare’s performance of power here. Her continual reference to it ensures that that attention is on her, rather than the game, or other housemates. She shapes and produces the game. To return to Valerie Walkerdine’s research on children and

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gaming, Clare seems to be ‘managing’ femininity through a careful negotiation of gaming knowledge on the one hand, and social inclusivity on the other: [Girls] have to display performance regarded as masculine while also displaying femininity, for example as in winning without losing female friendship … femininity is taken to embody passivity (losing, being killed, being the victim of violence). Girls struggle to embody both activity and passivity, killing and being killed, winning and losing. These are not intrinsic positions, but rather the discursive binaries through which gender difference is produced. (Walkerdine 2007: 94)

In the negotiation between gaming competency and the more traditionally feminine qualities of sensitivity to others and co-operation, Clare seems to negotiate and oscillate between creating a funny, inclusive gaming experience, and demonstrating knowledge, control and power. The game is the device through which Clare is able to assert active qualities, and those associated not only with ‘masculinity’, but also with power. The cultural capital of technological knowledge discussed in the previous chapters still resonates here in the all-female household. It is, as Walkerdine suggests, a negotiation between activity (interrupting the game, action within and towards it) and passivity (watching the game, being subject to other people gaming). Further, all three women negotiate these positions – Sara, too, for example, negotiates between causing violence within the game, and being directed by her housemates. Taken together, this extract demonstrates not only that technological/gaming knowledge continues to be valued regardless of the gendered make-up of the households. It also suggests that the power relations discussed in previous chapters (in which technological knowledge are included) also continue to be negotiated during gameplay. By comparison to many game theorists, then, I am arguing that the socio-cultural dynamics, the power structures, or the context of gaming do not necessarily recede during gaming, but continue to frame, produce and reflect gaming. Indeed, we see little evidence here of Kitchen’s suggestion that: Virtual reality technologies partially or totally immerse users in an interactive, visual, artificial, computer-generated environment; instead of the users being spectators of a static screen, they are participants in an environment that responds. (Kitchen: 1998: 8)

Even recent accounts of gaming, which more tentatively suggest immersive qualities of gaming, are problematic here. King and Krzywinska’s (2006) suggestion that gameplay offers the opportunity for ‘other preoccupations and anxieties to be forgotten’ (2006: 33), for example, is problematic if such preoccupations and anxieties include the dynamics of the household and interpersonal relations. Similarly, Dovey and Kennedy’s suggestions that immersion could incorporate ‘intimate mental, emotional and physical engagement’ so that the ‘sense of time

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and physical discomfort recede’ (2006: 104) is also difficult to sustain for social gaming scenarios where engagement with the technology is negotiated on a range of discursive levels prior to, but also during, gameplay. As Newman has suggested (2008: 23), the immersive qualities of gaming are exacerbated by the assumption of solo gaming as the norm, which, as I discussed in Chapter 1 locate power with the game itself and assume an undisrupted, temporally specific, period of gameplay. For the gamers of this project, however, the discursive ‘regimenting’ of gaming that insists – regardless of individual preference or practice – that social gaming is, and should be, the norm, highly problematizes such immersive claims of both virtual reality and videogaming. Indeed, if a gamer rarely interacts with the game alone, or if social dynamics are continually negotiated during gameplay, the possibilities for immersive gaming – at least in terms of how it is conceptualized by the theorists cited above – are much reduced. This brings us onto a further point around the relations between the technology, the social, and performance. The extract below is taken from Rob and Rach’s gameplay and, in a similar vein to Clare’s narrative earlier, Rach offers not only an active and continuous narration of the game, but also a performance of her (gendered) role in the household. Similarly, like the extract above, her negotiation of gender/power is inclusive of technology. Indeed, it is a performance filtered and narrated through the technology. The extract below therefore also provides a useful springboard for an increasingly theoretical debate discussed later in the chapter around the possibility of ontological narrative including active praxis in its remit. In the extract below, Rob has finished his turn on the game, and gets up to leave the room: Rach: Oh. Shit. Oh! That’s water! I thought it was grass! [leans back in seat] Rob: [comes back in] oh. You’re dead. Get out Rach: how?! Rob: press triangle [Rach leans forward again] Rob: oh you’re all right. It’s not deep. Oh yeah, you can swim in this one, I forgot [turns to leave the room] Rach: If I don’t head butt things! Rob: [turns back, laughs] Rach: how do I get out?

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Rob: err, probably square Rach: [looks at controller] Great [GTA: ‘you’re making this worse for yourself’] Rach: oh shit! Think I just took a police motorbike! [laughs] by accident. I didn’t realize it was a policeman til I got in! oh shit! Hang on! Ohhh [laughs] I’ve got stuck! What’s going on? Look! It’s a bloody police motorbike! How did I do that? Whah. Whah. Oops. Lets get the hooker. Rah! Get off! Well you have to apparently! Oh no! she’s still there! Hit! Hit! Hit! Gimme your money! She’s got no money! Interviewer: are you supposed to do that? Rob: [moving back towards seat, talking to Interviewer] that’s how you get money, by beating people up! Their money. They leave their money behind when you kill them Rach: right. So. Where am I? Rob:[to Interviewer] you don’t actually kill them Rach: coz they’re only pixel people Rob: coz the ambulance comes, and when the ambulance comes they bring them back to life Rach: That’s very err oh Come On! Where was your indicator?! Rob: nobody actually dies Interviewer: did you mean to do that? Rob: press ‘X’ and down on your control stick [sounding bored] Rach: down? Rob: yeah Rach: why? Rob: coz you’ve turned the police siren on

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Rach: oh! Have I? [laughs] Rob: pull, like click it down, like a button [sounding amused] Rach: [laughs] oh I thought something was chasing me! Ha! Rob: why did you get on a police bike?! Rach: I was trying to get something and I turned round. I was practicing punching [mimes punching with right arm], turned round [laughing] and punched a policeman! [laughter. Rach holds head in hands] Rach: and I was like ‘oh well I’ve got a bike now’! [GTA: ‘give me fifteen motherfucker … who’s winning, who’d you think man’..] [Rob gets up to leave room again] Rach: should I skip this bit? Or is it useful to know what I’m doing? Rob: what? [pauses on way out] Yeah just press ‘X’ [leaves room]. (8.1)

What is initially interesting about Rach’s dialogue is the way she also negotiates social dynamics by utilizing the game. By comparison with Clare, however, these performances have very different outcomes. Clare, in the all female house, negotiates action/interaction and passivity/care relatively successfully, keeping everyone’s attention, good feeling, and instructing gaming. Rach, in her mixed gender household, continually attempts to interest Rob in the game, but this has limited success. In the extract above, Rob is frequently continually turning or getting up to leave the room. Indeed, in this household there are often times when Rob ignores Rach, or leaves the room when Rach games. This suggests a number of issues relating to gender, gaming and performance, which is worth investigating further. Firstly, the differences between Clare and Rach suggest that success of the ‘management’ of femininity, depends to a certain extent on the power dynamics of the household – and in particularly on the other housemates. The fact that Rach is often ignored, means that while she may be vocal, this has very little impact. Clare, on the other hand, is listened to, and responded to; so that we could claim her shouts and exclamations have some sort of gaming and social effect. At one point Sara follows Clare’s instructions and steals from the character within the game. Chloe also laughs at Sara, supporting the dynamic Clare establishes. In other words, the success of the management of femininity is contextually specific and depends on the power dynamics in which such managements are produced.

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As Valerie Walkerdine suggests, such subject positions require, ‘complex covert negotiations of power that position girls ambivalently in the sense that they seem to struggle for power while appearing not to’ (2007: 68). While Clare and Rach may be attempting to do similar things (keep everyone entertained, maintain attention, direct attention), the success of either performance is very different. It seems that the ambivalent position between gaming ability and inability (‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’) are less negotiable in a mixed gender household where gender is a primary signifier of difference. Consequently it is not only that Rach has limited success here, it is also that she is disregarded in her attempts. Clare’s all-female household arguably nuances the signifier of gender, embedding it within other power relations. Indeed, there seems more scope for performances of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ within such a context because they are enmeshed in power relations, rather than overt signifiers of them. If Rach is disregarded in her attempts to maintain Rob’s attention and create an inclusive, social gaming environment, this also suggests that while Walkerdine’s binaries may be evidenced here, they are not valued equally. Rob’s continued attempts to leave the room suggest he is not interested in watching Rach game (despite the fact she has watched him for the past 40 minutes here). As soon as he hands over the analogue controller, he gets up to leave the room, absenting himself from the role of ‘sidekick’ or ‘commentator’ which Rach had thus far been performing. She frequently asked questions when Rob was gaming, and exclaimed at key points in the game (‘is that an old woman behind you? Oh god! Jesus Christ! ... I thought they all had guns in LA … why doesn’t he just shoot you? ... oohhh! Quick! Quick!... was that a hooker?’). We see little of this behaviour when Rach has the controller. Instead Rob is positioned in a role as an expert, and constantly drawn back into the room through a variety of questions or actions, which require his attention in this role. The roles, which are both produced and performed here, are much more in keeping with more traditional gender binaries. Rob is continually positioned as expert, as active, as knowledgeable about the game, as adult. Rach is continually positioned as novice, as needing direction, as unknowledgeable and as child (emotional, excitable). Finally, when we consider that Rach is a competent and frequent gamer of GTA, we can also suggest something about the power of gender signifiers at an individual and individually negotiated level. By comparison with Clare, who has more tangible effects on Sara’s gameplay, Rach’s comments negate responsibility for her actions, so that any successes in the game are not regarded as relating to her skills as a gamer. She narrates her gaming experience in order to encourage interaction with Rob, rather than focusing on progressing in the game. Despite the fact that Rach has played GTA before and considers herself a competent and frequent gamer, then, her performance during gameplay positions her unequally in relation to it – her actions are ‘accidents’ and she does not know where she is or what she is doing. Her shouts and exclamations require urgent attention and the necessity of Rob’s presence, as well as his interest. Perhaps, then, the

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comparison should be drawn between Sara and Rach, both of whom perform the game as a predominantly social activity. Both use comedy and immediate action to make themselves the funny and entertaining mediators of the game. These performances, then, ultimately position both Sara and Rach as ineffectual in terms of gaming progression, and as silenced in terms of claiming gaming knowledge. Indeed, as Rach later commented: When I sit next to Rob here and he’s gaming, I’m asking him questions. But when he’s sat next to me and I’m gaming, he’s telling me what to do. (8.2)

This is a common theme of the recordings of gameplay. Even the all-male and all-female households perform gender/power roles, suggesting the performative nature of gender and gameplay as well as the links between gendered performance and claims to knowledge or autonomy. The competent gaming performances (active, aggressive and competitive) seem to correlate with the experienced, knowledgeable and rational performance during discussions: of Duncan and Bob in the all-male house and Chloe in the all-female house. I am arguing, ultimately, that the signifier of gender not only emerges as the most powerful signifier in the mixed gender houses, but that the meanings associated with this signifier unequally, and perhaps detrimentally, position Rach (and Sara). Taken together, such a comparison between the two households suggests, in keeping with Judith Butler’s seminal work on gender, that while the values associated with gender may vary, they are nevertheless powerful and sustained signifiers which are socio-culturally embedded: The recurrence [of gender] does not index a sameness, but rather the way in which the social articulation of the term depends upon its repetition, which constitutes one dimension of the performative structure of gender. Terms of gender designation are this never settled once and for all but are constantly in the process of being remade. (Butler 2004b: 10)

What is noticeable here, then, is that technology is also embedded into these processes of ‘remaking gender’. Indeed, one of the arguments for this chapter is that technology is not a separate entity here, as so often assumed by new media theorists and game theorists. Here, it signifies in a number of ways – as a device to facilitate performances, as an inclusive tool, as pertaining to cultural capital which is drawn on to signify ‘masculinity’ and power, and as a positioning device where relations with the technology signify power. Despite the early promises of virtual reality, then, to create an identity based not on the ‘inevitability of biology, birth, and social circumstance’, but as a ‘highly manipulable, completely disembodied intellectual fabrication’ (Mitchell 1995: 12), what we see in the extracts above, is a continuation of the negotiations of, and with, gender and power.

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Of course, as many feminist new media theorists demonstrate (Grosz 2001, Sobchack 1995, Braidotti 2000, Thornham 2007), this is hardly surprising, especially when we consider the embodied elements of such performances. Feminist theorists such as Grosz and Braidotti, for example, argue that identities are corporeally lived (rather than cognitively performed). Further, the fantasy of a disembodied identity is one only afforded the male subject, who, in keeping with Cartesian logic as well as Enlightenment narratives, ‘discovers’ an object to be studied, which is consequently feminized and rendered passive:2 The fantasy of disembodiment is that of autogenesis [self-producing and reproducing], a megalomaniacal attempt to provide perfect control in a world where things tend to become messy, complicated or costly; it is a control fantasy. The idea that one could take on a second-order or virtual body and somehow leave one’s other body behind with no trace or residue, with no effects or repercussions, is a luxury only afforded the male subject. (Grosz 2001: 43)

The performances evidenced above, then, are the embodied, lived performances of located and situated bodies. And, as Lois McNay has highlighted, in keeping with Butler (above), such performances not only reflect gender relations, they also have the potential to forge new ones: Identity is contingent upon a particular set of social relations; it is not fixed, but neither is it purely arbitrary in that some narratives have deep historical resonance and durability. (2000: 92)

We could argue, then, that while more traditional gender roles emerge in the mixed gender houses, the all-female house creates and values different qualities producing the more ‘masculine’ position of competent gamer as active, but also as socially inclusive (for example). Further, as Walkerdine argues in relation to young girls, the ambivalent positions women occupy, produce varied emphases on qualities associated with each gendered signifier, facilitating possibilities for change. In other words, while gender is clearly an important signifier, it is both produced and managed relationally, and inclusively of the technology. It is clear from the extracts above, then, that such performances continue to be shaped by ‘who is imagining whom’ (Butler 2004: 10). In other words, praxis does not change the fundamental dimensions of imagined and actual performances, and indeed if anything, they are intensified here. Perhaps this is unsurprising when we consider that action, which has a corporeal dimension, is a key facet of praxis. Indeed, while I discuss the gaming body in detail in the following chapter, it is worth noting that the imagined, the lived, and the mediatory aspects of ontological narrative are still pertinent here. Indeed, if we consider these articulations as reflection on, and productions of, power 2  See also Braidotti 2002: 247.

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dynamics, then they are momentary lived narratives of the mediations of gaming. Such performances narrate the game, and the power relations, which constitute and make possible the gaming environment. In what follows, I turn more specifically to the technological elements of gaming, arguing that rather than see such technology as separate from, as impacting onto, or as detracting from, the social context of gaming, we should instead see gaming as an intricate and embedded element of it. The Material Importance of Technology If the technology has ‘power’ to interrupt Clare’s conversation, or focus Rob and Rach’s attention, this needs to be partly attributed to the material position of the game. While Clare clearly uses the game for a particular performance, it is facilitated by the long-term position of the technology in the gamers’ lives, and the social dynamics of the household, which position the technology as relevant. In other words, the mediation of the videogame through the television set, seems once again highly relevant here. My argument is that the mediation through the television set has quite profound consequences for gameplay, not least because of the way the television itself is (already) appropriated into households as a socio-cultural, gendered, and symbolic force. In a similar vein to the television, gaming technology signifies as a leisure and pleasure device, and, as I suggested earlier, while these qualities sit uncomfortably with adulthood, they do fit with conceptions of the home, and in particular, the living room. Indeed, the social context of gaming is clearly inclusive of the material dimensions of it. While gaming technology is in every room of the shared households, gaming itself almost always occurred in the living room. This means that there is already a materially powerful position for the technology as the focal point of the social setting. Mediated through the television set, gaming alwaysalready occupies a materially and discursively significant position. As Silverstone, Morley and Hirsch’s (1992) seminal work on the domestication of technology argues, through the incorporation into domestic environments, technology is appropriated and made meaningful depending on those environments or contexts into which it is incorporated (1992: 16). The concept of contextual frameworks has also, of course, been taken up by ethnographic research more widely, where contextual factors, and in particular place and space, frame interpreted performance (see for example, Silverstone, Morley and Hirsch 1992, Gray 1992, Walkerdine 1997, Moores 1996, 2000). While some videogame theorists have also noted contextual factors as an important aspect of under-researched gaming (see Newman 2004, Dovey and Kennedy 2006), there remains little research to date investigating these issues. Yet it is clear that perceptions of the space, context and technology in which, and through which, gaming occurs are relevant here. Indeed, this research finds that there is clearly a relationship between conceptions of the home and the activities

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within it. The two concerns bleed into one another and inform identity (and other) discourses. As Doreen Massey (1994: 120–1) argues, places need to be understood in terms of social, cultural, industrial, and political dynamics. The home is clearly not abstract from this – both in terms of the actual location of the home within a specific geographical, national, regional setting, and in the perception of the home in relation to formations of identity and subjectivity. This means that in many ways, the discursive and material position of the technology as powerful predates and precedes ‘actual’ gaming because the television set as the mediatory device, has a powerful position in the material and discursive make-up of the living room. This suggests that the material and symbolic significance of the technology goes beyond the moment of gameplay: it is also the result of its physical positioning in the room. It is a discursively and materially powerful position despite the fact that it is a technology supposedly incapable of ‘acting’ without ‘human’ intervention. Indeed, by comparison with videogame theorists, whose primary comparison is often with PCs; the gamers of this research always compared videogames first and foremost with television. It seems increasingly relevant, then, to also situate gaming in relation to ‘viewing’ habits, perhaps in the way videogames ‘remediate’ both the material and social elements of television viewing. Following this, it is perhaps more useful to consider the familiarity of Clare’s self interruption in relation to television viewing habits, where the ‘ebb and flow’ of interest follows a routine pattern of segmented programmed slots and the sudden interest equates with sporadic moments of intense interaction with the screen (see, for example, Grossberg 1987: 3, Ang 1989: 101). If the technology has material importance, and predicates gaming, perhaps the primary comparison should be drawn with television. While there is limited scope to develop such an argument here, it is worth drawing some similarities not least because they potentially explain the material significance of the technology we see in the gaming extracts above. Indeed, when we consider the layout of the living rooms in the gaming households, it is clear that the television set is not only the centre of attention for the rooms, but also always-already enmeshed with varying amounts of gaming technology. Each living room positioned the television set in one corner of the room with sofas and chairs facing it. In each household, the television was mounted on a display box, or table, with DVD player, wireless router, Freeview/Virgin or Sky Digital box and Playstation permanently located underneath the television set. In addition to this, the all-male house in Leeds had a number of Playstations, as well as 2 Xboxes, and wireless gaming accompaniments (bongos, boxing mitts, flight simulator dashboards, joy sticks, driving pedals and spare analogue controllers), which were left under the television set. The all female household in London had a rolled up dance mat and spare analogue controllers, while the Brighton households all had a collection of newer and older model Playstations and Xboxes stacked up behind or in front of the television set. My argument is therefore not only that the material layout of each living room constructed a media corner, which facilitated a range of media engagements; it is also that the seating arrangements of each room

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attached importance to the media through the arrangement of chairs, sofas and tables. Finally, the television set, on permanent display in the corner of the room, remains the primary screen through which all other media is displayed. It has a longstanding relevance, but more than this, it continues to play the major part in terms of representing and facilitating newer media forms. PCs, by comparison, were pushed into alcoves in bedrooms, or were mobile laptops that were put away under coffee tables and on desks in bedrooms after use. The television set, permanently on display and in a dominant material position within each room, is both the normalized and routinized technology. It is also discursively, materially and socially powerful – in ways that arc well beyond any immediate moment of gameplay. ‘Being There’: Redefining the ‘Social’ If the material dimensions of gaming need to be included in conceptions of gaming, then the concept of the social similarly needs redefining. Consequently, this section explores a further aspect raised by gamers prior to, during and after gameplay: the social redefined as simply being there. This section, then, continues the notion of theorizing technology as always-already implicit in conceptions of narrative and the social, but extends these elements to look at the social in relation to physical co-presence. When gameplay was recorded and the gamers subsequently interviewed, they remembered very little about the conversation or events during gameplay. Instead, they remembered the gameplay. I will return to this in Chapter 6 in terms of reflections on gaming, but what interests me here about these ‘rememberings’ are the implications in terms of theories of the social. It suggests, on the one hand, that their understanding of the ‘social’ and of interaction is different from what I considered the ‘social’ and interaction to be before this research commenced. Indeed, the social and interaction are defined by the gamers as a physical co-presence, rather than the content of discussion or discourse (which is how I initially defined these terms). This suggests that conceptions of the social may also be, if not primarily about, than at least inclusive of, presence rather than ‘interaction’. In other words, the social is about bodies and about feelings of familiarity. Indeed, all of the households interviewed commented on how gaming was ‘easy sociability’. Joe goes even further: There’s none of those niceties of dull normal conversation, you just get down to it and play. It’s a nice routine, and easy. (1.5)

It is clear, then, that these terms need rethinking. If the notion of ‘being there’ is the important element for creating a familiar environment in which to game, this suggests that it is a more phenomenological notion of the social which needs to be addressed. Indeed, if social gaming is defined in relation to ‘being there’, rather than the content or manner of conversation or gaming, then the social is constituted

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by sitting down together and going through familiar and repetitive routines. This is precisely what is suggested by Joe when he tells me that gaming is a ‘nice routine’ and ‘easy’ (1.5). The social is therefore also tied to the material familiarity of the home and the living room, as well as the specific and temporal actions, which occur in these places. Again, these actions, perceptions and feelings are inclusive of both the technology and the other people present, so that conceptions of the social, the living room and the home include gaming (and other technology) as always-already implicated.3 There are a number of issues to be addressed, then. The first is around defining the social through the actions undertaken within it. It is the relationship between place and action, which is of interest – specifically in terms of the way gamers understand the ‘social’ in this way. Secondly, I am interested in continuing the notion of place as defined by the actions within it, but also extending this to look at the place of social gaming in relation to temporality. Here I am interested in discussing the specificity of the home and the living room as gaming places, and the notion of temporality in relation to repetitive and generative action. Conceiving place in relation to the actions and emotions experienced within a specific space prioritizes experiential construction over physical location, and emerges from both phenomenological geography and ethnomethodology. These are attempts to view place as social actions rather than as specific ‘actual’ or physical environments. It is useful for discussing social gaming because it emphasizes relationships between action and place. It is a tensional and emotive relationship constructing meaning out of generative and repetitive physical action. As Lewis Holloway and Phil Hubbard have commented (2001), this line of thought emphasizes how ‘creativity and emotion are involved in the making of place’ (2001: 67). It is attractive, therefore, for theorizing social gaming because it also maintains generative accounts of the construction of the meaning of the place through action. Actions and emotions of gamers are not only repetitions of, for example, power/gender performances, as well as being negotiations between action and gender/power relations (as we saw with Clare and Sara). Their actions and emotions are also generative in terms of creating the place of gaming, and creating and reiterating the living room, for example, through action. If place is defined through actions performed within it, then the meaning of the living room and indeed, the home, are also similarly dependent on gaming scenarios. This suggests that gaming is so corporeally familiar and quotidian that the routine of gaming can, in fact, constitute the ‘social’. It also suggests that the technology, which facilitates gaming scenarios, is similarly familiar, so that the social as an activity equates with social gaming – the two are inextricably linked. If this is the case, gaming is more akin to Giddens notion 3  This also relates to the previous ethnographic work cited earlier in the chapter in relation to the material elements of gaming, where the context of viewing habits frame the relation to the technology (see Silverstone and Hirsch 1992, Ang 1989, 1991, Morley 1980, 1986, 1989, Gray 1992).

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of ‘practical consciousness’ (1984: xxiii) which he defines as, ‘all the things which actors know tacitly about how to “go on” in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression’ (ibid.). These are the familiar, routine, and quotidian actions, which take place in familiar settings, what David Seamon has called the feelings of ‘at-homeness’: ‘the usually unnoticed, taken-for-granted situation of being comfortable in and familiar with the everyday world in which we live’ (Moores and Metykova 2010: 174). In many respects, these are key concepts for the following chapter, where I attempt to theorize gaming as an activity that does not necessarily have ‘direct discursive expression’ (Giddens 1984: xxiii). For the purposes of this chapter, however, my argument is that the activity of gaming, the places and spaces of gaming need to be understood as corporeal and embodied. Thinking through place in relation to the actions that produce it, insists on the centrality of the body as active agent producing meaning. In turn, this shifts attention away from discursive practices and relates more to corporeal narratives where the body could be said to narrate the occasion through action to make it meaningful. There are clear resonances, then, with Bourdieu’s concept of ‘praxis’ (1990: 5), which also goes some way towards theorizing the notion of ‘being there’ as defining the social. Defined by Lois McNay as ‘the living through of embodied potentialities of the habitus’ (2000: 40), praxis is the living through of the social, which (through being there) incorporates generative possibilities for the meaning of place and practice to change. In other words, Bourdieu’s concept of praxis incorporates a generative dimension encapsulated in the grouped locality of gamers’ bodies, which promises and lives something more than simply ‘being there’. There is, however, a final note of caution relating to gender to be added to remarks about location, temporality and embodied praxis. Indeed, this also becomes increasingly pertinent for the following chapter, and is worth considering here. One of the problems with suggesting either that place is defined by action, or that the social is defined by physical co-presence, is the tendency to define an entity positively through its active ability, or negatively because it is acted upon. It figures the acted-upon as either docile until that moment of action, or drastically improved because of it. These are the popular arguments around the cyborg (and cyberspace), where technology impacts onto the (previously docile) body and the benefit of the exchange is the rendering of the body as active. These are Rawdon-Wilson’s concepts of the cyborg critiqued in the following chapter, where the technology enhances, elongates and acts upon his body so that ‘in each of these instances, I will have been improved.’ (1995: 240). Here, action onto or into is equated with progression, as the newly technologized body can discard its previously gendered and socially defined (lived) body. And, as discussed in Chapter 2, one of the consequences of such a negation is that the space through which the newly technologized body can travel is rendered, passive and penetrated. In short, it is feminized. In turn, the subject who travels through such spaces is gendered male, and we are offered once again the age-old fantasies of the self-made, liberal male subject (Grosz 2001: 42).

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Indeed, if we define place as defined through the actions within it, we are at danger of theorizing place as the feminine matrix only given meaning by being acted upon, penetrated or colonized. Indeed, if ontological narrative is the ‘construction of self-identity through time’ (McNay 2000: 85), and the definition of place is the praxis of ontological narrative through physical (spatial) co-presence, then the gendered binaries of space/time are reiterated: The space/time opposition has been historically and conceptually associated with the opposition between femininity and masculinity, that is, the ways in which femininity is spatialized, rendered substance or medium to the interiority and duration attributed to the (masculinized) subject of duration. (Grosz 2001: 157)

Similarly, theorizing the technology as implicated in the body becomes equally restrictive if there is an assumed ‘normal’ body into which the technology is absorbed. On the other side of this debate, is the threat of the loss of technology through its domestication. While these arguments are taken up in more detail in the following chapter, it is worth noting here that such arguments seem even more prevalent around the videogame where a ‘new’ technology is mediated through an existing one. While the notion of narrating technology does not necessarily erase these issues, it does place these arguments within a historicized debate, which, in turn, renders them more transparent in terms of locating them. Before going onto the next chapter and a discussion of gaming bodies, it is worth investigating them here. Material Technology and Ontological Narrative My argument, then, is that technology is part of the social through its materiality and through the way games are played in social settings. It is not a productionconsumption issue, or a ‘uses and gratifications’ issue, nor is it an etiolated version of acting onto, or effecting actions in a productive cycle. Rather, it is that technology and the social exist as fundamental parts of each other, and are complicit in the ways we understand either term, not in the sense of a binary opposition, but in a generative, creative praxis. In this final section, I want to extend these arguments in order to argue that the embeddedness of technology and the social are not only the result of praxis, or action, they are also the result of narrative. This argument not only returns us to the concept of ontological narrative, it also, more importantly, theorizes the activity of gaming as more than action onto and into a specific place and therefore goes some way towards alleviating the criticisms above. Ontological narrative, by comparison with action, is always-already discursively positioned into the power dynamics of the specific context. Further, insofar as narrative is an active narration, agency is only ever momentarily possible and highly tenuous. Further, as Caroline Bassett argues, narrative is not only embedded in the technological, it is central to it:

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Narrative remains central to what we do in an information-saturated world. Narrative is at the heart of the operations of everyday life and everyday culture within a world where digital culture is becoming pervasive. To consider contemporary narrative formations is to engage with contemporary technoculture. (2007: 8)

Bassett’s defence of narrative is an important intervention for this chapter in terms of utilizing narrative to talk about ‘new’ technology. She argues, following Fredric Jameson (1981), that if we think of a cultural object as a bearer of the time and culture in which it was made, then narrative as a reaction to information and a means through which we understand technology, could be understood to bring information into being as a cultural form (2007: 3). This account would see the gaming technology as a cultural object and consequently, as a bearer of the time and culture in which it was made. Gaming is the act that brings such relations into being as a cultural form: gaming narrates the stories and relations of the technology because they bring those relations that made the technology possible, into the present. This argument firmly positions technology as embedded in our culture: technology is both created in culture and is understood as meaningful through narrative. Further, mediations with that technology (the act of gaming) are narrations of that technology, because it is the means through which that technology becomes meaningful. Indeed, as Bassett continues: Interaction between human and machine (the interface) can thus be conceived of not as a punctual process of exchange determined by the machine, but as a distended moment in which the experience of the different temporalities and spatial dynamics involved in computer use is taken up in the arc of narrative, where sense is given to experience through its ordering as narrative. (my italics, 2007: 32)

There are clear similarities, then, between Bassett’s conception of the way we understand our experience with technology through narrative, and Somers and Gibson’s theories of ontological narrative as a way in which we story our experience to make it meaningful (1994: 58–9). The main difference is that while Somers and Gibson are talking about our social experiences, Bassett is referring more specifically to the way we understand our technological experiences. Despite these overt differences, my argument is that Bassett’s approach to narrative offers a way to conceptualize mediations with technology in productive ways. Indeed, there are two important points to make here, which relate specifically to the two key concepts of ontological narrative. The first is the experiential/practical dimension of narrative, which, indicated through the somewhat uneasy juxtaposition of ontology and narrative for Somers and Gibson, is also extended here through theories of praxis. Gameplay as praxis suggests that it is the experience of the relations with the technology that are forged through practice (gameplay) and made meaningful through narrative.

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This is the main focus for the following chapter where I attempt to conceptualize the various dimensions of gaming praxis: those of the gaming body, action, and place. In thinking through praxis, it is possible to conceive the identity performances of gamers (above) as a kind of narrative of gaming. Seen in this light, Rach and Clare’s commentaries are both performances of gender (inclusive of technology) and narratives of the long-term and immediate relations, which make gaming possible. Their performances are also mediations with that technology; they are active, embodied, and possible not only because of the relations that immediately make gaming possible, but also because of their longstanding mediations with gaming. Indeed, as Chapter 2 demonstrated, gaming technologies are not new or novel for these gamers who have been gaming for a long time. Bassett’s argument therefore allows us to theorize the acts of gaming as a kind of narration of these relations, because in the act of gaming, they ‘story’ the relations, the histories and interactions with the cultural object of the videogame. They also, of course, produce those relations through the act of gaming, thus potentially allowing for the durability of some relations (gender, for example), while also account for protensive possibilities (to use McNay’s phrase) of change. I am therefore arguing that, when taken together, it is possible to argue that the praxis of gaming (with these various dimensions) could be said to offer particular narratives of gaming. The second point Bassett highlights is that gameplay can be understood as praxis through its temporal dimensions. This is worth further development here because it speaks to the criticisms introduced earlier around the problematic celebration of action onto and into space and place. If narrative always-already incorporates a specific temporality, then the notion of effective action is consequently much reduced. Bassett draws on the work of Riceour who argues that narrative is ‘a mediating act through which humans apprehend the world’ (my italics, Bassett 2007: 31). It is a mediating act through time, however, and, as McNay suggests, expresses the ‘inherent temporality of being’ (2000: 85) because it ‘simultaneously gives shape to identity and is the means through which selfhood is expressed’ (ibid.). Seen here, the action of narrative is inherently temporal, momentary and performative: it is always socio-culturally and discursively positioned. The conception of narrative as lived praxis therefore takes ontological narrative to its extreme. It is perhaps the furthest removed theorization of narrative from structural narratology or narrative as diegetic story. Indeed, its use here demonstrates the range of theoretical possibilities for ontological narrative far beyond oral, diegetic and structural narratives. Most importantly, ontological narrative necessitates a social and political history for the technology. By this I mean not only in relation to how the technology/body/social has been figured, but also that the relationship between the social and technology, or the body and technology, has both history and a temporality of performance. As previously suggested, the concept of ontological narrative reduces the possibility of a deterministic account of either culture or technology, but instead implicates them. Narrative as ontological condition is a means through which we can understand how we orally and corporeally story our existence, and

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how it positions us, and the elements within the narrative, into that story. In turn, that story offers a temporal framework for praxis by insisting that praxis operates within, and through, a specific temporality, which is tied to action. It stories these elements as tensional or relational, and it is these tensions, which generate the possibilities of alternative stories and existences. Furthermore, action is embedded into these narratives: when we act or when the technology ‘acts’ we generate narrative, we live through it and construct it. The active gaming body and the activity of social gaming could therefore be said to narrate the game, the technology, the social and the relations between them, thus generating further sensory, emotive and meaningful narratives. Rather than assuming (as with the cyborg) that there is a possibility of transcendence of either the body or the technology, this argument has at its core the relational tension as lived praxis. Although this concept of ontological narrative does perhaps stretch the concept to its limits, I wanted to demonstrate how ontological narrative could be used to explain gaming praxis. Indeed it is the triple edged attributes of a temporal, an interpretative, and an experiential dimension, which makes ontological narrative attractive here. In terms of temporality, there is the insistence on durable elements of time such as the various dimensions of play by comparison with those of work. It also goes some way to explain imperatives to act during gameplay and the ‘jump’ factor of games. Finally, it explains, in part, the continual negotiations and productions of the power dynamics of the households, when agency is momentarily and tenuously claimed or attempted through praxis, only to be queried, undermined or upheld (as with Clare and Rach). The interpretative or mediatory dimensions refer to the way the gamer mediates the game, as well as the relations with the other gamers, and with the material setting of gameplay, and interprets them through narrative. It allows an imagined dimension in the slippage between interpretation of gameplay and the performance of it, and is attractive because it figures narrative as the central means through which gamers understand the gaming culture in which they are living and performing. The experiential dimensions work in similar way to the temporal ones: they insist on longevity of experience for subjectivity, performance, and power, which positions the gamer within certain social power relations. It also allows for the generation of new relations through the concept of praxis understood here as the ‘living through of embodied potentialities of the habitus’ (McNay 2000: 40). Finally it allows for feelings of familiarity for the material place of gaming, where gaming is a quotidian occurrence and gamers feel relaxed and that they are being social, through gaming praxis. Having focused on the gendered, material and active aspects of gameplay, I turn specifically to the bodies of gamers in the following chapter. Indeed, in a similar vein to the way the social and material need to be rethought to include the technology as always-already intrinsic; my argument is that the gaming body also needs to be rethought. Consequently, we investigate the mobile and immobile bodies of gaming and in particular the actions of gaming – those which do not necessarily have ‘direct discursive expression’ (to reiterate Giddens 1984: xxiii) but nevertheless narrate, perform and produce gaming in particular ways.

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Chapter 5

Bodies and Action This chapter focuses on gaming bodies, and my contention is that rather than continue the arguments of videogame theory, which focuses attention into, and onto, the game, we need to fundamentally rethink gaming as a lived praxis. Following the arguments of the previous chapter, I argue that if the technology is an embedded element of the social, it is also an always-already present element of the body because the body narrates the social and vice-versa. While theories of identity performance do have space to include the technology as an intrinsic element (and I have been arguing this throughout the book), there is a tendency to discuss the body solely in relation to discursive performances and power, where the body is a signifier of such power relations or discourses. In turn, this figures the body as a site of effect, to be ‘read’ in relation to performance and action, celebrating such qualities while negating or dismissing inaction or immobile bodies. As we see from the extracts cited here, the gaming bodies do continue to reflect and produce the power relations into which they are positioned. But the gaming body is also much, much more than ‘simply’ a site of affect or a signifier of such relations. Bodies are also always already technological, they are imagined as well as lived, and they are signifiers of power relations, and they are terrains on which negotiations with such power relations are felt and imagined. Starting initially with the gaming body, then, I argue that while there have been longstanding attempts to think through the gaming body in videogame theory (Ryan 2001, Dovey and Kennedy 2006, Grodal 2003), the gaming body is nevertheless often theorized as either a site of affect, or as an aside to the real ‘action’ which occurs cognitively or in the world of the game. Instead I suggest that we continue to use Basset’s argument that mediations with technology narrate both the technology itself, and the relations with it. In turn, this neither negates the body, nor sees it solely as a site of affect – as just another signifier to be interpreted. Indeed, this latter conception of the active body is a familiar one to symbolic interactionism, and I turn from videogame theory to thinking through gaming as a site of ‘practical consciousness’. This is Giddens’ (1984) term, introduced in the previous chapter, to describe actions that do not necessarily have direct discursive expression because they are so familiar and routine. Drawing on Hansen’s (2006) insistence of a technologized body, I return to theories of new media – particularly the cyborg and actor-network theory, to argue that a major notion absent in videogame theory, in symbolic interactionism, in new media theory, and in actor-network theory, are the imagined elements – what Walkerdine refers to as ‘fantasies’ (2007), Butler refers to as ‘imagined’ (2004), or McNay refers to as ‘protensive’ (2000). These are the imperatives to/desire to

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act: imperatives and desires, which may never be realized, but nevertheless form an important part of both gaming, and subjective identity in the negotiations with power politics within each household. By accommodating the fantasies/desires/ protentive possibilities, which may never be realized, I am acknowledging that the lived body is not the end point – the site of affect or the signifier to be interpreted. Instead, I am arguing that gaming is a powerful activity, embedded within, and producing, power relations, which make themselves felt in sensory, in imagined, in lived, and in discursive ways. This chapter, then, aims to theorize the gaming body in ways that do not continue the gendered rhetoric of celebrating action to the detriment of the immobile body as videogame theory and new media theories can do. Similarly, it also aims to theorize the gaming body in ways that do not celebrate action to the detriment of place as symbolic interactionism or phenomenological geography can do. It is a chapter about lived gaming bodies, which may want to act and game, but which do not or cannot always act or game in intended or transparent ways. If ontological narrative can be used to conceptualize mediations with technology, this section looks specifically at gaming as mediating act, and an act, which is performed through the gaming body. In attempting to theorize the praxis of gaming, my contention is that ultimately, it is ontological narrative that is most useful us to think through the action of gaming. Gamers narrate the praxis of gaming to me in these recordings in that they are performing roles which narrate their relations with each other, their relations with the technology and the game, their relations with the material setting in which gaming occurs, and their relations with the temporal structures of gameplay. I argue that these actions are kinds of narratives because gamers story to me, and to each other, those relations which make gameplay possible. In a similar vein to Bassett’s discussion of the computer interface, the praxis of gaming is a mediation of the technology where it is made meaningful as a social device. Furthermore, social movement is also mediated in part through the technology when gamers ‘narrate’ their social relations through it. Game Studies’ Active Gaming Body While I reiterate and return to these arguments in the course of the chapter, I start with an extract of gameplay that includes accounts of movements and gestures, and draw initial parallels with game studies’ analysis of the act of gaming. The extracts quoted below are moments from recordings of gameplay where the gamer physically and viscerally acts or ‘narrates’ in the social setting, either in terms of physical movement or ‘involuntary’ exclamation. While it is impossible to represent these moments (indeed this is one of the major problems with representing praxis) they occur throughout the households in moments when gamers wave their arms, point, or lean towards the screen, sit back, slump, or move left or right. Indeed, all the gamers recorded and observed during gameplay articulate the game

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corporeally, whether through obvious and determined movement towards or away from the screen, or through gesticulation, exclamation or sudden visceral reaction: Joe: I went through a stage of playing Resident Evil. But the thing about all those sort of games ... Simon: they’re quite linear Joe: Once you’ve completed [Resident Evil] like you know [sudden laughter] what was that?! [pointing, leaning forward] Simon: [laughing] oh dear [shakes head, sits back, puts controller down, leans forward, picks up and smokes cigarette] Joe: there’s not really any point in playing them again. But this game isn’t like that. What?! Tackle him Simon! [lifts controller upwards suddenly, leans forward quickly] For gods sake! [rests controller back on crossed legs slowly. Glares at Simon. Simon picks his controller back up again. Joe leans back. Simon shakes his head, drops his shoulders and slumps down glancing at Joe] You can play it again and again. The other thing is that Resident Evil is a one player game Simon: yeah you only play it on your own so what’s the point? Joe: so there’s no point to it really. It’s just dull. I mean you can watch. Resident Evil is one of those games that is kind of like a movie, so you can watch it and watch other people playing Simon: it’s the one with the dogs and the zombies Joe: get the ball! [points, sits more upright and leans towards the TV] Simon!!! Simon: oh [jumps when Joe shouts and raises up controller in his hands, but slumps back down] Joe: but watching other people playing is really crap. That’s it! It’s a good game though. But this is the only one I really play [to Simon] they’re not bringing it out on the Playstation 3 Simon: no Joe: I don’t know what I’m going to do then! Interviewer: and what are the both of you going to do then? Without this ritual?

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Simon: I know! We’ll actually have to talk to one another! Joe: no that’ll never happen. We’ll just have to keep the Playstation 2 [laughter] Joe: oh! Simon! Simon: shit Joe: I mean we do play this game a lot. It’s ridiculous. You get in, we have the niceties. We put this on. Conversation ends Simon: it’s sad really. What has happened to communication eh? Joe: [shouts] Jesus Christ! [glares at Simon] Simon: sorry! [puts controller down on floor, picks up controller, puts it down again] Interviewer: what is it about this game you like so much? Joe: err it’s just a good game Simon: [looks at me] it’s different every time as well Joe: it’s nothing to do with the graphics or anything like that. The graphics are ok, they’re nothing like Resident Evil or GTA. It’s just the playability is mint. It’s just one of those games where you, you kind of play it and you keep getting better at it. (1.6)

Although entirely inadequate as representational of the activity of gameplay, the extract above is an attempt to articulate in detail the actions of each gamer as they game. Joe and Simon play Pro Evolution seated on the floor in front of the screen with their legs crossed. They each have an analogue controller and are playing as a team against the computer. By comparison with the extracts in the previous chapter, this one includes accounts of movement and gesticulation to further emphasize the ‘interaction’ between the gamer and game during play. As well the game and the conversation interrupting one another, movement and gestures are also included in the mix. It is evident from this extract that gestures of defeat, resignation and sudden impetus to act are part and parcel of the gaming scenario, where the actions of the gamers seem to reveal as much (if not more so) that the spoken dialogue. Indeed, despite working as a ‘team’ and proclaiming a supportive atmosphere for the game, the extract above (of which there are many in all the households) indicates a far

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more competitive and complex relationship. There are also power relations being played out here: it is Joe who physically and quickly responds to Simon’s mistakes and inertia as he puts down the controller and distances himself from the game. Joe’s verbal admonition and ‘actual’ response with the controller emphasizes his authority where Joe is the competent and articulate gamer in this household.1 Before claiming that these actions are a preserve of ontological narrative, it is worth, briefly, thinking through these moments in relation to videogame theory in terms of the attempts to theorize moments where the game seems to be performed by the gamer. This outlines certain inadequacies, which I think, have been addressed by more recent new media theory (Hansen 2006, Walkerdine 2007) but which ontological narrative can also accommodate. Starting with earlier videogame theory (2003), but incorporating some more recent responses, it is clear, above all, that while there has been sustained attempts to include the gamer in theories of gaming, how that gamer is conceptualized, varies widely. As suggested, the tendency is to conceive of the body solely as a site of affect (Grodal 2003, Grodal and Gregersen 2009, Hansen 2004) rather than as a generative, lived, and mediatory production (Walkerdine 2007, Hansen 2006). For the extract above, such a conception would allow us to interpret Simon’s corporeal response as an indication of both his relationship with Joe and as site on which the affects of the game are felt. When Simon shakes his head, drops his shoulders and slumps down glancing at Joe, this would be read as a gesture of both defeat, and subservience. Glancing at Joe while he drops his shoulders suggests that Simon is aware that he has not only lost the particular game, but he has also let Joe down, whose actions throughout the gameplay are quicker and more immediate by comparison. But Simon’s actions are also much more than this. They continue to produce the power relations and dynamics of the household, rather than simply reflect them. They produce Joe as the more powerful and more invested gamer. In a similar vein to my arguments in the previous chapter, these actions also produce the game as powerful, facilitating the games’ disruption of the ‘conversation’. Conceiving of the body only as a site of affect, does not allow for the protensive and generative elements of corporeality. Indeed, as James Newman reminds us, drawing on the works of Sobchack (1995) and Balsamo (1995), ‘we do not just have a body, we are a body’ (2004: 140). In what follows, I trace some of the arguments in videogame theory in order to demonstrate that while there are clearly attempts to include viscerality and corporeality, they emerge in very different ways. For Torben Grodal (2003), the gamer physically and mentally disrupts interpretive strategies to respond ‘instinctually’ to the game. This suggests, for Grodal, that gaming is more interactive and corporeal than previous audio-visual media. The instinctual (cognitive and physical) reactions bypass any linguistic dynamics or discursive structures because the body reacts instantaneously to (visual, audio, 1  It is also interesting that Simon’s position has shifted by comparison with his previous household. After he moves in with Joe and Lorna, Simon performs an identity as a much less competent gamer.

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sensual) prompts within the game. For Grodal, this moment would be evidenced in the extract above where Joe suddenly responds to the on-screen impetus, leaning forward and picking up the controller, before resuming the conversation. In some ways, Grodel’s model echoes one of the major concerns raised through Deleuzian and Assemblage theory – to include a space where that which is unsaid/unthought/ unperformed can be included in the accounts of action/performance (see Chapter 4). In other words, ‘planes of immanence’ or the assemblages of the subject need to be included in theories of subjective performance. Following from this, Grodal is clearly trying to negotiate both viscerality and technicity into corporeal gaming, both of which contribute to ‘producing’ the gaming body. The moments he discusses require no cognitive assessment of risk or judgment (for example) but are entirely instinctual reactions to active imperatives on screen. Indeed, Grodal suggests that linguistic models actually impede descriptions of gameplay because games rely on non-verbal skills (2003: 133). In a similar vein to Jesper Juul’s account of interactivity, which the game ‘allows’ (2005: 200), Grodal is also trying to maintain focus very insistently on the game as a unique medium. For Grodal, then, that which is un-sayable (‘instinctual’ reactions) contributes not only to corporeal gaming, but to pleasurable gaming as well. In relation to ontological narratives or the praxis of gaming, he offers a useful inclusion of the technological, visceral and cognitive into gaming scenarios. This is useful because, along with technology, it suggests that the narratives of gaming also include the visceral and the cognitive – the un-articulable. For gamers who are unable to articulate what it is about gaming they enjoy (as discussed in the previous chapters), and for theories of ‘actual’ gameplay, his approach expands notions of ontological gaming narratives beyond both the linguistic and the corporeal. The major issues with his approach are, firstly the focus on the game itself to the potential detriment of the gamer and the context of gaming and secondly, the conclusions he draws from these assertions. In relation to the first issue, Grodal’s approach not only assumes a one-to-one relationship with the game and therefore returns us to the criticisms outlined in Chapter 1, he also assumes a finite temporality for gameplay, which Newman (and this research) reminds us, is unrepresentative of many gaming experiences: [T]o concentrate solely on the period of play is to significantly impoverish the study of videogames. In other words, videogames are about more than just the act and moment of play itself … it would be incredible to imagine that sociality and interaction would cease upon game over. (Newman 2004: 153)

As Newman suggests, then, gaming is much more than the moments of gameplay, and to concentrate solely on these aspects is not only detrimental to the field of videogame research, it also undermines the depth and scope of gaming experience. Indeed, this is an issue I return to later in the chapter, when I discuss the imperatives to, and for, action.

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In relation to second issue, the conclusions he draws from his assertions are also problematic. Physical reactions to programmed initiatives (the sudden movements of an ‘enemy’/unexpected path, for example) become, for him, part of the brain’s learning phases, described, rather aggressively as ‘challenge, mastery and automation’ (Grodal 2003: 149). Gaming is more akin to ‘real life’, therefore, because it echoes the brains’ own pre-linguistic, logical (linear) and causal progression: ‘our innate mental machinery seems to take the canonical story format as its baseline’ (2003: 133). Furthermore, the cognitive mechanisms, which are described in modernist, colonizing, and linear terms are quite unsettling. While I would agree that causal logic tends to be linearly described, I would suggest that linearity is performatively produced and temporally dependent. In other words, regardless of the brains cognitive mechanics, assuming not only that logic is linear, but that it is pre-linguistic seems entirely the result of language and narrative. The performative element of gaming, as with the fantasies on offer, and the desires to play, become increasingly negated through Grodal’s attempts to assert a ‘real life’ element to gaming: both the body and the technology seem to disappear. Following these earlier attempts, his more recent work (with Andreas Gregersen 2009) has attempted to focus more specifically on the gaming body, and in particular, the concept of embodiment and the mediations with the interface. Here however, while we see some attempts to draw on phenomenological corporeality – and in particular Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘body schema’ (2006, also see below) – Grodal and Gregersen reproduce the body of First Wave New Media theory (2009: 66–9) where the Cartesian logic of a mind/body split enables the body to be conceptualized as done to. Gaming is thus theorized as ‘an embodied awareness in the moment of action, a kind of body image in action – where one experiences both agency and ownership of virtual entities’ (2009: 67 emphasis in original). Knowledge of, ownership of, and agency over, the body is maintained here, and the body becomes a site through which, and on which, one can read the effects of intention, pleasure and action. Their account of embodiment is one of ‘ownership’ (2009: 66) so that, rather than being lived and acted, embodiment is once again a site of evidential pleasure and intention. In keeping with Newman’s argument that gaming should be seen as embodied (2004: 140–1), and drawing on Mark Hansen’s (2004) work, Valerie Walkerdine argues that gaming should be theorized, more in relation to corporeal or embodied notions of immersion (2007: 16–29). She draws on Hansen’s argument that ‘the body forges the digital image through affectively expressed sensation’ (Walkerdine 2007: 21) in order to argue that gaming is an embodied, affective and gendered activity. In a similar vein to Newman’s argument that gaming is powerful precisely because it is corporeal, Walkerdine argues that gaming also maintains the power of the screen, but, unlike film, occurs at the site of the body. It is an argument also made by some film theorists (Linda Williams 1990, Steven Shaviro 1993), who similarly argue that film should be theorized as a corporeal and intensely embodied activity. Linda Williams, for example, discussing cinema-going with her son, argues that rather than the ‘coded articulations of language’, recourse is to ‘inarticulate

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cries of pleasure … screams of horror … [and] sobs of anguish’ (in Thornham (ed.) 1999: 270). Here, the film experience is both corporeal and affective, and in a similar vein to Hansen’s argument, the body is neither the screen nor the body, but rather, mediations between the two. It is a fine line that Walkerdine draws between affective and productive bodies: while they may be read as ‘affectively expressed sensation’ (2007: 21), they nevertheless produce and generate power relations, which situate gaming and a primarily gendered and gendering experience. While they may evidence relations with the screen, then, they also forge new relations so that, conceptualizing gaming as an embodied and located activity, enables her to think through the gendered nature of gaming, where actions and performances, desires and fantasies of a gendered identity, can be played out. Walkerdine’s conception of gaming is partly facilitated through her focus on gaming as ‘management’ of gender (discussed previously), and her interpretive methodology, which insists she reads and interprets gamers’ bodies as sites of meaning. There are clear similarities between her project and this one, then, and while the line she draws between theorizing the body as a site of affect and thinking through gender as embodied and performed (and therefore generative) is perhaps necessary (see Grosz 2004: 23–4),2 it is, however, an uncomfortable one for this project because the body is allowed certain kinds of agency, produced in very particular ways. Indeed, as I argue below, ontological narrative, with it’s assumption that such gestures are momentary articulations of (sustained and durable) relations and mediations, goes some way towards accommodating this tension. Resonating aspects of symbolic interactionism and phenomenological geography, an ontological narrative approach locates the body as a means of, and site of, articulation, and therefore maintains agency and autonomy, which an affective body may undermine. While I will return to ontological narrative below, it is worth first outlining the similarities and resonances such an approach has with symbolic interactionism and phenomenological geography. Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear that while videogame theory may be a relatively new discipline, the attempts to discuss embodiment, technology and context are not. Gaming as Practical Consciousness? If Simon’s corporeal actions during gaming are productions and reflections of a power dynamic which arcs beyond the moment gameplay, his embodied actions are also to a certain extent, habitual responses to a contextually specific interaction. 2  Grosz argues for a more diplomatic approach when she suggests that ‘[t]he body is neither – while also being both – the private or the public, self or other, natural or cultural, psychical or social, instinctive or learned, genetically or environmentally determined. In the face of social constructionism, the body’s tangibility, its matter, its (quasi) nature may be evoked; but in opposition to essentialism, biologism, and naturalism, it is the body as a cultural product which must be stressed’ (Grosz 1994: 23–4).

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Perhaps, then, as suggested in the previous chapter, gaming should be thought of more akin to Giddens’ notion of ‘practical consciousness’ (1984: xxiii) which he defines as ‘all the things which actors know tacitly about how to “go on” in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression’ (ibid.). And, for Mark Hansen, developing Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘body schema’ (2006), such actions are always already inclusive of technology: [D]igital technologies lend support to a phenomenological account of embodiment and expose the technical element that has always inhabited and mediated our embodied coupling with the world. (2006: 26)

In this sense, mediations with technology, in that they have always ‘inhabited and mediated’ our experiences are precisely what Giddens refers to in his account of ‘practical consciousness’. Seen within this light, Simon and Joe’s actions and relationship, which are inclusive of the technology, are so habitual they do not ‘have’ direct discursive expression. They do not need (to use Joe’s phrase) the ‘niceties’ of normal conversation because they are so familiar. I see clear connections here with concepts of symbolic interactionism, particularly in relation to the ‘socio-semiotic’ concept of the body (Waskul and Vannini 2006: 10–12) and the insistence on an embodied and corporeal understanding of interaction. This is where the body is the ‘medium through which embodied selves take in and give out negotiated knowledge about their world, themselves, others, and material objects’ (Strauss 1993: 108 cited in Waskul and Vannini 2006: 12). Both Giddens concept and the socio-symbolic body attempt to understand embodied praxis as an articulation or discourse of wider relations. Indeed, if we think through both the extract above alongside the extract below, in relation to corporeal narratives – Simon dropping his shoulders, Joe glaring at Simon, Duncan leaning back and dropping his head, or Grant throwing down his controller – we can argue that the gamers bodies are all articulations of the relations between themselves, the game, the other people in the room and the environment of gaming: Grant: oh thanks mate! [leans back in seat] Duncan: [laughs leans forward] Where have you gone? Grant: I don’t know Duncan. I’ve lost myself [leans forward] I’m miles away. [laughs. Points] There I am [raises himself half out of seat, shakes his head]. Where is that? Duncan: let the championship commence [picks up controller] Grant: how did you get on there? [pointing] Cam: [comes in to room] what are you kids doing?

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Ethnographies of the Videogame Duncan: it’s [frowning, looking at screen] Grant: Mario Carts!! [leans sideways left, makes a ‘vroom’ sound, leans sideways right] Duncan: Hey!! That’s not right! [leans forward] Grant: [throws down controller, raises both arms in the air, shakes arms] whey hey! I’m the winner! Sweet Duncan: [places controller down, leans back, drops his head] man. [scratches head, picks up controller] Best out of three? Cam: Let us have a go [reaches for controller, Grant gives him his. Grant gets up and leaves room]. (4.1)

Duncan’s gesture, an often-repeated sign of defeat, of cessation of gaming, or of loss of power, articulates defeat in a way that his comment ‘best out of three?’ does not. These are also, then, the emotions and articulations, which are not necessarily given ‘direct discursive expression’ (Giddens 1984: xxiii), but are familiarly repetitive. Indeed, they are gestures that are common throughout the gaming households. We could also argue, along with Caroline Bassett (2007) that these embodied gestures narrate the mediations with the technology – the act of putting down the controller could therefore be seen as a gesture whereby Duncan acknowledges he is ‘beaten’ by the technology. But, by comparison with Grodal and Juul (discussed above) agency is not the sole preserve of that technology, and this action is one among many others. The act is one that acknowledges he has lost, and includes and incorporates the technology within these relations, but not as the sole cause of them. Indeed, the gaming scenario here also includes the interpersonal relations and long, negotiated, histories between Duncan, Grant and Cam (inclusive of the technology), the lived context of gaming (the living room, the material realities of the technology), and the embodied and corporeal elements of gaming (to name a few). Further parallels are drawn, then, with Bassett’s argument when we acknowledge that the bodies of symbolic interactionism also incorporate narrative elements (Waskul and Vannini 2006: 12–14). Indeed, this is useful not only because it overtly relates to conceptions of ontological narrative, but also because it can be rethought in relation to the technological and inter-personal. Waskul and Vannini discuss the body as a ‘site of struggle between the realm of the symbolic (that is, the self) and the physiological (that is, the corporeal)’ (ibid. 13). Such a conception, where the body is the site of a struggle, allows a certain amount of agency for the technology, but insists this is only one element of a wider struggle, which the body temporally enacts through praxis. This would also account for the seeming contradiction between Duncan’s gestures of defeat and his comment ‘best out of three?’ which Waskul and Vannini would see as the struggle

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between symbolic and physiological. Seen in this light, we could argue that while the corporeal acknowledges he has been ‘beaten’ in the gesture of putting the controller down, Duncan’s symbolic and social identity does not so readily accept this position, and he re-evokes competitiveness by asking to play again. Developing Waskul and Vannini’s concept, and drawing on Hansen (2006) and McNay (2000), then, we could also see the very act of gaming as a negotiation between the symbolic and the physiological, where the symbolic is seen, more traditionally, as the screen, and the physiological is seen as the gaming body. This returns us to the concerns of videogame theory discussed earlier, but in more productive ways. The struggle is the negotiation between these two elements, embodied and enacted at the site of the corporeal, but the body is not the end point, rather, as Hansen insists (and there are clear connections here with McNay’s work on subjectivity), a site of generative and protensive possibilities. If we return to the extract above, we can see these generations and negotiations. When Grant leans sideways left, makes a ‘vroom’ sound, and leans sideways right, for example, his body is a negotiation of the stimulus on screen – the symbolic, audio and sensory impetus – and the physiological – the corporeal elements of identity (for example). Further, this negotiation generates consequences and further actions. In relation to the game, such negotiations result in his avatar acting, moving from left to right, and results in him ultimately winning the race. In relation to the other people in the room, such negotiations generate audio and corporeal responses from Duncan, who shouts ‘Hey!! That’s not right!’ and leans forward towards the game to respond to Grant’s movements. The audio, corporeal and gaming actions are similarly framed by the context in which they occur, and we could argue they ultimately generate a new game, with different gamers (when Cam comes into the room). The point is not to claim a causal link, which would be both reductive and over-simplified, but to suggest that these embodied articulations are reflective and productive. They not only arc backwards, in that they reflect power dynamics. They also arc forwards, in that they generate new dynamics and relations. In other words, such embodied actions are, in a similar vein to Somers and Gibson’s account of ontological narrative, constantly in process, and generative. They also, as the extract above demonstrates, and as Hansen (2006) insists, include the technology. Indeed, including the technology here is a crucial move as it acknowledges the complexities and durability of these relations. As Caroline Bassett argues, the dichotomy between technological or social determinism when it comes to talking about technology is familiar, cyclical, gendered and deeply unhelpful (2007: 52). One of the key arguments of this book is that technology should be conceptualized as always already deeply enmeshed and embedded in the social and vice-versa. This is also an important concern of Hansen’s 2006 work, where he attempts to move from the body as a site of ‘affectively expressed sensation’ (in Walkerdine 2007: 21), to one, which includes the generative capacities of embodiment. Critiquing and developing Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body schema, Hansen argues for the inclusion (always already) of technology when he claims that the body both is, and negotiates, the symbolic, physiological and technical:

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Ethnographies of the Videogame [T]he body schema emerges from what, with autopoietic theory, we have called the operational perspective of the embodied organism. As such, it encompasses an ‘originary,’ preobjective process of world constitution that, by giving priority to the internal perspective of the organism, paradoxically includes what is outside the body proper, what lies in the interactional domain specified by embodied enaction. Three important consequences follow from this distinction: first, the body is always in excess over itself; second, this excess involves the body’s coupling to an external environment: and third, because such coupling is increasingly accomplished through technical means, this excess (which has certainly always been potentially technical) can increasingly be actualized only with the explicit aid of technics. (2006: 38–9)

Hansen’s argument, it seems, has resonances with Bassett’s suggestion that we narrate mediations with technology, and McNay’s arguments around protensive subject formation. Returning to the Cyborg Hansen’s re-imagining of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘body schema’, then, is clearly an attempt to think through embodied interaction (‘coupling’) in ways, which are always already inclusive of both technology and place. In many ways, these arguments have also been made in the field of cybernetics, particularly around the figure of the cyborg. Indeed it is worth noting these similarities, not least because they again demonstrate an ongoing concern with issues of corporeality, technology and place. Returning to the cyborg facilitates a number of things. It includes elements of the ‘un-sayable’ within accounts of action because it includes the technological as intrinsic to the cyborg’s identity make-up. These accounts of the cyborg also specifically focus on the body, and it is at the site of the body that technology and the ‘organic’ exist in torsion. For accounts of ‘actual’ gameplay, where the gaming body could be said to ‘narrate’ the game through action (through the playing of it), the cyborg potentially theorizes the identity of the gamer as inclusive of the technology. It also theorizes the embodied gamer as a generative active being who is essential to the creation of these social and technological identity narratives. Indeed for Dovey and Kennedy, a focus on the gamer-ascyborg offers ‘the opportunity to explore alternative subjectivities and to engage in different kinds of affective experience, where embodiment and possibilities are defined by different rules to those imposed in real life’ (2006: 117). While their conception of the cyborg is problematic insofar as it assumes a one-to-one relationship between the gamer and game and continues to theorize the body, in keeping with Hansen’s 2006 work as ‘affective’, they nevertheless highlight precisely what is so attractive about the cyborgian gamer: its generative capacity. The cyborg also offers one of the only accounts of a technological and technologized body, which incorporates both elements of organic and inorganic

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as equally relevant. It is therefore highly relevant for gaming not least because, as Dovey and Kennedy also suggest, ‘in the lived enactment of gameplay there is no player separate to the interface and game world; there is a fusion of the two into a cyborgian subjectivity – composed of wires, machines, codes and flesh’ (2006: 109). However, despite the potentiality of the cyborg as a framing concept and in a similar vein to early videogame/new media theory, cyborg theory seems locked into a fantasy of what the figure of the cyborg can offer theories of gender, corporeality and subjectivity in terms of effacing ‘negative’ or restricting identificatory signifiers. Cyborg theory seems to get carried away with the novelty of the technology and what it can do to bodies or identities. However, as Sue Thornham has noted, once the body ‘is no longer lived but ‘disassembled and reassembled’ [through technology], the concept of an embodied subjectivity becomes impossible to maintain’ (2007: 140). Yet this is precisely what the gameras cyborg needs to imagine – an embodied and lived subjectivity, but one that can be (to a certain extent) if not disassembled and reassembled, then at least lived through technology. It is worth briefly outlining the theoretical background to the cyborg, then, not least because it highlights yet another problematic legacy for videogame theory. Indeed, Dovey and Kennedy’s evocation of the cyborg in their understanding of gaming seems somewhat naive, and perhaps inappropriate, when we consider its legacy. Indeed, the concept of the cyborg as emerging from cybernetics in the 1960s (see Hayles 1999: 84–131, Clynes 1995: 43–53, Clynes and Klines 1960: 29–30, Thornham 2007: 135–43) envisages a body enhanced and improved, in other words, affected, by the technology. While such a body may be disassembled and reassembled by the technology, it is always problematically gendered and sexed not only because the body is done to by the technology, thus reproducing the gendered dichotomies of action-masculinity and passive-femininity. It is also always gendered because the body is conceived as in opposition to the technological – as natural, as organic, and as essential. This is not a produced or performed body as conceptualized by feminist theory, then, but a fixed site essential gender, acted onto by the technology. Indeed, as Clynes argues: The idea of the cyborg in no way implies an it. It’s a he or a she. It is either a male or a female cyborg … The genes and chromosomes already determine sex, and the brain circuitry expresses that sexuality … it hasn’t altered their essential identity. (1960: 48–9)

Clynes insistence on an essential identity, as Hayles reminds us, feeds into problematic concepts of the cyborg which privileges ‘informational pattern’ over ‘material instantiation’ (Hayles 1999: 2). Embodiment in relation to any biological connection is more an ‘accident of history rather than an inevitability of life’ (ibid.). In turn, this figures the body as something transformed or discarded. The body is more akin to a ‘bag of skin’ as Mitchell puts it (2003: 22), and identity, theorized a cognitive process, rather than embodied, remains intact. Indeed, if

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we look at Featherstone and Burrow’s (1995) early collection of essays, we see a gendered cyborg being produced through such language of technological affect. In Rawdon Wilson’s account of being a cyborg, his body is something that has to be ‘dealt’ with and done to: My body seems always to be dissolving, failing in one way or another, needing supplements. I feed it vitamins and healthy food and as one part after another begins to fail, I discuss with various doctors the possibilities of replacement. (Rawdon Wilson 1995: 239)

For a more contemporary account of such cyborgian bodies, we need only look at recent writings on the iPod. Here, the technology may be lived through, but it also functions as a technological tool to enhance control over the technologically altered environment. In this way, the technology is similarly conceived as an enhancing tool, facilitating control not only over the body, but also over the environment through which one moves: iPod use re-orientates and re-spatialises experience which users often describe in solipsistic and aesthetic terms. Users frequently mention feelings of calm gained through listening to their iPod. (Bull 2009: 542)

While Bull’s account does attempt to think through the lived dimensions of technology as always already corporeally inscribed, he nevertheless continues to prioritize individual agency over space and place as the user controls the sound scape for each environment. Indeed, the notion of technology facilitating agency over space and place returns us to the problematic gendering of space and place as something done to, and ordered by movement through it (see Grosz 2001: 58). While I am not suggesting Bull’s account of the iPod goes to this extreme, it is clear that once agency over space and place is privileged as supported by technological impact onto and into the body, a complex set of gendered and colonial rhetoric begins to emerge. It is a lived and embodied concept of the cyborg, then, which seems most useful for thinking through gaming scenarios. As a lived body, the gamer-as-cyborg is not only always already technological, it is also always already within and generative of the power dynamics into which it is positioned. Conceptualized as a lived body, the cyborgian body is also not the unique preserve of a temporally restrictive gaming scenario. Instead, the cyborgian body arcs well beyond the immediate moment of gameplay and (as with the social) is always-already technological, and therefore always-already ‘cyborgian’. This claim is possible because as with Clare and Rach (discussed in the previous chapter); Joe and Simon’s, Duncan and Grant’s performances whilst gaming are contingent on, and mediated through, the technology. Following this, it is possible to argue that along with their social memories, these performances have always been inclusive of the technology. Consequently, to separate the body from technology is to create a false binary in gamers’ conceptions

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of themselves as gamers. As these moments of gaming suggest, however, while corporeality is always something more than flesh and tissue, it is still grounded in power and gender politics of performance, especially in terms of including a technological element into conceptions of identity. Rather than a discussion of a technologically mediated body, or the effects of technology on the body, theories of corporeality have to include technology as always-already implicated in the body. Furthermore, while corporeality and identity have to include the technological, they also have to continue to be embedded into socio-cultural gender and power politics. Indeed, if the body is socially negotiated and culturally constituted, then as socioculturally positioned, conceptions of the body are always-already also technological. Yet, as the recordings of gameplay suggest, the gaming body also acts and negotiates with power dynamics, which are inclusive of gender and technology. While this was discussed in detail in the previous chapter, the further extract of Rob and Rach gaming also demonstrates this: Rach: Oh we were going to have sausages! [Looks at Rob, half rises out of her chair] Rob: [Picks up analogue controller, presses ‘x’ to re-commence gaming] we could have sausages! [Thumbs moving over buttons, index fingers pressing buttons on the face of the controller while left thumb moves between directional arrows and right thumb controls actions of avatar. Still looking at screen] [Rach looks from Rob to screen, lowers herself back into chair. Rises again, looks at kitchen, looks at Interviewer, looks at Rob. Lowers herself back into seat] Rach: Oh yeah. Ohh! Ohh! Ohh! Ohh you never! Ohh Laughs. Leans right forward so that her elbows are on her knees] [Rob glances at Rach, thumbs and index finger moving continuously, tensing arm and shoulder muscles, moving head slightly from left to right. Laughs] Rach: How did you survive that fall? [Looks at Rob, one arm pointing at screen. Arm totally outstretched] Rob: Law man! Law man! [staring at screen, glances at Rach’s arm and back to screen. Arms and shoulders convulsing, thumbs moving over buttons, index fingers pressing buttons on face of analogue controller] Rach: Is that an old woman behind you? [points. Shouts] Oh God! Jesus Christ! I thought they all had guns in LA [Rach’s mobile phone vibrates. She picks it up, glances at screen, looks at text message. Holds onto phone, frowns slightly]

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Ethnographies of the Videogame Rob: They do all have guns [looking at screen] Rach: Well there’s a policeman, why doesn’t he just shoot you? [Leans back, looks at mobile phone again, starts texting, glancing up at screen] (8.2)

In the account above, we not only see the gendered relations discussed in previous chapters evidenced here, in Rach’s negotiated participation in the game and other tasks (cooking sausages) in the house, and the differing roles the two housemates play throughout the conversation. We can also identify cyborgian notions of identity and performance, in Rob’s conversation with Rach, which is inclusive of the technology, and in Rach’s participation in the game and response to her text message. In keeping with Hansen’s account of the body as always already incorporating technology, and Vivian Sobchack’s account of her prosthetic limb, which highlighted the way her conception of her own identity envelops the technology (1995: 210), the extract above demonstrates a habitual, lived and embodied engagement with the technology as always already inclusive. Throughout the recording, Rob in particular rarely pauses gameplay while responding to Rach’s queries. His thumbs and index fingers constantly move over the analogue controller pressing buttons and his shoulders, arms, head and neck twitch continuously. Occasionally his legs and body jerk. Rach’s dialogue and movement is also embedded in the technology, she throws out her arms, shouts, laughs and leans forwards and backwards as she questions Rob. When she receives a text message, she replies in a negotiated moment, embedding her response into the dynamics of the living room. Contrary to First Wave New Media theory, some Game theory and first, second and third wave Cybernetics, then, Rob’s corporeality is not necessarily positively enhanced or improved here. It is not solely the technology, which ‘affects’ his performances. Instead, the extract suggests socially and culturally situated bodies, and, above all, lived bodies. Taken together, the recordings of gameplay highlight the way the game is narrated through the gaming body. Yet it is also a socio-cultural body performing in a social setting and it is a lived body with a history, phenomenology and temporality. My argument here is that it is not just conceptions of the social, which need to include technology; it is also, as Hansen argues, conceptions of the body. This inclusion in no way effaces the socio-cultural gender and power politics, but remains embedded in them. Tilting the scales in this way does a number of things. It reduces the possibility of the gendered notion of technology acting onto the (previously docile) body. It also insists on a history, phenomenology and temporality for both the technology and the body, and also for their relational tensions. Indeed, to reiterate my argument, social gaming always includes the technological not only because of the way the social is conceived by gamers as inclusive of the technological, but also because the body always already includes the technological. For gaming, the body tends to be seen in relation to the inclusions of the technologies of the screen, analogue controllers, headsets, dance mats, and Wii boards.

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Similarly, separating technology from other ‘social’ activities (movement, interaction, engagement) or from the ‘real’ body creates a false division. The false dichotomy retains notions of essentialism – a ‘real’ body or the ‘real’ social. In turn, this facilitates conceptions of the technology acting onto the body or the social, continuing the notion of one-way or top down power systems, as well as the ‘negative paradigm’ of subject formation to which McNay refers (2000: 4).3 The final criticism of this disjuncture is that it once again encourages focus on novel technology which alters the ‘real’, similarly continuing the discourse of technology facilitating progress into the virtual or beyond the ‘real’. I am not arguing for a reductionist notion of either the technology, or the body. Rather, I am suggesting that, in a similar vein to the rhetoric of technology and the social, the rhetoric around technology and the body also needs to be rethought. It is the loosest conception of the cyborg as ‘predicated on transgressed boundaries’ (Balsamo 2000: 155) that I am therefore evoking. Rather than the specific and contradictory history of the cyborg as it emerges through first, second and third wave cybernetics (see Hayles 1999), it is a feminist conception of the cyborg as, ‘a condensed image of both imagination and material reality’ (Haraway 1991: 150), and as a lived body (Sobchack 1995). Similarly, this lived body is not a body that ‘we have’, but a body ‘that we are’ (Sobchack 1995: 211). Indeed, as Hayles reminds us, the cyborg is a discursive formation, but it is also a technological and material one, not least because, as she argues, cyborgs exist: Were the cyborg only a product of discourse, it could perhaps be relegated to science fiction, of interest to DF aficionados but not of vital concern for culture. Were it only a technological practice, it could be confined to such technical fields as bionics, medical prostheses, and virtual reality. Manifesting as both technological object and discursive formation, [the cyborg] partakes of the power of the imagination as well as of the actuality of technology. Cyborgs actually exist. (Hayles 1999: 114–5)

Seen in conjunction with the socio-semiotic body of symbolic interactionism, or Hansen’s re-working of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘body schema’, the notion of the cyborg could be useful for us. Indeed, conceptualizing the gamer as cyborg insists on a material embodiment somewhat absent from videogame theory that, as discussed in the previous chapter, continues to argue for the power of the media/technology over the body to the extent it ‘loses’ itself or becomes inherently ‘immersed’. At the very least this account of the gaming body goes some way towards collapsing the dichotomy between the technological approach and a phenomenological approach to gaming discussed in Chapter 1, arguing instead, that the two approaches are 3  She argues that within Foucauldian theory, the ‘negative paradigm’ is the construction of the subject as subjected to power politics, which she argues is a misinterpretation of Foucault and overshadows generative possibilities or possibilities for change for the subject.

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always already enmeshed. It facilitates a discussion of technology and the social as implicated in each other, and consequently the gaming body is figured as an active interruption into, negotiation with, and commentary on, this relationship. Finally, as the extracts of gaming highlighted in this chapter suggest, a cyborgian subjectivity is not only about wires, machines, codes and flesh, it is also about context, embodied interaction, and imagined others. Temporality and Action: Actor-Network Theory and Imperatives to Act The final issue, then, relates to the critiques leveled at such accounts above, which have been hinted at in previous chapters: that once again, they privilege action and ignore or negate inaction, and the desire, but not necessarily impetus, to act. As suggested, focusing on the body tends to privilege ‘affectively expressed sensation’ (Walkerdine 2007: 21). In turn, this privileges action insofar as affectivity has to be (positively) ‘expressed’ through action in order to be interpreted. In many ways, the critiques leveled at the accounts above are also those leveled at actornetwork theory (ANT) – a theory of relational entities within a productive cycle. At its best, ANT is a theory of the tensional space between actor and network, which John Law and John Hassard insist is ‘intentionally oxymoronic’ (1999: 1). It is worth detailing these arguments here, not least because they demonstrate the pervasiveness of the concept of affective bodies across disciplines and approaches. By comparison, the concept of an inactive body – where potential imperatives to act are rarely realized – is often undermined, dismissed, or simply negated. Inflected by, and incorporating, the concerns of Foucauldian discourse theory, Cultural studies and Colonial and Post-colonial theory, ANT utilizes certain aspects of these theories but maintains a focus on the more specific entities within the overall network. The conscious (visible) hyphenating of ‘actor-network’ highlights the notion of agency-in-tension, placing it at the forefront of the debate around generative or productive power relations. The hyphen claims actor/ actant and network/rhizome as existing as separate-yet-relational entities within a constantly shifting tension. By comparison with Foucauldian discourse theory then, instead of conceptualizing the subject as produced through discourse, ANT prioritizes an effective agent which is not only the product of a network (by virtue of being produced within it), but also contributes to it (through its productive role within the network). There are a number of issues to be noted in this shift of focus. One is the positive and productive effect maintained through this focus on the relational space between actor and network. There exists a capacity for change, which is the causal product of the relational tension between actor and network. In other words, because ANT focuses on the relationship between actor and network as tensional, generative contributions of, say, an actant onto the network are open to fluctuations. Similarly, because ANT theorizes actors and networks retrospectively, this contribution is always causal (it contributes actively and extensively to the final network being described or theorized).

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The actants of ANT are not limited to organic entities: they also include the inorganic or technological actants. This means that technology, for example, is afforded the same ability to produce, or shape, a network as human actants. Initially liberating,4 the conception of a network produced through organically indifferent actants assumes a number of prerequisites, which are problematic for this project. The first relates to the way ‘action’ or ‘performance’5 is measured or accounted for within such a network. By assuming an organically indifferent (in terms of the ability to shape the network) actant, nuances of productivity, or power, are reduced. This means that the cup of tea drunk when gaming has as much ‘force’ for shaping the network, which is gameplay, as the genre of the game played, or the presence of certain people in the room. For me, this undermines the human element of gaming and does not emphasize the power politics of the home, or to repeat Butler’s phrase, ‘who is imagining whom’ (2004b: 10) satisfactorily. Indeed, one of my arguments in this book is that one of the major frameworks for social gaming in the home is the power politics into which gaming is positioned. If one gamer is perceived as having more authority (Rob, Joe, Clare for example), it can render other housemates mute and immobile in certain gaming contexts, or at least radically alter their gaming experience and contributions (as we saw with Clare and Rach in Chapter 4). Those housemates who do not actively contribute to gaming praxis in terms of action, nevertheless hegemonically support the politics, which render them mute in the first place. Indeed, if we think of the gaming extracts cited in this chapter, when Simon and Joe are gaming, Lorna is present in the house, but vacates the living room and moves quietly between the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. Cam, in the second extract re-enters the room towards the end of the extract, asking to play. In the all female household (quoted in Chapter 4), when Sara hands over the analogue controller, she begins texting or reading, staying in the room but not ‘actively’ participating in the game. This is to say nothing of the moments when gamers may want to say/do something but ultimately do not ‘act’. If we think of gameplay as a network or actor-network relations, then those actors who do not act in recognizable or intended ways, become problematic. Indeed as suggested, ANT prioritizes action and movement (which it equates with production), but such a conception is problematic especially in relation to those gamers (like Lorna) who do not act in the valued role ANT assigns them (in ways which productively contribute to gameplay). While they may not participate in the game in terms of action, they clearly do interpret, respond, and return to the gaming scenario before or after gameplay. However, in creating a productive network of performances, a hierarchy of performance is introduced whereby those 4  ANT assumes the technology as already intrinsic to social networks, which is how it is often understood by the gamers as discussed in Chapter 2. 5  I am placing these words in quotation marks because they all call on a different rhetoric according to the theoretical approach. ANT would never discuss performance, for example, but I use it here in order to facilitate cross-theory comparisons.

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entities that do not perform in intended or recognizable ways are negated. The very notion of production introduces a power structure, which distinguishes between qualities of performance. In other words, ANT assumes the ability for all entities to speak to, and contribute to the network in which the performance is situated. Furthermore, unless motivation is enacted, it does not register in accounts of the network. Sara’s motivations would not register, only her pleasure would figure and this, as she latterly suggests (quoted in Chapter 2), is a problematic representation of herself, which she feels uneasy about when she comments retrospectively: I did feel that I was nearly always out of my depth when I was talking about gaming in comparison with everyone else, not because I knew less, but because I was always the girl. Not that I wasn’t interested, but it was their kind of topic of expertise and I took on more just to connect with people. Now I’m in a different social situation with people who actually like me and people I like. But my whole life in Brighton was just a performance. (9.3)

Of course, the irony of Sara’s comment is that although she claims very different feelings towards gaming and her housemates, her performances and actions in both the mixed and all-female house, are not so different to the observer. While I will return to feelings of well-being and togetherness in the following chapter, Sara is quoted here because she demonstrates not only disquiet at her previous performances, but that she also felt they we’re unreflective of her (‘my whole life … was just a performance’). ANT, however, does not recognize such nuances, limiting the actant to the immediate role it is assigned, and does not value (in the same way) movement or action outside the assigned mode of performance or action. It also, as Sue Thornham reminds us, does not conceptualize the intricacies of gender, class or race (for example), which are central to Sara’s conception of herself as well embedded in her performances (see Chapter 3): Gendered relations of power, like those of class or race, become invisible, or even impossible to conceptualise within this [ANT] framework, since power differentials between human actors matter no more than relationships between non-human (or human and non-human) actors. Yet infinitely dispersed and unmentioned as they are, gender and sexuality for this reason also remain unexamined, to occur infrequently as apparently naturalized markers of human identity. (Thornham 2007: 125)

Nick Couldry’s (2004: 9) criticisms of ANT are also pertinent considering Sara’s comments. He argues that there is no theorization of what comes after the establishment of a network. This is an issue here about temporality and interpretation (both very human attributes). He argues that ANT concentrates on the establishment of a network (ibid.). However, interpretations of that network and subsequent networks are minimally mentioned, resulting in a limited scope to theorize movements beyond the network in terms of power and time. If we

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understand the practice of gaming as a network which is produced through the actants performing (some of which are technological, some of which are material, and some organic), there is little interest in terms of how that episode of gameplay shaped further gaming activities, or the way it is interpreted by gamers who do not physically game (in terms of picking up the analogue controller, or dancing on the dance mat) but are present in the room. Movement beyond the network is unaccounted for. As this is a major feature of my research because of what frequent revisits to certain households highlighted, ANT as a shaping concept is problematic. The final criticism of ANT relates to the conception of the actant and relates to the criticism above. By comparison with negotiated performance as it is understood within cultural studies, or ontological narrative as it is used in this book, ANT assumes a transparent actant whose movements can be fully accounted for. As I have already discussed, negotiated performance or ontological narrative incorporate the subject’s private understandings of their own identity (which is never entirely transparent even to the performer). Concepts of negotiated performance or ontological narrative are also contingent on the specific social make-up of the household and living in which gaming occurs (the politics of it). ANT, on the other hand, abstracts the power relations through which subjectivity is produced, assuming a kind of benign understanding of all operations within the network. A transparent and un-conflicted actor (itself produced through definable networks) can impact actively (and often linearly) to help create a further network. This strikes me as particularly problematic not only for the assumptions about how the actant is created, but also for the assumption about the theorist describing the networks. My argument, ultimately, is that it is ontological narrative, which allows us to think through imperatives to act. As mediated through McNay’s notion of protensive subject formation (2000: 86), Bassett’s account of technological mediation (2007: 32), Hansen’s re-working of the body schema (2006: 26) and Butler’s concept of ‘who is imagining whom’ (2004: 10); ontological narrative is expanded to incorporate the technological, action, desire and the symbolic. Indeed the imperatives to act can be seen throughout the gaming extracts cited in this chapter (and Chapter 5), and it is worth briefly detailing some of these moments here. Rach’s decision to not leave the room to make sausages, or Simon’s continual act of lifting up and lowering the analogue controller, for example, could both be seen as such moments. Rach responds to Rob’s query about the sausages and negotiates his request with her desire to remain in the room, and what she imagines the other people in the room want her to do (she looks at each person), before lowering herself back into the chair. Simon constantly raises and lowers his controller when playing Joe (above). When Simon jumps when Joe shouts, he automatically raises up controller in his hands, only to slump back down and lower the controller again. My argument is that these are such moments where the gamers are impelled to act (by Rob, by Joe), but do not act, or at least, act in unanticipated ways. Similarly, because these actions are unanticipated, there

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is little room to conceptualize them using actor-network theory. Simon does not progress the game, which is what Joe wants: his actions are not predictable or transparent. Instead Simon expresses the potential desire to act in his lifting up of the analogue controller, but does not press any buttons or move his avatars. While these are not moments of inaction per se, they do produce both unanticipated actions and actions that reflect power dynamics beyond the immediacy of the game itself. Indeed, both Rach and Simon’s actions here reflect the fact that videogames, and videogame playing, are about much more than ‘the act and moment of play itself’ (Newman 2004: 153). Along with such imperatives to act prompted, in part, by requests from housemates, we also see negotiations with one’s own desire to act highlighted in the gaming extracts cited in this chapter. These are moments of negotiation between what we could call the corporeal and discursive, which similarly produce unanticipated outcomes. Duncan’s gesture of defeat before he asks ‘best out of three?’ is one such moment. Here, his embodied gesture produces a range of possible outcomes, which McNay would conceptualize as protensive possibilities. Duncan’s request to play again is perhaps the least anticipated of those protensive possibilities. The outcome of this negotiation – discussed earlier as symbolic and physiological – could also be conceptualized as a negotiation between the lived experiences of gaming and Duncan’s imagined sense of self. Butler’s concept resonates here insofar as Duncan’s imagined self (negotiated in part through imaginings of others) does not fit comfortably with losing the game. It suggests that the negotiation between the lived experience of gaming, and imagined sense of self, is also a negotiation with qualities of masculinity. Indeed, Walkerdine argues in relation to her research on children and games, that winning is an essential component of masculinity primarily because it posits masculinity as always already active: [T]he fantasy of the winner is an essential component [of masculinity], because imagining belonging to a group of winners is essential to this membership of action-masculinity. It isn’t simply what practices [gamers] … engage in but what they fantasize engaging in and being. (Walkerdine 2007: 45)

While Walkerdine is discussing the children of her research project, her point is equally applicable to Duncan, and suggests the durability of the signifier of actionmasculinity. Taken together, the moment captured in Duncan’s gesture of putting down the console before asking ‘best out of three?’ narrates not only Duncan’s imagined relations with his co-gamers, but also his relations with the game, and with himself (the fantasies to which Walkerdine refers). It is also just one single moment within a whole afternoon of gaming, and consequently constantly generates new narratives, relations, power politics, technologies and identities. Ontological narrative, then, with its embodied and lived dimensions, seems to me to be the most promising conceptualization able to accommodate both the embodied act of gaming, and the fantasized or imagined elements of gaming.

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To reiterate my arguments in the previous chapters, ontological narrative also facilitates a momentary (sometimes imagined) agency whilst also acknowledging wider power relations, which are always already inclusive of the technology. Moments of gameplay, somewhat inadequately captured in this chapter, are theorized using ontological narrative, as both fantasies both of performance and of action-masculinity (where there is the desire to win, to perform, to engage) and fantasies that may never be realized. In this conception, the gamer negotiates imagined and lived praxis, and the gamers body is both a site of those negotiations and positioned within (and to a certain extent, they do affectively express these negotiations). Inclusive of, but not reduced to, the arguments of symbolic interactionism, videogame theory, phenomenological geography or cyborgs; the bodies of ontological narrative emerge through the long term and immediate mediations with technology and with one another. More than a site of negotiation or an interpreted signifier, then, the gaming body and gaming ‘itself’ as a corporeal experience is lived by the gamers in familiar, repetitive and quotidian ways. Considering the lived relations of gaming, then, the following chapter addresses the moments when gamers were asked to reflect on their recorded gaming experience, and, as I argue, such revelations further demonstrate the importance of maintaining a focus on the lived body – not only as a conceptual site, but as one which ultimately frames the experiences and interpretations of technological mediations and social interactions.

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Chapter 6

Pleasure and the Imagined Gamer By comparison with the previous chapters, which investigated the discourses and activities of gaming, this chapter focuses on the ‘post gaming’ moments: when gamers watched themselves game on-screen. Having discussed and recorded gaming in each household, I then recorded gamer responses to the recordings of gameplay. Initially, this was to offer the space to interpret the recordings themselves, and reflect on them. I hoped their reflections would feed back and expand my comprehension of gameplay and that the reflections would offer them space for the research participants to comment on the research findings as a whole. However, what emerged from the reflections was something quite different, so that, rather than speak to the research findings, these moments actually spoke to the key theoretical underpinnings of the project, particularly in terms of gaming bodies, fantasy, pleasure and the importance of narrative. Consequently, rather than embed these findings into the other sections of the book, it is worth addressing them separately not least because they encapsulate some of the key theoretical tensions of the project. As suggested, I asked gamers to watch the recordings of gameplay with me, and comment on anything that struck them as they watched. However, for a number of logistical reasons, the recordings of gameplay were not played back to the gamers immediately following gameplay. Instead, there was a lapse of months after gameplay was recorded and before gamers viewed the recordings.1 Further, the visual recordings were of the gamers in the room: the camera was positioned on top of the television set, filming frontal shots of the gamers as they gamed. Taken together, the time delay and actual recording makes the responses cited here even more extraordinary as it became increasingly clear that gamers vividly remembered the game, their motivations during play, and even the specific actions of the avatars. Further, they remembered these elements of gameplay from watching and interpreting their own gaming bodies and faces (rather than the game itself). Finally, these recordings were pleasurable to watch, but they were also awkward and in some cases intensely uncomfortable for the gamers, whose memories of gaming, on which they base their confident claims about gaming (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) did not fit with what they saw onscreen. The disjuncture they felt, and the unease they expressed, is a crucial point methodologically and theoretically for this project as it demonstrates once again that reading the gamers body as a site of effect, or as a object to be ‘read’ and 1  See Appendix 2 for interview dates and topics.

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interpreted, is far from adequate when the gamers themselves cannot ‘read’ their own bodies in transparent or straightforward ways. As suggested, the impetus behind such reflections was to provide the gamer with a potentially rare reflexive opportunity to watch and comment on the game, their gamer ‘identities’, and the event of gaming. Consequently, these moments offer insights into gaming, suggesting that (in keeping with Newman’s argument, 2008), that gaming is much more than the immediate moment of engagement with the game. Taken together, they offer insights into the gamers in relation to their interpretations of their own embodied performances. They also offer insights into how the gamers conceptualize gaming, and what they perceive as important to recount. Finally, they also suggest some critical insights into conceptions of the social, arguing once again for a concept of the social as lived, as sensory, and as inclusive of the technology. In other words, these moments return us to, and develop, the themes of the project: technology, the body, the social, and narrative. Indeed, they highlight a crucial aspect of narrative, which underlies the whole project: the desire to narrate both the technology and themselves. One of the justifications for focusing on narrative throughout the book is the fact that gamers want to story their gaming experiences. These recordings clearly emphasize the fact that gamers not only want to narrate the game, but that they find this narration pleasurable. Indeed, despite the fact that gamers clearly found it problematic to articulate what was pleasurable about gaming (as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3), they nevertheless take every opportunity here to steer the conversation back to the dynamics of the game and gameplay, lingering on key moments during the game, which they want to explain and explore. We see here, then, not only a certain pleasure in the game demonstrated by the continual return to it, but also a pleasure exacerbated by the narration of the game, which offers rationale and logic for the events on screen. These moments are not only opportunities to explain the game, then, they are also opportunities for the gamers to explain themselves, and their actions and pleasures during gaming. Indeed, given the chance to comment on the visuals (which, in this instance are recordings of the gamers), gamers often direct the conversation to what is off-screen – the game. This not only indicates pleasure, it also reiterates the ‘power’ of narrative, insofar as gamers want to order the visuals through a narrative causality and logic. Narrative continues to have ideological, discursive and identificatory significance, placing the narrator in a momentary position of agency and authority. Narrative also facilitates the continued relevance and meaning of the game, well beyond the initial playing of it. There are three main issues to be discussed in this chapter. Firstly, there are the moments when gamers continue to narrate the game despite being invited to comment on themselves. This returns us to notions of the power and pleasure of the technology, suggesting not only that gaming is durable and embedded, but also that gamers continue to find and locate pleasure in the game beyond the initial moment of gaming. The pleasures of gaming are enmeshed with the narratives of gaming, and it is clear that gamers not only want to narrate the game, but the narration of the game creates entertaining and socially inclusive (pleasurable)

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spaces for their present audiences. Ultimately, then, these moments also return us to the wider concerns of the book in terms of the usefulness of narrative as a structuring device, and consequently its applicability in theorizing the videogame. The second issue related to the moments when gamers ‘can’t remember’ the conversation going on in the room, and are consequently surprised by what they witness on-screen. As suggested, this moment creates an uneasy disjuncture between how they remembered the gaming scenario, and perhaps more importantly, how they remember and imagine themselves as gamers. Indeed, when gamers see themselves not communicating with their housemates in ways they remembered, their imagined gaming scenarios are exposed as precisely that: as imagined. In turn, this suggests not only an ‘imagined’ event, one which was remembered through individual feelings of well-being and togetherness. It also suggests an imagined sense of self where the gamers fantasize and imagine themselves in ways, which are not borne out in the recordings. Jodi Dean, talking about social networking sites, discusses what she calls a ‘fantasy of participation’ (2008: 109), where users believe they are meaningfully communicating with one another, when in fact, it is a fantasy of participation they invest in because they are rarely responded to in productive ways. Thinking of gaming as a fantasy of participation suggests that technology plays a major part in the imagined construction of selves, to the extent that technological mediations can offer similar feelings of interaction and sociability. Further, this not only incorporates a fantasized or imagined element into gameplay, and therefore stakes a further claim for including imagined or desired gaming into our conception of gameplay. It also clearly centres the body, demonstrating that feelings of togetherness and interaction are as important as action. Considering this, I return to sensory and embodied concepts of social gaming, which nevertheless maintains a fantasized and imagined element – not only in terms of who is imagining whom, but also in terms of the desire to perform, the fantasy of a gaming self, and the imagined dimensions of gaming praxis. Further, when faced with the disjuncture between remembered gaming events and the recordings of them, gamers firstly attempt to rationalize the events on screen, before undermining and querying such corporeal memories. This means that they take the visual ‘evidence’ as a more accurate account of the gaming scenario, and ultimately negate their corporeal feelings of gaming on which they not only based their memories of gaming, but also their assertions about gaming and themselves discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. More widely, gamers own negation of their gaming bodies in favour of contrary visual evidence, suggests that the concepts of the body critiqued throughout this book are also upheld on a micro scale by the gamers of this project. In deference to a visual ‘capturing’ and a narrative logic, sensory feelings of togetherness and interaction are questioned, in many ways reproducing the dichotomy discussed in Chapter 1 of a technological or phenomenological approach to gaming. The disquiet they articulate at seeing themselves onscreen also articulates precisely what is at stake in this book as a whole: an understanding of gaming as lived, embodied, enacted and produced.

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Indeed, the final issue directly follows from this, and relates to conceptions of the social. Gamers asserted throughout this project that it is the social aspects of gaming, which they primarily engage in and find pleasurable. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 2, they normalize gaming as social, drawing on wider stereotypes of the geek gamer to undermine excessive or solo gaming. When we consider these statements retrospectively, and in light of these recordings, it becomes increasingly clear that the social needs redefining. Along with the concept of the social as ‘being there’ discussed in Chapter 4, the social is also clearly based on sensory and lived feelings of togetherness. When gamers begin to question their memories of gaming, their uneasiness suggests a number of critical issues not only around the concept of the social, but also around imagined and lived interaction, imagined and lived presence, and technologically mediated communication. Taken together, these moments of ‘not remembering’, therefore return us to some fundamental questions around videogames today, namely around the power, pleasure and culture of videogames. Returning to the Game The initial comments of gamers upon viewing the recordings of gameplay demonstrate a number of things: embarrassment, pleasure and excitement at seeing themselves on screen, attempts to rationalize and explain what they are seeing through recourse to one another or the game itself, and continuations of the power dynamics and inter-personal relations discussed throughout the book. We see, then, in the extracts below, different rationalizations offered by the gamers, which continue to negotiate gender, the power dynamics of the household, and claims of gaming ability (to name a few). Joe, for example, continues to claim agency over the game when he tells the interviewer that the move we are seeing onscreen is a difficult one technically, requiring skill and fluency with the technology. Rach continues to provide a socially entertaining commentary, noting that Rob behaves in a different way to her, and rationalizing her behaviour in relation to the game. Sara continues to claim very little agency over her actions, creating a distance once again between past events and present identity. In other words, the durable identity signifiers, or the meta narratives to which Somers and Gibson refer (1994), continue to be performed and produced here in the reflections on gaming. Finally, the recordings show very little of the game itself, or movements beyond the room in which gaming occurred, yet despite this, they prompt a range of memories and reflections, which suggest that the game is vividly remembered: Rob: The camera’s right above the TV, like we’re just staring at the camera Rach: and it’s widescreen as well, so we all look twice as lardy. [To Rob] and you are totally not facing me

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Rob: what do you mean? Interviewer: you’re just facing me! Rach: well because you’re not playing? Rob: that’s the way I sit on the couch isn’t it? Rach: no but you’re definitely more, coz when you were playing I was definitely facing more towards the camera [laughter] Rach: what was that? An order? [laughter] Rach: I don’t think I ever said ‘thank you’ for my tea either! Coz you’re so engrossed, the toast and tea just appears! It looks really funny when we’re both looking at the map and we can’t find the dumbbells. Look we both lean forward at the same time [laughter] Rach: and look at this, it’s obviously quite violent, you can see the light from the screen there, and we both just sit there, totally still. No response [laughter on screen] Interviewer: so what are your initial impressions from seeing this then? Rach: He did like a roll and then shot something, and I thought I had to replicate it … he was like crouching down after he’d finished shooting and I couldn’t crouch down so I was doing this dance coz I was trying everything. Jumping, kicking, shooting, swapping weapons, climbing boxes [laughs. Rach on screen says ‘where’s L3?’] That’s funny coz I know where ‘L3’ is. I’m just saying that for effect! (8.2)

The initial comments offered by Rob and Rach introduce a number of issues. Indeed, while Rob initially rationalizes his behaviour onscreen, commenting that this is just the way he sits on the couch, and nothing out of the ordinary, Rach expresses much more surprise and pleasure at seeing herself onscreen. While I will return to Rob later in the chapter as he becomes increasingly uneasy as he watches the recordings, it is interesting to note his initial attempt

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at rationalization, particularly as it continues the gendered power dynamics of this household discussed earlier in the book. Rach’s first remark, by comparison, draws attention to, and explains her body size, as she comments that the wide screen is making them look much bigger. While this perhaps indicates underlying anxieties about image and representation, it is noticeable how quickly Rach objectifies herself by comparison with Rob and indeed, Simon and Joe discussed below. For me, this indicates a much longer practice of critical self evaluation as well as a normalized practice of visual self assessment, not least because she articulates such criticisms to both Rob and the interviewer, and is the most vocal and practiced at assessing her representation onscreen. Indeed, Rob rarely comments at all in the extract above, leaving Rach to offers analyses and exclamations. In this moment of viewing, Rach’s body becomes the surveilled, controlled, and maintained body discussed by feminist theorists and sociologists (for example, Grosz 1994, Featherstone 1991, Lash 1991). It is the ‘looking-glass body’ discussed by Waskul and Vannini 2006: 4–6) where the body is both interpreted and imagined (ibid.: 5). However, it is also an uncomfortable body, and one which, to use psychoanalytic discourse, is both recognized and misrecognized when Rach first sees it. While I will return to this later, it is important to note here that Rach finds the image of herself both familiar and unsettling, because the image does not fit with her imagined sense of self, as essentially thinner than the representation onscreen. Indeed, the extract above captures another moment of analytical self-reflection offered by Rach in the course of the research, when she reveals that she actually knows the functions of the console and is only asking Rob ‘for effect’. While I have argued throughout the book that the female gamers are competent gamers, they rarely claim this status themselves and it is only in moments of reflection (either in terms of watching these recordings, or reflecting back on previous households as with Sara), that such acknowledgements occur. It seems, then, that seeing the events on screen facilitates a certain amount of reflective distance enabling Rach to comment on her gaming as a particular kind of (gendered?) performance. Such reflective spaces are not always taken up, however, as we see with Simon and Joe’s initial comments when they first view the recordings. By comparison with Rach, and in a similar vein to Rob, their immediate recourse is towards explanation and rationalization: Simon: this is all just the start up here though Joe: yeah, wait ‘til we get into the flow of it Simon: [laughs. To Joe] you didn’t try your trick [to Interviewer] he’s got this trick where you’re going along like this, and you stop and he does like this, concentrates really hard. It sort of side steps around the player. Here, this is where you do it. Sidestep round the player and then, look, I wanted you to pass

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to me and you didn’t. Here, you go left and then shoot. You can tell. Short burst of speed and then this is where you score. See. Joe: yeah, it’s like a little running thing. But it’s quite difficult to get because that’s a ‘shoot’ button, and that’s a ‘pass’ button, so you’ve got to do it really quickly with fluid moves so. See there. I do it there. Simon: that’s a special move on the playing game though isn’t it? Joe: yeah (1.6)

While we see a similar amount of pleasure and expectation here as with Rach and Rob (‘wait ‘til we get into the flow of it’), we see very little of the selfcritique offered by Rach. Instead, Simon and Joe rationalize the events, explaining to the interviewer that what we see onscreen is Joe’s attempt to do a particular move in the game. Further, the onscreen events act as a prompt and a support to their conversation. The moment where Joe demonstrates his ‘trick’ occurs after Simon has started discussing it, and prompts an explanation around the technical difficulties of the ‘trick’ by Joe. In other words, they reference the onscreen representations far less than Rach, who refers to it much more and in relation to both the events on screen, and her behaviour in the room (‘I don’t think I ever said ‘thank you’ for my tea either!’). Rach, then, uses the visual representation to discuss the entire gaming scenario reflectively. Simon and Joe use it to enhance and support a discussion about their present day gaming skills. By comparison with Simon and Joe, and in a similar vein to Rach, the all female house rarely comments on their gaming skills, or indeed, the game itself. Instead, their focus is almost entirely on themselves, as they offer humorous, but also critical commentaries on their own bodies and actions. Despite their main focus on the living room and themselves, it is also clear from the extract below that like Rach, Simon and Joe, Sara can also pinpoint the exact moment in the game they were playing: Clare: Chloe’s not even looking at the screen, I’m not looking Sara: that’s because you know I’m not going to be very good. I’m not going to move the mission on Clare: is this where you were talking about the wall? Sara: we did talk about the wall for a while! [laughter] Sara: but Clare look at you, it’s like you’ve died!

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Sara: oh no, wait, I’ll eat some more cheese whirls … no I’ve died, given up on life. I’ll just stop what I’m doing and get myself run over. Just run in front of a car. I just gave up it was too hard. Look at that! Shot, run over and blown up all in one go Clare: [laughs] you’ve got really good posture when you sit Sara! I just slouch Sara: maybe I was more aware of being filmed than gaming Clare: is Sara texting again?! Sara: someone loves me! I think it’s my mum ‘what are you doing?’ Chloe letting the cat out [laughter. On screen, Clare is gaming, Chloe moves Clare and her chair forwards so she can reach the door behind] Clare: [To Chloe] I knew you were moving it forward to get past, so I wasn’t going to kind of, I just thought ‘I’ll sit here and let her push me’ [laughs] I’m just like and old person aren’t I? In a home. (9.3)

As with Rach’s initial comments above, Clare, Sara and Chloe seem to also readily adopt a critical position in relation to their onscreen representations. They critically comment on their own bodies and each other, comparing them to one another in inclusive and collective moment of self-critique. Sara comments that Clare looks like she’s died because she is so immobile, Clare comments that Sara is texting throughout the evening and by comparison with Sara, Clare claims she is slouching. Like with Rach, these onscreen selves are objectified, criticized and analyzed, and very often, found lacking. Indeed as many feminist screen theorists have noted (Pollock 1987, Winship 1980, Felski 2000, Gill 2007), the long history of representation of women’s bodies, and the culture of self control and self monitoring (Bordo 1993, Grosz 1994) not only implicate women audiences into the process of criticism, they also celebrate and encourage a critical perspective on images of women. Indeed, there seems strong resonances with Clare and Sara articulations in the extract above, and Ros Gill’s understanding of the postfeminist body: both of which seem to require, ‘constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and remodelling’ (Gill 2007: 255). While I will return to screen theory below, the initial comments by the gamers suggest indicate a range of emphasis and focus for these recordings. Similarly, and in keeping with the findings throughout the project, these emphases are not only gendered, they relate to the power dynamics of the households, and the imagined subjectivities of the gamers. Simon, Joe and Rob, for example, in their rationalization and explanation of the recordings which emphasizes ‘reality’ or gaming expertise, stake very different

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claims to the women gamers, whose critical self reflection yet again seems to invite further ridicule and commentary. The final point I want to make about all these initial comments, relates to the game itself. Indeed, it is clear that despite a range of emphasis and focus, all of the gamers cited above vividly remember the game. They can pinpoint exact moments within the game by watching their own bodies and actions. Rach, for example, after a period of nearly 4 months, not only remembers the exact moment when she was trying to make her avatar crouch down, she also remembers what she actually made her avatar do in the process of trying to get it to crouch down: ‘I was doing this dance coz I was trying everything. Jumping, kicking, shooting, swapping weapons, climbing boxes’. Simon and Joe, after the same amount of time, also remember the move Joe does in order to score, detailing it precisely in their explanation of Joe’s jerky movements onscreen. Sara, after 2 months, remembers the long discussion about the wall just before her avatar is killed and Clare takes her turn. These vivid memories are narrated here despite overt invitations by the interviewer to discuss themselves and their gaming bodies, despite the game being off-screen, and despite (as suggested) a lapse of up to several months from gameplay to watching the re-play. My argument, firstly, is that we can use these moments to talk about the durability of the game beyond the moment of immediate gameplay in the meanings they hold for the gamers. Indeed, Newman’s argument once again seems pertinent here, when he argues that we need to understand the culture of videogames inclusive of ‘talk, discussion, sharing and collaboration’ (2008: 23). In keeping with Newman, we could argue that these moments are shared and collaboratively constructed narratives of gaming, then, which continue to construct gaming as pleasurable and as socially inclusive. Further, it seems to me that the processes articulated here in relation to the rationales and narratives gamers offer around the game, are precisely the processes which Dovey and Kennedy (2006) speak of, when they argue that the meaning of gaming is ‘brought about by a set of cultural processes through which meanings are generated and contested’ (2006: 65). In other words, the rationales and narratives gamers offer when reflecting on the recordings of gameplay, create and produce the game, and gaming itself, as meaningful through the cultural processes of narrative, reflection, interpretation and pleasure. This brings us onto a further point around narrative, then, and returns us to a central theme of the book. Indeed, along with Dovey and Kennedy’s argument which theorizes the reflections of gameplay in terms of the way the gamers construct meaning for the game, these extracts also seem to support Caroline Bassett’s argument that we understand technology through narrative (2007: 31–2), because what we see above are re-interpretations of off-screen events through narrative in order to make them meaningful. As she explains, narrative emplotment is the resolution of experience in time, which we could argue, is precisely what is going on in the extracts above. Here, the experiences of gaming are given a resolution through the positioning of them into, and as generative of, narrative:

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Ethnographies of the Videogame Information technology and our experiences within it and across it can be drawn up into the process of prefiguration, configuration and refiguration that constitute narrative emplotment, or the resolution of experience in time, according to shared forms that give those experiences meaning. (2007: 32)

Narrative is a central means through which meaning is generated not least because gaming is understood as an experience in time, and offered momentary resolution. Clare’s explanation of sitting in her chair while her housemates tried to move it to access the back door generates new meaning for her action because she offers it a temporally relevant explanation. The reasons for her behaviour are conducive to that particular moment, and through this specific recourse to temporal context, her actions are given coherence, and resolution. As she tells her housemates, ‘I knew you were moving it forward to get past … I just thought, ‘I’ll sit here and let her push me’. However, the narratives also do much more than generate meaning, not least because, as the extracts above also demonstrate, the act of narration is also deeply pleasurable. This suggests they can be seen, not only as a potential means though which we can understand the durability and power of gaming well beyond the moment of immediate gameplay. It is also a means through which we can understand gamers’ investment in it, in terms of constituting their identity and in terms of the pleasures of, and desire for, narration. Narration, Desire and Subjectivity Indeed, these extracts can also be read as engagements with subjectivity and gaming identity. As suggested, gamers continue to generate and produce the power relations into which and through which they are constituted. They also negotiate such relations, staking a claim for, and as, a particular subjectivity. Simon, for example, continues to perform rational masculinity, explaining and interpreting Joe’s movements within the context of gaming (even if this is ultimately undermined by Joe). My argument is, then, that these extracts can also be read as engagements with subjectivity. Indeed, as de Lauretis’ suggests: [S]ubjectivity is engaged in the cogs of narrative and indeed constituted in the relation of narrative, meaning, and desire; so that the very work of narrativity is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire. (1987: 106)

Seen in this light, Simon’s explanation is an engagement with certain negotiated positionalities of both meaning and desire. We see the attempts to claim authorship and agency through the act of narration and therefore the desire for agency and authorship (‘here, you go left and then shoot … this is where you score’). But Joe’s response, which interprets Simon’s comment not as an explanation of gaming, but as an acknowledgement of Joe’s superior gaming skills, ultimately undermines

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such performative attempts. When Joe tells me that ‘it’s quite difficult to get because that’s a ‘shoot’ button, and that’s a ‘pass’ button, so you’ve got to do it really quickly with fluid moves’, he turns attention towards himself and his superior playing skills, ultimately undermining Simon’s attempts at claiming agency and authorship through his own explanation. Furthermore, the pleasure and frustration Simon felt while gaming which was articulated thorough his corporeal gestures of raising and lowering his controller (discussed in the previous chapters), is also acknowledged here when he comments, ‘I wanted you to pass to me and you didn’t’. This, in turn, suggests that the relations experienced during gaming are not only meaningfully recognized here, but also continue to be pertinent for Simon. Here, then we see Somers and Gibson’s conception of ontological narrative, when they argue that it is through narrativity ‘that we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities’ (1994: 58–9). Indeed, Simon’s social identity as inclusive of the game, the power dynamics of the household, and his relations with Joe, are all (re)constituted here through his narrative of the game. However, as Somers and Gibson continue, ‘all of us come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making’ (ibid.: emphasis in original). Indeed, the narrative in which, and through which, Simon attempts to claim agency, is a narrative, which, as we have seen in previous chapters, positions Joe as the powerful, autonomous figure in the household. Joe is the competent gamer, the hero of the narrative, the one able to move through the places and spaces of the games’ topography. Joe is the one who directs action during gameplay, controls avatars and dominates the game. He is the one who, to draw on Jurij Lotman, who is mobile, who can ‘cross the frontier’. Simon, on the other hand, and by comparison, is ‘immobile’ and represents, in fact, ‘a function of this space’ (de Lauretis 1984: 118). Simon’s attempt at rationalization, then, could be read as a momentary claim for, and towards, agency. But as the less competent gamer, the less mobile gamer and ultimately, the less powerful housemate, such a claim is already problematic, and perhaps it is not surprising that Joe’s interruption returns focus onto his own gaming skills and competency. Indeed, Joe does not defend his gaming actions, nor does he try and placate Simon’s frustration. Instead, he discusses the difficult technique he has mastered in the game, pressing two buttons almost simultaneously in order to increase his avatars’ speed. In other words, he consolidates his position as more competent gamer, interpreting Simon’s comments as such claims, and further articulating his skill. My argument, firstly, is that just as gaming (re)produces and negotiates the power dynamics of the households, so too does reflections on gaming. Gaming is not an activity occurring outside such power relations, nor do gamers somehow leave such relations behind when they game. Instead, gaming is always already embedded and inscribed into, and of, such power dynamics so that it is implausible to discuss gaming as an activity separate from them. Following on from this, my second argument is that these power dynamics are

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themselves a kind of narrative into which the gamers position themselves. To use Stuart Hall’s phrase, they are the ‘narratives of a culture’ (1987: 44) into which the gamer positions and locates themselves. The explanations gamers offer when watching these recordings do not simply reproduce the power dynamics of the households, they also, in the momentary attempts and claims of agency, negotiate a new positionality which in turn, attempts to forge new narratives and new power dynamics. Finally, then, in these attempts to narrate the game, and claim authorship of the events, we also see imagined and fantasized (gaming) selves being tentatively articulated. My final argument in relation to narrative, is that in the attempts to claim agency, we also see the desire for, and pleasure of, authorship. This pleasure is evident not only, as suggested, in the frequent return to the game, it is also evident in the act of narration, which offers rationale and logic for the events on screen: Interviewer: so what are your initial impressions from seeing this then? Rach: He did like a roll and then shot something, and I thought I had to replicate it … he was like crouching down after he’d finished shooting and I couldn’t crouch down so I was doing this dance coz I was trying everything. Jumping, kicking, shooting, swapping weapons, climbing boxes [laughs. Rach on screen says ‘where’s L3?’] That’s funny coz I know where ‘L3’ is. I’m just saying that for effect!

Not only does Rach clearly remember the moment of gameplay relating to her asking ‘where’s L3?’ she clearly enjoys recounting this moment, and wants to story it. The interviewer asks about initial impressions of the recording, but Rach responds with an account of the GTA game she was playing. Her high-speed recollection expresses the complexity of her avatars tasks as well as her own amusing attempts to copy the other character on screen when attempting to crouch down. In many ways, then, she continues her role as social ‘manager’, creating a socially inclusive space through her commentary and inviting comments from her housemate. Further, in relation to her desire to narrate the game, there are clear resonances with Simon’s attempts at authorship. We could therefore argue, that the desire to narrate is also the desire for (momentary) agency, partially claimed through articulation, but constantly negotiated. Indeed, as Ricoeur suggests, our human existence can be defined as ‘an activity and a desire in search of a narrative (1991a: 437). Seen here, such reflections are not only attempts to claim a positionality into the cultural narratives of gaming, they are also articulations of the desire for subjectivity and identity. And, as Sue Thornham drawing on Ricoeur reminds us: [Identity] comes into being as a story which demands expression – which we must constantly tell and re-tell if we are to construct a concept of self through

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which to act in the world. And just as our narrative interpretations serve to make sense of our past actions, they also provide the basis for future acts which will in turn be narrativized. (2007: 73)

The explanations the games offer, then, are not only part of a constant re-telling of identity, they also (re)order the events of the past (seen here in relation to the recordings of gameplay) in ways which make sense of the actions in terms of their gaming identity. The desire to narrate is not only the desire to story and order the events in ways when render them meaningful. The desire to narrate is also a desire for identity and subjectivity through a positioning into narrative structures. As de Lauretis discusses, drawing on Laura Mulvey, the desire to narrate is the desire for agency (1984: 103), but as we saw with Simon, while such attempts are clearly enacted, some are more successful than others. Not Remembering Although gamers may express the desire to narrate in the extracts cited here, the narratives also expressed a certain amount of unease and even displeasure. Indeed, as suggested, the extracts above also indicate a certain amount of initial surprise at the recordings, particularly in terms of what gamers look like on screen. Sara, for example, exclaims at the chaos of her actions, responding to them with both amusement and incredulity: Wait, I’ll eat some more cheese whirls … no I’ve died, given up on life. I’ll just stop what I’m doing and get myself run over. Just run in front of a car. I just gave up it was too hard. Look at that! Shot, run over and blown up all in one go.

Indeed, this relates to the second issue I want to discuss in this chapter, the moment of ‘not remembering’, or, to be more precise, the discomfort the gamers express at seeing a seeming disjuncture between their memories of gaming, and the recordings. My argument here is that such moments raise critical questions not only around the power of the visual which ‘makes’ them amend or query their memories, but also around corporeality which is at the heart of remembering gaming as socially inclusive. Indeed, as suggested earlier, gamers feel that gaming is socially inclusive, and a great proportion of dialogues with housemates insisted that gaming was, and should be, understood as a social activity. If we remember the extracts cited in Chapter 3, gamers who gamed alone were stereotyped, sometimes cruelly, as geeks, as excessive, and as having dubious sexuality, or at least ‘lacking’ ‘normal’ masculine qualities. The male gamers in particular invested a great amount in establishing and producing normal gaming as an explicitly and carefully discursively regimented social gaming activity. The reflections on gaming cited here, however, seem to suggests not only that the event of gaming does not match their memories of the same event (and therefore calls into question

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their authority and agency), but also that, despite claiming to only enjoy gaming as a social activity, they themselves are behaving in the excessive, immersive ways they previously ridiculed: Sara: I thought it would be more obvious who was gaming, totally, I thought we would look more into it. I’m actually quite disappointed that we don’t look into it, or even that we’re enjoying it. We look the same all the way through, we look really passive … we could have been watching a fairly dull film or TV programme for the amount of movement we had Clare: yeah, and the fact we were so easily distracted, like we were all eating, we were all drinking, talking about the wall, totally like TV I reckon Chloe: We look so uncommunicative! And I think the only time you got any kind of movement was when, like in relation to the game, was when Sara got stuck and you’re going ‘left and right’ Sara: yeah Chloe: coz I was pointing go left, go right, straight on, even though you weren’t even watching me, you were staring at the screen Sara: yeah Clare: and so that’s more coz we’re interacting outside of the game as well. (9.3)

Sara’s observation here relates to the fact she thought ‘it would be more obvious who was gaming’. She tells me that she’s ‘quite disappointed’ they do not look like they’re actually enjoying gaming. Her comments reflect the other gamers (cited below) when they suggest that while they found gaming pleasurable and socially inclusive, they do not represent this corporeally in expected ways. For Sara, she cannot identify the levels of enjoyment or engagement she felt while gaming, commenting that all look ‘really passive’. Clare is similarly surprised by how easily distracted they all seem to be so that, while she remembers the game, and being involved in the game, the recordings seem to demonstrate that they paid it little attention – eating, drinking and talking while gaming in ways which do not demonstrate the centrality of the game to them. Simon and Joe, below, find the recording equally disturbing: Joe: it’s weird seeing it back. It’s not like I remember it at all Simon: it looks like massive concentration during the game – our whole bodies are focused on this game

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Joe: yeah, coz we’re just totally immobile the rest of the time. It’s really weird. I’m in a conversation with you [the Interviewer] or Simon, but no-one actually looks at one another Simon: yeah Joe: everyone assumes we’re listening, but we’re kind of just, concentrating. And you can see me just look annoyed when someone actually talks to me. And like someone can be in the middle of talking, and, in the middle of saying something Simon: and then the game Joe: yeah, the game interrupts and you just shut up! Simon: you recline your head slightly Joe: trying to be polite, or [laughs] acknowledge the fact someone else is in the room Simon: but then when Joe’s talking to you [Interviewer] and something happens, he just stops talking Joe: [to Interviewer] I cut you off mid sentence a few times as well, like ‘ohhh, ohh no!’ at the game. I never even realised that. Simon: It’s quite funny actually looking at this. Like I always talk about gaming being an ice-breaker and having a social function, but we’re just both like zombies and just not communicating Joe: do you want to revise you’re earlier comments?! Simon: well Joe: I mean we’re still communicating and enjoying ourselves it’s … it’s just … weird. Not in the way I imagined. But we’re still communicating. (1.5)

Joe’s frequent comment here that the recording is ‘weird’ emphasizes a similar discomfort to Sara above. He tells me that this recording is ‘not like he remembered it at all’, while Simon goes so far as to begin to question his previous assertion about games being ‘ice breakers’ and social tools. This leads to Joe’s part mocking question about revising earlier statements, and it seems that rather than undermine himself by questioning his previous comments, Joe insists that ‘we’re still communicating’. Seen alongside his frequent comment about how ‘weird’ the

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recordings are, however, this final statement seems far less confident than perhaps intended. As they both suggest, these recordings are not what they imagined. In the final extract below, Rob also expresses unease because the recordings do not fit with how he imagined gaming. He gets upset that he cannot remember the ‘joke about the radios on the bike’, and clearly finds the fact that he seems to be paying little attention quite unnerving: Rob: It looks like I’ve forgotten who is in the room, I mean I don’t forget other people are in the room, but I am concentrating more on the game than what’s going on in the rest of the room … maybe it’s just how important I think the conversation is in the room. But I did think that I was paying attention. I mean it’s funny because I really did think I was aware of what’s going on in the room, and I was communicating with you. But watching this, it looks like I’m just totally ignoring you Rach: yeah. And it’s funny because we both know exactly what’s going on in the game at this point, like I’m saying ‘you’re rolling over’ or whatever Rob: but I can’t remember the joke about the radios on the bike, but I can remember this bit of the game. Like watching just my reactions I can tell what I’m doing, and where I’m at in the game, but I can’t remember the conversation as well Interviewer: but you say you thought at the time you were paying attention? Rob: yeah. It’s weird Rach: it suggests that we think we’re paying more attention than we actually are doesn’t it and that the game holds our attention more than we think. Do you think? Rob: yeah I guess. (8.2)

Rob initially tries to rationalize his actions by suggesting that the conversation was not interesting enough to hold his attention, but is then, as suggested, clearly quite shocked that he looks as if he’s ignoring the rest of the room. Similarly, he expects the visual recording to represent his internal emotional state as being involved socially with the room. He felt as if he was communicating with the other people in the room, but the visual representation does not reflect this. He is also surprised at the inadequacy of the visual for expressing his emotional and corporeal state. My argument here is that these moments of unease – or ‘not remembering’ – not only demonstrate the power of the visual, to the extent that gamers begin to question their memories of gaming, and even previous assertions and claims about gaming. They also raise some crucial issues around sensory feelings of togetherness,

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imagined gaming scenarios, and imagined senses of self. Starting initially with the latter issue, in what follows I discuss what these moments may suggest for conceptions of the social, and for the gaming self. Participation? In the extracts cited above, as suggested, the gamers express surprise that the recordings of gaming do not reflect their feelings of gaming. This suggests, perhaps, some interesting disjunctures between imagined and actual gaming, in which it seems, the technology plays a crucial role. It is worth exploring these issues here, not least because, as suggested earlier, they raise crucial methodological and theoretical questions. Indeed, if we argue that social gaming is imagined, or, at least, gamers experience feelings of sociability which they later question, some interesting avenues of critical inquiry are opened up which draws connections between a number of new media. Starting with Dean’s concept of a ‘fantasy of participation’, I return to Walkerdine’s research on children and gaming, before drawing on psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity. Taken together, they all argue for an imagined dimension of (technological) interaction, and consequently offer a way to theorize these moments in productive ways. Indeed, despite the fact that gamers find these moments unsettling, and begin to question their previous assertions, they neither undermine previous comments, nor the claims made throughout the book. Instead, the gamers insist, through their expressions of unease, that lived, corporeal and sensory accounts of interaction, of gaming and of self, are crucial for understanding such engagements. Jodi Dean, discussing online social networking sites, uses Žižek’s (1997) concept of ‘interpassivity’ to argue that new media offers little more than a ‘fetish’ of communication. Using her conceptualization on social networking sites, we could similarly argue that if the memories of gaming are, in fact, ‘fantasies of participation’, then gaming scenarios, like social networking sites, also offer such fetishes of communication where gamers feel and believe they are meaningfully and productively communicating, but are in fact, for the most part, ‘interpassive’. Indeed, Sara’s comment that they look really ‘passive’ seems to support this assertion, if they felt at the time that they were interacting with the game and with one another, but upon reflection, seem really passive and uncommunicative. As Dean argues in relation to social networking sites: [F]rantic contributing and content circulation [on the Net], may well involve a profound passivity, one that is interconnected, linked, but passive nonetheless. Put back in terms of the circulation of contributions that fail to coalesce into actual debates, that fail as messages in need of response, we might think of this odd interpassivity as content that is linked, but never fully connected … the promise of participation is not just propaganda. No, it is a deeper, underlying

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Ethnographies of the Videogame fantasy wherein technology functions as a fetish covering over our impotence and helping understand ourselves as active. (2008: 109–10)

My suggestion is that, following the accounts above, we could conceptualize gaming in a similar way – as a circulation of contributions where the gamers each contribute towards the game when they pick up the analogue controller. Such contributions produce responses, but such responses are rarely ‘productive’ in terms of meaningful communication or connection. Indeed, if we think of the extracts of gameplay cited in Chapters 4 and 5, remarks and questions are rarely answered, unless they directly relate to avatar action in the game. The fetish of communication emerges, then, in part through the technology with which gamers clearly do interact (‘when Joe’s talking to you and something happens, he just stops talking’, ‘I am concentrating more on the game than what’s going on in the rest of the room’), but also through the corporeal feelings of well-being which interpassive co-presence also engenders. Seen in this light, gaming functions as a fetish of activity, one that is deeply pleasurable and powerful, to the extent that gamers conceive and corporeally experience gaming as socially inclusive. Gaming as a ‘social tool’, which was explored in Chapters 2 and 3, continues the conception of the technological fetish, not least because gamers argue that the technology supports their normalized behaviour. The reflections of gaming cited in this chapter, then, make this fetish apparent in ways that it otherwise would not have been. If gamers had not watched the recordings of gameplay, they would continue to believe the fetish of participation. Further, as Dean argues, the technology is implicated into a fetish of a whole identity, of agency and authority, and of technological competency. Such a fetish ‘protects a fantasy of unity, wholeness, or order, compensating in advance for this impossibility.’ (ibid.: 112). In short, and drawing on Valerie Walkerdine’s (2007: 45) arguments, it is a fetish of active masculinity. Again, we see this fantasy of unity begin to break down in the reflections above, particularly if we think of Simon’s query regarding his previous statements about gaming being ‘ice-breakers’. His fantasy of an ordered gaming technology that functions as a tool to support social gaming, begins to unravel, and he begins to question himself and his assertions. Jodi Dean, like Sara’s comment above, ultimately concludes that the fetish of participation renders the user of social networking sites passive, because, as she suggests, it ‘works to prevent actual action, to prevent something from really happening’ (2008: 109). For Dean, this is a negative and problematic outcome, masking the potential possibilities for democratic debate online. However, Dean’s conclusion is problematic for gaming scenarios, not least because it reproduces the dichotomy of a technological or phenomenological approach to gaming, constructing the gamer as once again affected by the technology which is afforded increased power. Indeed, it is clear that while the gamers are surprised and disquieted by the recordings, they continue to use such recordings in productive ways insofar as the reflections generate new narratives and negotiate power dynamics of the households. Further, while Dean wants productive democratic

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exchange, the expectation of the gaming scenario is perhaps not meaningful communication, but perhaps simply pleasurable and quotidian experience. Indeed, to reiterate Joe’s comment cited earlier in the book: There’s none of those niceties of dull normal conversation, you just get down to it and play. It’s a nice routine, and easy (1.5)

Consequently, while I find her concept of a fantasy of participation useful for explaining the unease gamers felt, I reject the negative conclusion that this renders the gamers passive. Instead, I want to consider Dean’s arguments in relation to what they suggest for gaming as a fetish and as a fantasized space – one which is lived as such through the gaming body. Indeed, the corporeality of these fantasies suggests they are both powerful and deeply persuasive, insofar as they are the lived experiences of the gamers. In other words, while I accept that gaming produces a fetish of participation, I am less sure about the negative conclusions of such a statement. Instead, it seems to me, they raise further questions around the imagined dimensions of gaming and gaming selves, which should be further explored. It seems to me then, that the extracts above suggest that imagined gaming is lived. Consequently the gamers’ lived and imagined bodies play a crucial role in imagined, fantasized and pleasurable gaming. Drawing on psychoanalysis, screen theory, and Hansen’s (2004) concept of affect, Walkerdine argues that we need to approach gaming as a three fold process, one which includes the sensation, the ideation of that sensation, and fantasy and pleasure (2007: 25–6). As she suggests: [B]odily sensations never exist alone but are accompanied by what we take those feelings to mean, both in terms of pleasure, pain, anxiety but also fantasy. (2007: 25)

Her argument is that videogames are not only kinaesthetic; they are also fantasy. Videogame play involves sensation, the body and fantasy. Seen in this light, the fantasized or imagined elements of gaming are always already both sensory and corporeal. Indeed, the very activity of gaming incorporates lived and imagined dimensions. Further, it is clear that gamers’ imagined sense of self, inclusive of both corporeality and technology, is brought into sharp relief through their disappointment when the gamers watch the recordings. This raises a number of issues, not only around the site of the body as interpretable affect, but also, as Walkerdine argues, around thinking through gaming as lived imagined praxis. Indeed if anything, the unease gamers express upon seeing themselves game, supports my argument in the previous chapter that the body, contrary to much videogame and new media theory, is much more than simply or transparently a site of affect. Gamers’ bodies do not visibly display (at least transparently) the emotional or sensory ‘affects’ of gaming, so that, while gaming may be deeply affective, it makes itself felt in complex, nuanced and perhaps contradictory ways. As Walkerdine argues:

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Ethnographies of the Videogame It is necessary … to assume something else not visible in either action or discourse – a third space in which I want to place unconscious process … For Freud, the unconscious was glimpsed in dreams, jokes and slips of the tongue, but we could equally argue that it is glimpsed and telegraphed within the relations of playing and indeed within narrative and discourse. (2007: 190)

Indeed, if we need a ‘third space’ of unconscious process, or fantasized and desired imaginings, if the body cannot simply be seen as an interpretable signifier in, and of, itself then this returns us to arguments throughout this book that imagined or fantasized dimensions have to be included in conceptions of both subjectivity and the body. Waskul and Vannini also remind us that the body is neither a subject nor an object, but ‘a special type of symbol, being both a subject (through its relation with a self an others) and an object (to the self and others).’ (2006: 11). We could argue, then, that the moment of unease is one which highlights the ‘third space’ of gaming, where the fantasy or unconscious elements of gaming are brought into sharp relief through the recordings. Towards a Fourth Space? If the cultures of gaming need to include, as Walkerdine suggests, a third space, an imagined and fantasized, lived dimension to, and of, subjectivity, these reflections may bring such elements into sharp relief, but they do not necessarily resolve them. Indeed, in many ways, asking the gamers to comment on the recordings of gaming, produces a fourth space of gaming – one which visually represents the gaming scenario, and the gamers, but does not accommodate the lived experiences of gameplay. Perhaps this visual representation should not be included in concepts of gaming, then, not least because the recordings appear to misrepresent the sensory and lived experiences gamers base their enjoyment of gaming on. Considering this, perhaps the best way to conceptualize such visual representations is to return to screen theory, particularly as it helps explain the gamers unease and disquiet at seeing themselves onscreen. While this final section may not help explain gaming, then, it does go some way towards understanding the gamers’ responses, and offers some final methodological conclusions. If the process of watching oneself on screen prompts the gamers to recognize (or, using psychoanalytic theory) misrecognize themselves as objects on screen, then we could argue, drawing on psychoanalysis, that such misrecognitions are always uncomfortable because they never represent the desired or imagined elements of subjectivity. In what follows, I briefly turn to such theories in order to argue that the gamers’ imagined or fantasized senses of self are not only part and parcel of subjectivity (as argued earlier in the book). They are also corporeal and embodied. Following this, it is the moment when gamers are asked to watch themselves perform which becomes problematic, as this creates a tension

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between visual representation of body-as-object (onscreen) and embodied sense of gamer as subject (off-screen). Indeed, one explanation for the unsettled response of a number of gamers upon seeing themselves onscreen, relates to psychoanalytically-inflected accounts of identification and pleasure. For many feminist film scholars writing in the 1980s, psychoanalysis, and particularly Lacan’s ‘mirror-stage’, offered one of the only plausible explanations for the intense feelings of dis/ involvement, mis/identification and dis/pleasure associated with viewing (for example, Silverman 1988, Sarup 1992, Doane 1987, Mulvey 1989, Kaplan 1983, Penley 1988). It is worth exploring Lacan’s mirror-stage, then, not least because it clearly resonates with the moment of disjuncture gamers experience upon seeing themselves onscreen. For Lacan, the mirror-stage is the moment when a child first looks at itself in the mirror and recognizes that the mirrorimage is a reflection of themselves (1966: 3–9). Madan Sarup describes this moment as, ‘a period at which … the child is first able to imagine itself as a coherent and self-governing entity’ (1992: 64), and it is a key moment in both the development of subjectivity, and the establishment of the primacy of the visual for a number of reasons. Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty remarks, this is the moment when the child ‘notices the he is visible, for himself and for others’ (in Grosz 1994: 93). Indeed, while such a moment may therefore explain the ready objectification of gamers selves onscreen, it also explains their disquiet because, as Sue Thornham reminds us, this mirror-image is not a moment of recognition: it is a moment of mis-recognition: There are several points which are important to note about this process. The first is that this first recognition of itself as a discrete individual, the foundation of the ego and the basis on which the child will later be able to say ‘I’, is in fact a misrecognition. The mirror-image with which the child identifies is more coordinated, more unified and in control, than is the child itself. Nevertheless, it is the imaginary wholeness which the child internalizes as an ‘ideal ego’. The second point to note is the importance of the visual image in this acquisition of identity. The mirror phase is, in Sarup’s words, ‘a moment of self-delusion, of captivation by an illusory image (1992: 83). Image, identity and identification are interdependent. (Sue Thornham 1997: 35–6)

As Sue Thornham demonstrates, this moment is not a moment of recognition, but instead, and primarily, a moment of misrecognition. It is a misrecognition because the mirror image is more whole, more perfect, than the corporeal sense of self which the child experiences and lives every day. There are clear resonances here, then, with the gamers, who experience gaming as corporeal and pleasurable – and remember it as such – but do not see this evidenced in the visual representation of themselves in the recordings. The moment of misrecognition here, is the simultaneity of seeing themselves onscreen, but recognizing that these visual images both do and do not express the entirety of their gaming experiences

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(‘we don’t look into it, or even that we’re enjoying it’, ‘it’s not like I remember it at all’). By comparison to their usual experience of seeing themselves as more complete (in the mirror), the visual recordings here highlight the disjuncture between everyday embodied experiences and the visual representation. The fact that the gamers themselves query these representations as accurate raises, as suggested, a number of critical points for ethnographic research more widely, and for interpretations of the body in particular. Reading the body as a site of effect, to be interpreted and understood as a transparent indicator of meaning is clearly problematic when gamers themselves cannot recognize such meanings in their own corporeal enactments. Thornham’s second point, that this places the visual as central in the formation and acquisition of identity, also clearly resonates with the gamers, not least because the image has the power to create a certain level of anxiety or unease. As suggested, when faced with such visual ‘evidence’, they begin to question their memories rather than, for example, the value of the recordings as accurate or reliable documentations of the gaming event. Taken together then, the recordings of the gamers cause disquiet for a number of reasons. They cause the gamer to (mis)recognize themselves as objects rather than as embodied subjects; they undermine the imagined and fantasized elements of gameplay; they misrepresent the experience of gaming which was felt to be, and remembered as, pleasurable and socially inclusive; and they misrepresent subjectivity and the competent performances the gamers un/consciously perform. In short, they misrepresent both the gamer, and gaming. There are also issues in relation to the way the visual is taken as more public record. The recordings of gameplay transform subjective, individual and private corporeal memories into public displays of sociability (or not). The sudden (unexpected) exposure of being portrayed on-screen in the place of the fictional television or game world is clearly problematic and unsettling for the gamers who are disturbed by what they see. It’s not only a case of public display (on the television screen), but of the socio-cultural status the television screen holds for these individuals who interact with it on very different levels most of the time. There is therefore a public/private dichotomy going on here, not only in relation to public display versus private subjective memories and feelings, but also in terms of what the television screen means to each gamer. It is interesting to note (again), that the technological (figured as the screen) remains implicit in these elements of post-gaming recordings. The technology is once again implicated as alwaysalready a fundamental part of these moments. Ironically, then, the problem with ‘not remembering’ only seem to arise when gamers are forced to watch themselves. If I had never asked them to watch themselves gaming, the interviewees would have continued to ‘remember’ the game as a socially inclusive event. In some ways, then, these recordings are not only unreflective of remembered gaming scenarios, they actually act as a disruptive force to gaming memories. This suggests, again, that the visual as factual record is problematic when gamers locate pleasure in corporeality or emotive

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recollection. The recordings of gameplay unsettle and disrupt gaming memories which otherwise would have been pleasurable. In a similar vein to other visual ‘remembering’ devices, like photographs or video clips of family events, gamers initially attempt to use the recordings as prompts for memories or narratives (see Kuhn 2003: 395–7). Such attempts, as we saw with the extracts cited here, are short lived and ultimately seem to produce problematic disparities between memory and the representation of the event onscreen. They work to undermine the fantasy of the performing self, the fantasy of memory, and the fantasy of gaming, which are all based upon subjective lived and embodied experience. In relation to narrative, then, these moments would indicate that there is clearly pleasure in narrating the visual replays. It also indicates that narrative positions the gamers’ on-screen actions as logical, both in the creation of their present (immediate) gaming identities but also in relation to the diegetic narrative of the game, which is also pleasurable to recount. The pleasure comes in part, therefore, from identity constructions and performance, both of which could not be theorized without the advent of psychoanalytic theory. Pleasure is also located in the act of narration, where gamers perform entertaining narratives of interpretation of the visual. They also clearly want to narrate the game even though it is off screen, so that durability of the technology and also the desire to narrate come into play. These narratives are clearly prompted by the screen, so that the visual in relation to power or durability should not be forgotten. Similarly, it is the screen, which is afforded the most power to upset or unsettle the gamers when it does not reflect their memories of the gaming scenario as social and inclusive. Again, in relation to the discussion of the power of the technology, or the power of the screen, it is clearly not enough to discuss just one element. Instead, the balance in terms of power and meaning the gamers give to the technology is negotiated throughout social gaming experiences, where gamers pay attention sporadically. Finally, these moments also remind us that the screen is also technology, and these moments consequently also indicate the power of the technology for generating narrative and bearing the socially and culturally accepted modes of viewing and looking. The power Rob gives the screen in demonstrating his level of ‘social’ engagement during gameplay is not only the result of gaming and television screen interaction, it is also based on the socio-cultural power of the visual as bearer of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. It is not only a history of the technology that needs to be remembered, but also a history of popular and academic approaches to visual culture, specifically in relation to pleasure, power and desire.

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Chapter 7

Conclusions: Towards a Theory of Domestic Videogaming This book has attempted to represent 11 gaming households through an interpretative ethnographic approach as outlined by early cultural studies ethnographers, most notably Ien Ang. As indicated in the initial chapters, and in keeping with the traditions of ethnographic practice, the project changed over the four years of research. In terms of the final representation of this project, I chose to present it in a particular way, which has tended to underplay the rigour, longevity and depth of the empirical research. Although I have offered further quotes where needed, ultimately I felt that the theoretical aims of the project necessitated such a presentation. This was in part facilitated by the nature of the research, which, having no other ethnographic videogame research to relate it to, was afforded a certain amount of flexibility. Indeed, by comparison with previous work on the videogame, this project was primarily concerned with the cultures of gaming: their discursive contexts, their material contexts and their symbolic contexts. What emerged from the project along with quite definite indicators around gaming subjectivities, was the key theme of ontological narrative which I used as a theoretical framework for the structure of the book. The political aims of the project, which were formulated both through a feeling of inadequacy of existing approaches to the videogame, and a frustration with the way new technology was talked about more generally, has also resulted in this particular mode of presentation. I wanted to outline alternative approaches to the videogame in order to suggest that focusing solely on the text of the videogame not only negates some crucial elements of gameplay, it also fundamentally misrepresents the experience of gaming felt and articulated by the gamers of this project. The current writings on the videogame, with the problematic alignment to the PC and assumptions of a solitary and immersed gamer, come under scrutiny through this research. Rather than aligning the project with discourses of immersion, interaction, or gameplay, I chose to align it instead with the discourse of feminist ethnography and ontological narrative. Although this has produced some clear results, the decision for this theoretical and discursive alignment was reached not only through a methodological inquiry which insistently asks gamers what they think and is therefore always contingent on discourse and issues of interpretation. The decision for this particular discursive and theoretical alignment was also the result of the pleasurable way gamers continued to story past and present gaming practices and their insistent creation of the dichotomy of social versus solo gaming with its normatively inscribed behavioural patterns.

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There were also more subjective political agendas to be satisfied. Indeed, I also wanted to problematize the technologically deterministic models along with what I see as the de-politicized and abstract concepts of actor-network theory, and the negation of a gender politics found in much new media theory with its’ concentration on systems, nodes and networks. The research provided a platform from which to critique such theories, not least because interpretative (feminist) ethnographic research makes any abstraction from the political and cultural conditions, which facilitate and produce it, absolutely impossible (Walkerdine 1997: 59, Skeggs 1997: 17). The specific political aims of the research have therefore, and perhaps unfortunately, somewhat overshadowed the presentation of the ‘findings’, ultimately producing a representation more weighted towards theory than practice. However, this was a necessary negotiation for a project that focused on the contradictions, negotiations, and the similarities between what gamers said about gaming and what was recorded and observed during and after gameplay. It was also necessary for the broader academic aims of the project, which as suggested above, was to critique current trends within videogame theory as well as the more abstract theories of new digital technology. In the remainder of the chapter, then, I draw conclusions in relation to the theoretical implications of this project, before addressing the specific themes of gender, identity, interaction, technology, and pleasure, which run throughout the project. Ontological Narrative and Symbolic Interactionism The key concept of ontological narrative, which shaped both the theoretical interpretations and the structure of the book has been investigated and, perhaps, stretched to its limits. I argued that ontological narrative as a lived relation could be used as a concept to understand how gamers understand their gaming subjectivities. Gamers claim momentary agency through the act of narration. Such articulations are the relational product of negotiations between imagined and performed selves. In this sense, fantasies of gaming selves are included in an ontological narrative approach, but perhaps more in keeping with McNay’s notion of a ‘protensive’ subject formation (2000: 86), or Butler’s concept of ‘who is imagining whom’ (2004b: 10). The articulation of agency, through the construction of narratives, also articulates a positioned subjectivity so that identity ‘is best understood as neither a fixed essence nor a juxtaposition of fragmented, fractured and discordant elements, but as dynamic unity through time’ (Thornham 2007: 73). The past memories of gaming were social ones: they were nostalgic recollections not only of past gaming experience, but of childhood social relations, of tactile and sensory memories of the feel and look of the console, and of pleasurable and familiar social scenarios. I argued, in conjunction with Annette Kuhn’s conception of ‘memory maps’ (2002: 16–18) that the route into the past was also a pleasurable movement. I also suggested that alongside Kuhn’s locationary places to which and through which the narrator travels, the console could also be seen as a locationary

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device. Finally, I suggested that the memories of past gaming experiences indicated present-day self-perceptions of the speaker as a competent (or otherwise) social gamer. I argued that the social setting shaped the narratives so that ‘who was imagining whom’ (Butler 2004b: 10) played a crucial and very real role in shaping what was narrated. I offered two examples of changes in performances and claims to knowledge when other housemates came into the room in order to suggest that narratives were also gender performances and played out in relation to certain (imagined, fantasized, performed and relational) power roles within each house. Ontological narrative explains not only the way gamers understood and formed gaming identities through the storying of past gaming experiences and decisions. It also explains the embeddedness of these narratives in present and future gaming scenarios, not least because, as Thornham suggests, ‘just as our narrative interpretations serve to make sense of our past actions, so they also provide the basis for future acts which will in turn be narrativized’ (2007: 73). Stretching the concept to its limits, and drawing on Caroline Bassett’s works around technology and narrative, I argued that ontological narrative could also explain how subjectivities were negotiated and performed during gameplay. I suggested that ontological narrative as an interpretative, embodied, imagined, and lived praxis could also theorize the relations gamers have with the technologies of gameplay. The mediation of the game and technology through gaming practice could be seen as a kind of narration of those relations and practices. Such lived and performed narratives are interpreted by other gamers as an active storying of those relations being mediated. In turn, gaming housemates, mediate, narrate and enact those relations in generative and relational ways. An ontological narrative approach locates the technology, not as a novel and powerful medium impacting onto gamers, but as a negotiated and lived element of narrative. I argued that the technology, as a bearer of the relations which forged it (Bassett 2007: 48) and as created and constituted within culture, should be seen as always-already embedded into our lives. I drew this to its extreme conclusion and suggested that the binary of the social and technology is not only a false one, but also a binary unsupported by gamers, who perceived not only the social and technology as intrinsic to one another, but also their own subjectivities as similarly entwined. The concept of ontological narrative helped theorize past gaming experiences and contributed towards an understanding of the active creations of gaming subjectivities. Ontological narrative, then, has many resonances with theories of performance and interaction. Performative theory, symbolic interactionism, and theories of subjectivity are located in this project in terms of understanding the nuances between imagined and actual articulations, imagined and actual performance and mediations with games. As Valerie Walkerdine argues in relation to gaming, play involves ‘not only sensation and therefore the kinaesthetic, but also fantasy’ (2007: 209). My contestation throughout the book, however, is that it is not just play which involves sensation, the kinaesthetic and fantasy: subjectivity and identity can also be understood in these terms. Indeed, this is Butler’s argument that subjectivity

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incorporates a fantasized and lived element (2004b: 10). It is also Waskul and Vannini’s suggestion when they outline the various ways symbolic interactionism has conceptualized the body. As they suggest, while they can identify ‘a relatively coherent’ conceptual orientation to, and for, the body (2006: 3), symbolic interactionism is more like a ‘constellation of related theoretical frameworks’ (ibid.: 2) pragmatically utilized for specific conceptual and theoretical purposes. These discourses overlap, merge, and resonate with each other. And while this project may find ontological narrative as the most useful theoretical approach, it is not my intention to premise a particular approach, but rather argue for a wider set of approaches and alignments for the videogame. Videogame Theory For videogame theory, this research primarily highlights a fundamental need not only for further ethnographic research per se, but also the necessity of ‘empirical’ research in approaching ‘new’ digital media. Indeed, when gameplay is determined primarily by social rather than technological considerations, then the effectivity of a body of work which focuses on what is ‘offered’ (King and Krzywinska 2006: 6) to gamers becomes immediately questionable. Gaming is not easily located in a particular temporal moment of immediate gameplay. Instead, it emerges as an enmeshed, lived, discursive and rhizomatic event that is part of the households quotidian routine. The memories, reflections, and practices of gaming, suggest the durability of it well beyond the immediacy of gameplay and this, in turn, fundamentally problematizes the assumptions made in videogame theory that posit gaming as either a solitary activity, or one conceptualized as a single, temporally finite, event. In turn, while more recent work on the videogame have offered a range of approaches which richly diversify the field of game research, they continue to focus on the text itself, often conceptualizing the gamer as at best affected by the game, and at worst effected. However, this project also finds little support for popular or theoretical imaginings of videogames as violent or detrimental (see Anderson and Dill 2000, Anderson, Gentle and Buckley 2007). Such approaches are problematic not only because of the methodologies and assumptions located within such research (see Barker and Petley 1997, Barker 1984, Newman 2004, 2008), but also quite simply because the power of the technology as determining, is continually undermined by the gamers of the project. When power is located with the technology, it is within a negotiated relationship and producing the gamer, through mediation, in particular ways. Furthermore, the novelty of a technology, on which such claims of media effects are based, is also undermined here when gamers locate such gaming technologies in long and complex personal and social histories of gaming and gameplay. This means that while individual consoles and games may be new, the processes and practices of gameplay are not. Technologically deterministic approaches, then, come under scrutiny, not in favour of culturally deterministic accounts, but because these memories highlight

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how new technology is not only mediated and interpreted by gamers, but is also always already produced through those mediations and interpretations. Gamers understand the console not as a separate entity from the social, but as intrinsic to it. When they prioritize social gaming, the technology is a fundamental aspect of their understanding of the social. When they discuss quotidian leisure routines, gaming technologies are part of this. Furthermore, as suggested through gamers’ memories, it becomes clear that this has always been the case. What is needed for game research, then, are accounts of gaming, which not only include both the technology and the social within it, but also go beyond a deterministic account of either. Theories of immersion and the potential loss of one’s identity are also, finally, revealed as problematic through this research. Indeed, rather than the anxieties, pressures or distractions of the social context receding during gaming, this research finds that the social context shapes gaming before and during gameplay. The social relations and gendered power dynamics that we see contributing to the discussions of gaming prior to gameplay, are also played out during gameplay. Again, this suggests that gaming is always already much more that the immediate relation with any one game. It also suggests that the myth of the solo gamer, espoused by both the gamers of this project and videogame theory more widely (see Newman 2008), is both unhelpful and, for the most part, entirely false. It is difficult to argue for the immersive potential of gaming within the gaming scenarios recorded during this research. At best, we could argue that gamers rarely participate and communicate in ways they imagine or remember, and consequently as Dean suggests there is a ‘fantasy of participation’ (2008: 109) involved in gameplay. Even here, however, such fantasies are more about interaction and communication with housemates, than fantasies of immersion into, or control over, the game. Rather than ‘total immersion’, then, we could argue that gamers evidence a much more sporadic identification perhaps more akin to Radner’s understanding of ‘scattering’ (1995: 131–3) which she discusses in relation to women’s magazines. For Radner, such a concept accounts for intense moments of concentration alongside distracted reading, both of which constitute the pleasurable aspects of reading women’s magazines. Drawing comparisons with Radner’s work also facilitates my final suggestion; that the experiences gamers articulate are not new phenomena brought about by an innovation in technology. Instead, gaming and the experiences of gaming are part of an ongoing process of pleasurable negotiation, which is also found in approaches to other cultural products. Indeed, this is precisely Caroline Bassett’s point when she suggests that there is an element of familiar cyclicality in approaches to certain technologies, where the initial celebration of a ‘new’ technology as autonomous and entirely novel latterly (belatedly) becomes a discussion of its social and cultural relevance (2007: 52). Taken together, my research finds that videogames are material objects, which are corporeally played. They are embedded objects – embedded into our sociocultural lives not only because they are material and corporeal, but also because they are spatially and temporally embedded into, for example, conceptions of play, leisure time, and domesticity. Finally, and importantly, videogames are

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pleasurable digital technologies. And, in keeping with Newman’s suggestions about the cultures of gaming (2008: 23–45), the pleasures of gaming are not only located in the game itself, but elsewhere; in the way games are talked about, in the meaning the games and consoles have for the gamers, and in the narratives of gaming. These findings, then, return us to Roger Silverstone’s argument captured in the first edition of the journal New Media and Society, that: New media technologies, in their supposed novelty, have to be tested not just against the old, but in the context both of the past and present, against the social and the human. (1999: 11)

Indeed, only by locating the technology in relation to the social, human, past and present, can we negate a technologically determined account. In many ways, of course, utilizing an interpretative ethnographic methodology has produced these arguments, identifying similarities with past ethnographic projects. However, I would contend that what has emerged, is a far richer, deeper and nuanced understanding of gaming culture. Further, what is needed for game research, then, are accounts of gaming that not only include both the technological and the social within it, but also go beyond a deterministic account of either. Gender, Identity, Technology If gameplay is socio-technological, then gender, in all its complexities, re-emerges as central. Furthermore, in the face of ‘new’ technology and its impact into the home, gender as lived relations and practices, and as contingent on power relations (within which, and to which, technology is included), ideologies and subjective identity; envelopes and incorporates the technology rather than vice-versa. Following early feminist writings which insisted on an embodied and lived understanding of identity (Irigaray 1977, 1987, Fuss 1989, Butler 1990, 1993, 2004b, Grosz 1994, Braidotti 1994), and following more recent feminist responses to early writings on cyberspace (Grosz 2001, Braidotti 2004, Thornham 2007), I argued that gender emerged from the gaming dynamics of each household, in generative, reflective, and negotiated ways. Gaming, technology and imagined senses of self, contribute to imagined and lived gendered relations, as always already implicated, rather than impacting onto the lived experiences of gamers. In this way, gender emerges from, rather than being straightforwardly determined of, gaming practices. Indeed, the multiple articulations of gender do not detract from its durability and power as a framing device. Rather, these articulations highlight the pervasiveness, mutability and centrality of gender in UK gaming culture. To reiterate Joke Hermes and Ien Ang’s argument: [A]rticulations [of gender] have to be made again and again, day after day, and the fact that the same articulations are so often repeated – and thus lead to the

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successful reproduction of established gender meanings, gender relations and gender identities – is not a matter of course; it is, rather, a matter of active reproduction, continual re-articulation. (1991: 319)

Rather than attempting to quantify or definitively address gender and gaming, I instead focused on how gendered relations, gendered identities, and gendered typologies are produced within, rather than straightforwardly determinant of, gaming activities. While this has not resulted in an absolute account of gender and gaming, it has repositioned and relocated gaming as a lived and embodied practice into the complexities of gender performance. Consequently, gender is shown to emerge with, to shape, and to negotiate gaming as an everyday and lived practice. Indeed, the discourses of knowledge, the cultural capital gamers located around technological knowledge, the articulations of positionalities in relation to specific games, the rationales offered for gaming, the claims and performances of agency and autonomy for gaming, and the household dynamics in which gaming was located, are all implicitly permeated by gendered relations, and as feminist theory suggests, these are always negotiated positions. Indeed, as Judith Halberstam reminds us: On the one hand we do not name and notice new genders because as a society we are committed to maintaining a binary gender system. On the other hand, we could also say that the failure of ‘male’ and ‘female’ to exhaust the field of gender variation actually ensures the continued dominance of these terms. Precisely because virtually nobody fits the definitions of male and female, the categories gain power and currency from their impossibility. In other words, the very flexibility and elasticity of the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ensures their longevity. (Halberstam, 1998: 27)

For the gamers of this project, gender is continually negotiated in relational, contextual, fantasized terms, and in relation to articulation, performance and practice. As Valerie Walkerdine suggests, games should be seen as another site facilitating the production and management of gender (2007: 32). As well as acting out the stereotypes of genre preference or gaming performance, the examples offered throughout the book also highlighted a negotiation with (or to use Walkerdine’s term, management of) these positions and with each other. In the activity of conversing or gaming, relational positionalities between people and technology shift. Despite claiming Pro Evolution was for the boys, for example, Lorna still got one of the best scores ever. And despite requesting supervision during gameplay, Rach still excels at GTA. Ricky and Duncan do game on their own, even though they undermine this in the conversations about solo gaming. Similarly, Hannah and Sara comment explicitly as consumers, for example, but are careful that such critical claims do not impact onto gaming practices. However, while some claims are undermined or questioned by later practice, other claims operate as frameworks, ultimately shaping and restricting later practice.

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Indeed, we see articulations and practices by the female gamers throughout the four years of research, that prioritize friends, peers and social scenarios, constructing the women gamers primarily as appeasing and socially concerned individuals. These are qualities that Beverley Skeggs identifies as important facets of ‘feminine cultural capital’ (1997: 72). Walkerdine goes further, when she suggests that such qualities go hand in hand with what she terms as the ‘habitual feminine position of [technological] incompetence’ (2006: 526). Crucially, and as Walkerdine argues in relation to young girls, this creates a tension and a contradiction for gaming scenarios, because girls (and women) have to navigate the ‘covert negotiations of power’ (2007: 68) that contradictorily position them as either successful gamers or as female housemates. For the male gamers of the project, however, the tensions between gendered identity and gaming practice were far less overt. Indeed, Walkerdine suggests that the ideal gamer is always gendered male not least because of the impetus of each game towards activity, progression and (usually) violence. Drawing on the work of Teresa de Lauretis and Elizabeth Grosz (2001) we could add here that the qualities successful gaming requires, are also those of the Cartesian subject (Grosz 2001), and the ubiquitous hero of fiction (de Lauretis 1984). Indeed, for Walkerdine, the successful gamer is a ‘rational masculine subject’ (2007: 32), who as de Lauretis reminds us is ‘the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences’ (de Lauretis 1984: 119). The male gamers of this research carefully establish themselves as rational individuals, for whom gaming is a social tool and celebrated because of its functionality. Unlike the women gamers, then, gaming does not create the same tensions or negotiations. Instead, gaming seems an ideal terrain on which to explore and claim masculinity. We should, however, note a final caveat. Indeed, to a certain extent, the gendered dichotomy is one that I intentionally evoked in my politically, analytically and theoretically informed interpretation of gaming discourse and practice. I claimed that Simon, for example, performs masculinity not because he biologically ‘male’ but because all the signifiers in his life (his relationship with Sara, his job, his location, his class) contribute to a particular kind of authoritative, logical, and rational performance which I interpret as masculine. Although I differentiated behaviour primarily based on a gender dichotomy (into which other signifiers pervaded), the performances could also have been discussed as dichotomies of adult/child, rationality/pleasure, analysis/involvement, or logic/desire. In other words, gender never signifies on its own, it is never abstract from other power relations. Indeed, in keeping with other feminist ethnography (for example Skeggs 1997, Walkerdine 1997, Gray 1992, Radway 1984), this project finds that gender is filtered through other signifiers such as class, location, ethnicity, mobility and age. As I also suggested, signifiers are subjectively, emotively and ideologically contingent terms, which resonated differently for each individual. Furthermore, although the stereotypes and recognizable patterns of gendered behaviour have been highlighted through this research, it is when they begin to impact persuasively onto gameplay and the way it is talked about, that gender politics signify as a

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central facet of gaming. As intrinsically connected to understandings of the home, the living room, and leisure time, gendered relations of gaming in many ways have always had longevity precisely because the technology is similarly materially, discursively and symbolically positioned within the home. Pleasure The vehement and frequent justifications and rationales offered for owning a console and for engaging in social gameplay demonstrate the strong attachment to both the games themselves and gameplay. Particularly for the male gamers of the research, gaming is both strongly defended, and strongly regimented in terms of normative practices. For female gamers, the careful creation of an excluded position enables them, in the face of sometimes competitive and aggressive social gaming, also to continue to game as social adults. Despite the different claims and positionalities in relation to gameplay, then, it is clear that some interesting convolutions are going on for both gender demographics in order to facilitate and normalize gaming. My argument is that it is pleasure that is at the heart of these convolutions. Such convolutions occur not only because of the problematic discursive position of gaming in adult lives, but also because of the pleasurable identifications and investments gamers generate through gaming. It is not only that adults are taking ‘time out’ to game, and therefore not acting in a way conducive to accepted notions of adulthood; it is that they are finding this activity pleasurable. Indeed, I would argue that it is precisely this unsettled relationship between pleasure and adulthood which makes the gamers defensive about gaming practices. Furthermore, it suggests that the interesting convolutions gamers are entering into to justify gaming tells us far more about a wider discourse of adulthood, pleasure and play, than can be properly addressed in this book. In thinking about pleasure, it is also clear that we find here the same kinds of ‘guilty pleasures’ outlined in previous ethnographic research investigating domestic technologies. Indeed, previous research into the VCR (Gray 1992), the romance novel (Radway 1984) and soap opera viewing (Brunsdon 1997, Ang 1982), suggests a long history of negotiated and contextual technological use. However, by comparison with the research cited above, it is clear that for gaming such guilty pleasures are also the preserve of the male populations. Indeed, seen within this context, the derision of solo gaming and the suggestion it was somehow a failure of masculinity, seems more a case of negotiating pleasurable experiences than about accurate reflections of gameplay scenarios. Consequently, and by comparison with the technologically determined discourses of early game theory and the later focus on the diegetics of the game, this research highlights that the videogame is one in a long line of pleasurable technologies for users. This is not to deny gaming consoles an innovative and novel technicity; rather, it is to suggest that their social and cultural use is mediated not only by it long-term position within gamers’ lives, but also through a wider

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socio-cultural use of pleasurable domestic technologies. Indeed, the videogame is mediated through the television set, and therefore materially, discursively and symbolically already positioned in gamers’ imaginations in a particular way. New innovations in gaming such as the Nintendo Wii, which continue to be mediated through the television set, are also therefore also contingent on these relations which affect where, when, and with whom games are played. Towards an Ethnographic Approach The final consideration is around the methodological and political implications of an ethnographic approach to the videogame. Indeed, thinking more broadly about videogames as a domestic technology locates this project within a very different context from much research on videogames, one that reflexively attempts to navigate gendered articulations about, and investments in, new technology. Further, as Beverley Skeggs suggests, methodology is political, and to side-step questions around the political and methodological location of the research is an abdication not only of responsibility, but of my own position within the research (1997: 17). As I suggested in Chapter 1, I locate this project very much within a cultural studies legacy. This has presented a narrative of the project, which locates the knowledge produced within a very particular set of interpretative ethnographic discourses. As Skeggs continues, knowledge is socio-culturally located and is produced through relations and mechanisms, which also need to be made transparent (ibid.). Indeed, the project finds close methodological alliances with Walkerdine’s recent research on children and gaming (2006, 2007), which has been called on throughout the book in order to understand the negotiated managements of gender articulated and performed during gaming. Walkerdine’s research, in turn, emerges from a longterm engagement with feminist ethnography, where her concern has always been to investigate the lived, gendered relations of media engagements (see Walkerdine 1997). While alignments and connections with Valerie Walkerdine’s research have been made throughout the book, there are a number of further alignments I want to elucidate here around gender, identity, and technology. Ien Ang and Joke Hermes, for example, researching media consumption by female ‘audiences’, find that gender is constantly reproduced as both an identity signifier and an articulation of difference (1991: 316). Furthermore, this means that, rather than thinking of gender as an essential category of difference, the theoretical and methodological question for ethnography becomes how gender is articulated (ibid. 315). In a similar vein to Beverley Skeggs, who finds gender emerging through discourses of class and race (1997: 115), or Ann Gray, who finds gender is caught up with questions of ‘taste’ and judgement (1992: 249), this project also finds gender emerging through and caught up in a set of wider discourses. Indeed, for the female gamers of this project, gender is articulated through discourses of consumerism, genre preference and actual gameplay. While some claims by

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the male gamers – particularly around social gaming or the functionality of the console – are repeated by female gamers, the overwhelming articulation seems to be of care for others, sensitivity and personal acknowledgements of pleasure. In many ways, of course, the complex articulations of gender and technology are also the result of allowing gamers to articulate what it is they enjoy about gaming in their own words. While quotes have been ‘tidied’ up and the more coherent expressions used as indications of wider comments and opinions, the quotes are lengthy, detailed accounts of the range, depth and banality (Morris 1990: 16) of everyday discussions by gamers. Furthermore, the political impetus to engage with gamers, rather than assume my own gaming experience constitutes a wider participatory example, is at the heart of this project. Consequently the project is already implicated into theories of interpretation and discourse. Despite these caveats, this research demonstrates what can be achieved through interpretative ethnographic research by comparison with more abstract theories of new technology. While ActorNetwork and Assemblage theory could have been utilized with considerable effect, the fantasy, desire, and imagined narratives of gaming and gaming memories would have been lost in an account of quantifiable performance. As it is, this research is not a complete understanding of gaming culture precisely because it asks gamers what they think, rather than supposing a role for them within my understanding of gaming culture. As Walkerdine reminds us, subjectivity and fantasy are entwined, and while we may understand the former, we can only interpret the latter: Subjects are created in multiple and often contradictory positioning in multiple and discursive practices in which apparatuses of regulation become apparent techniques of self-production … These self productions are imbued with fantasy. (1997: 35).

Indeed, in the slippage of language and interpretation, gamers will always maintain a certain amount of ‘secrecy’ and pleasure no amount of ‘subaltern’ exposure can understand. The aim is therefore not to represent a ‘true’ account, but to offer, in keeping with Ien Ang’s argument, a ‘politics of interpretation’ (1989: 105). Finally, by comparison with theories of new digital technology, which increasingly brackets mobile agency with the mobile technologies,1 and contributes to the creation of what Walkerdine has termed the ‘central fantasy’ of Cartesian masculinity as ‘separate, who knows and who has control of an object world’ (2007: 145) my research suggests that agency and use should primarily be bracketed, not with a mobile technology (facilitating movement), but with the constitution and performance of subjectivity. Furthermore, movement is not the enhanced and abstracted mobility through (virtual or real) time and space facilitated by technology, posited by First Wave New Media theorists and re-emerging in 1  See Issue 6 (2005) of the Fibreculture journal which focuses on issues of mobility and technology (http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/index.html accessed: 7 September 2007).

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contemporary accounts of videogames. Instead it is the negotiated movements within and through culture, and by extension contingent on relational subjectivity, identity and performance. This is not to deny technological movements or the technicity of the game; rather it is to suggest that these movements have an inherent politics right from the start. Having undertaken research motivated by a novel technology, which I perceived as being problematically aligned with the PC, I find that it is the ontological movements of the gamers, who mediate the technology, which are important.

Appendix 1 Index and Statistics of Houses and Household Members BRIGHTON 1: Brighton 1 (interviews 1.1–1.3) was one of the original participant houses and consisted of Sara, Simon, Steve and Ben aged between 22 and 25 at the start of the research. Both Sara and Simon had studied at Warwick University in the same undergraduate year as me: Simon studied mathematics, Sara studied English; she lived with me, and three others during university. At the start of the research, she was doing an MA at Sussex University, which she completed. Following that, she temped before moving to London to become a researcher for a publishing company. This house is quoted in relation to the construction of gaming subjectivities. The gendered performances of Sara and Simon are also quoted in relation to this house and it is one of the households, which insist on normal gaming as social gaming. Sara and Simon are two of my key research participants because I followed them to their prospective households. Consequently they also contribute to discussions around how the politics of each house shapes social gaming (as these politics altered when Sara and Simon moved). SARA Age at start of research: 24 ‘Ethnicity’: other Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: completing an MA at start of research. Temped whilst in Brighton. Became a researcher for a publishing company when she moved to London. Relationship Status: was in a relationship with Simon. They split up when she moved to London Gaming hours p/w: 10–20 TV viewing hours p/w: 5–10 Reading hours p/w: 5–10 First ever gaming console: BBC Computer Reason: ‘educational’ gift from parents

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SIMON Age at start of research: 25 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: working northern Nationality: British Profession: Secondary school mathematics teacher Relationship Status: was in a relationship with Sara. They split up when she moved to London. He moved in with Joe and Lorna Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: 5–10 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Commodore 64 Reason: stole from brother STEVE Age at start of research: 22 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: homosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: Credit Analyst Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: less than 5 TV viewing hours p/w 20–30 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Sinclair ZX Spectrum Reason: for the games BEN Age at start of research: 25 ‘Ethnicity’: white homosexual Sexuality: Class: middle French Nationality: Profession: Accountant Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: 20–30

Appendix 1

163

20-30

less than 5

10-20

Figure A.1 Brighton 1: Gaming hours per week TV viewing hours p/w: 10–20 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Amiga Reason: influence of brother/hand me down Games Played: 1. Micro Machines 2. GTA: San Andreas 3. Final Fantasy X-2 4. SingStar 5. Pro Evolution 3 6. Civilization 7. Football Manager 8. Tomb Raider 9. PaRappa the Rappa 10. Logic 3 Dance Mat 11. GTA: Vice City 12. EyeToy 13. Half Life 14. Resident Evil BRIGHTON 2: Brighton 2 (interviews 1.5–1.6) was formed when Sara moved to London and Simon moved in with Joe (aged 30) and Lorna (aged 30). It is the

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household in Brighton into which Simon moved. I also reference this house in relation to the construction of gaming as a normal and insistently social activity. Joe also figures regularly in relation to the performance of authoritative (gendered) gamer. Joe and Lorna visited one evening while I was recording gameplay at household 1: they therefore also figure in interview 1.3 (see Appendix 2 for index of interviews). Joe and Simon studied for a PGCE together. They were both in their placement schools in the first year of research, and when Simon moved in with Joe and Lorna, he was also about to start a new job at the same school as Joe. Lorna was a childcare assistant in Brighton for the duration of the research. Her brother was a game designer and both Joe and Lorna expressed interest in my research, which then enabled me to interview and record them. I discuss this house in relation to corporeality and gaming, quoting gameplay and the actions of each gamer during a short period of time when Simon and Joe were gaming. Both Simon and Joe discuss their understandings of the terms ‘gameplay’ and ‘narrative’; and I use their conversation as a spring board for a further discussion around the specific rhetoric employed in discussions of gaming. SIMON Age at start of research: 25 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: working northern Nationality: British Profession: Secondary school mathematics teacher Relationship Status: was in a relationship with Sara. They spit up when she moved to London. He moved in with Joe and Lorna Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: 5–10 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Commodore 64 Reason: stole from brother JOE Age at start of research: 30 ‘Ethnicity’: white heterosexual Sexuality: Class: middle British Nationality: Profession: Secondary school geography teacher (works in the same school as Simon) Relationship Status: in a relationship with Lorna

Appendix 1

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more than 30

10-20

20-30

Figure A.2 Brighton 2: Gaming hours per week Gaming hours p/w: 10–20 TV viewing hours p/w: 20–30 Reading hours p/w: 10–202: GAMING HOURS PER WEEK BRIGHTON First ever gaming console: LED handheld Reason: peer pressure LORNA Age at start of research: 30 ‘Ethnicity’: other Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British, Spanish and Romanian Profession: Pre-school care assistant Relationship Status: in a relationship with Joe Gaming hours p/w: 20–30 TV viewing hours p/w: 20–30 Reading hours p/w: 20–30 First ever gaming console: Sinclair ZX Spectrum Reason: hand me down from brother

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166

Games Played: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Pro Evolution 3 Pro Evolution 5 Resident Evil GTA: San Andreas Bubble Bobble Super Mario Final Fantasy X-2

LEEDS 1 AND METHLEYS: Leeds 1 and Methleys was another of the original households, which participated in the research for four years. In its initial formation (interview 7.1) it had five housemates: Duncan (28), Al (28), Ben (28), Nathan (28), and Heung (30). Heung and Nathan were a couple: Heung had recently moved into the house from Vietnam at the start of the research. Duncan was a Joiner, Al worked in insurance (he worked with Ricky who was a later addition to the house). Al, Ben and Nathan had all studied at Hull University together but had not lived with each other until graduation. Ben was a Chef and Nathan was an Electrician. Ben knew Duncan from secondary school, and invited Duncan to move into the house in 2001 when Peter moved out. Bob (26), who was a later addition (he replaced Heung and Nathan) was Peter’s younger brother, and also went to the same school as Duncan, Carl (a visitor quoted in interview 2.1) Peter, and Ben. Heung and Nathan moved out in 2004 and Bob moved in (interviews 2.1– 2.2). Bob moved from London where he was a radio presenter. Ricky (28), who figures in interview 2.1 as a guest, moved into the house when Ben moved to Japan (interviews 2.3–2.5). Most of the interviews and gameplay recorded from this household come from the latter stages of ‘movement’ when Nathan and Heung had moved out and the house was all-male. I have included the first stage in the movements here, not only to emphasize how these people were all inter-related, but also to highlight the close relations and ties each housemate had to one another, and the long and complex relationships, which offer a context for their discussions. This house is discussed in relation to all the themes mentioned above in relation to the Brighton households 1 and 2. Bob offers points of obvious similarity with Simon (above) in relation to discussions logical gaming and framing the console in relation to its function. In terms of the power dynamics of the households, Al and Sara perform similar and comparable roles. Finally, I argue that this house is complicit in the construction of a particular type of gamer which is rigidly enforced through both the narratives and practices of gameplay. NATHAN Age at start of research: 28 ‘Ethnicity’: other

Appendix 1

Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British, Black French Profession: Electrician Relationship Status: in a relationship with Heung Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: 5–10 Reading hours p/w: 20–30 First ever gaming console: Gameboy Reason: Christmas present HEUNG Age at start of research: 31 ‘Ethnicity’: other Sexuality: heterosexual Class: other Nationality: Vietnamese Profession: Student/housewife Relationship Status: in a relationship with Nathan Gaming hours p/w: 5–10 TV viewing hours p/w: 5–10 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Sega Mega Drive Reason: can’t remember DUNCAN Age at start of research: 28 ‘Ethnicity’: white heterosexual Sexuality: Class: middle British, Scottish Nationality: Profession: Joiner Relationship Status: in a relationship with Lena Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: 20–30 Reading hours p/w: 5–10 First ever gaming console: Nintendo Entertainment System Reason: peer pressure

167

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BOB Age at start of research: 26 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: working northern Nationality: British Profession: Radio Presenter for the BBC Relationship Status: single at start. In a relationship 2006 onwards Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: more than 30 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: SNES Reason: peer pressure AL Age at start of research: 28 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: Insurance Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: 10–20 TV viewing hours p/w: more than 30 Reading hours p/w: 20–30 First ever gaming console: Gameboy Reason: hand me down from sister and peer pressure RICKY Age at start of research: 28 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Insurance Profession: Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: 20–30

Appendix 1

169 less than 5

5-10

more than 30

Figure A.3 Leeds 1 and 2: Gaming hours per week Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: LED handheld Reason: peer pressure LEEDS 1 & 2: GAMING HOURS PER WEEK BEN Age at start of research: 28 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: working Nationality: British Profession: Chef Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: 20–30 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: SNES Reason: nagged parents Games Played: 1. Tiger Woods: PGA Tour 2. GTA: San Andreas

10-20

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170

3. GTA: Vice City 4. Football Manager 5. Civilization 6. FIFA 7. Pro Evolution 3 8. Getaway 9. Donkey Konga 10. Final Fantasy X-2 11. Tony Hawks 12. Tekken 13. Shenmue 14. Mec Warrior 15. Crazy Taxi 16. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 17. Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding/Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater BRIGHTON 3: Brighton 3 (interviews 3.1–3.3) was a further house in Brighton and included Beth (23), Celia (25) and Michael (32). Beth was doing a PGCE in middle school Biology. Celia was doing an MA at Sussex University and commuting between London where she also worked in a shop, and Brighton. Michael was a production assistant, working in Brighton. There were a further two housemates who did not participate in this research, and consequently are not presented here. Beth is my most-quoted member of this house, and she is an interesting case study around the kinds of identificatory narratives she offers in her accounts of gaming. She talks specifically about Final Fantasy X-2, which she was playing during the few years of interviews. In a similar way to Lorna and Sara, she creates an exclusionary position for herself outside the popular discourse of gaming, arguing for example, that games are not designed for women. It is the way she naturalizes gender as an essential performative indicator, which is most interesting here. As with Lorna, and Sara, the construction of an excluded position from which to speak allows her to offer non-confrontational comments, and reveal some insights into where she locates pleasure when gaming. BETH Age at start of research: 23 white ‘Ethnicity’: Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: Doing a PGCE in the first year and then a primary school teacher Relationship Status: single

Appendix 1

171

more than 30

10-20

20-30

Figure A.4 Brighton 3: Gaming hours per week Gaming hours p/w: 10–20 TV viewing hours p/w: 20–30 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Gameboy BRIGHTON 3: GAMING HOURS PER WEEK Reason: present from parents CELIA Age at start of research: 25 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: MA student Relationship Status: in a relationship Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: less than 5 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: SNES Reason: sibling influence

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MICHAEL Age at start of research: 32 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: homosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: production assistant Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: 20–30 TV viewing hours p/w: 5–10 Reading hours p/w: 5–10 First ever gaming console: Sega Mega Drive Reason: gift from parents Games Played: 1. Final Fantasy X-2 2. Final Fantasy VII 3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds DURHAM 1: Durham 1 (interviews 4.1–4.3) was an original house in Durham, and consisted of two brothers, Cam (32) and Grant (34). This was an experimental house in which I asked Duncan (from Leeds) to interview them. I was interested at the time in how much my presence was shaping the interviews and recordings, and I wanted to see the difference when I was not present. However, as the quotes indicate, what resulted was a fast-paced dialogue of techno-rich and nostalgic recollection, which actually told me very little about their pleasure or past gaming experience. I was also interested in what would happen when gamers talked about past gaming experiences where all gamers were present. Although it was particularly useful for memories of past gaming experiences, listening to the recordings was frustrating, and many of the answers I would have interrogated were not. They offer insights around two key areas for this project: social memories of gaming, and the use of techno-rhetoric to mask discussions of pleasure or identification. I also include extracts from recordings of gameplay in Chapter 6. Cam and Grant knew Duncan from school (not in the same year, but they became friends afterwards). Duncan offered to interview them for me, after he had told them of my research. CAM Age at start of research: 32 ‘Ethnicity’: white

Appendix 1

173

Sexuality: heterosexual Class: working Nationality: British Profession: Barman Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: more than 30* TV viewing hours p/w: 5–10 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Commodore 64 Reason: nagged parents GRANT Age at start of research: 34 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: working Nationality: British Profession: unemployed. Shortly after these interviews, he moved to Finland and became a dog trainer Relationship Status: in a relationship Gaming hours p/w: more than 30* TV viewing hours p/w: less than 5 Reading hours p/w: less than 5 First ever gaming console: Commodore 64 Reason: nagged parents *Both gamers game more than 30 hours a week Games Played: 1. Nintendogs 2. Mario Karts 3. GTA: San Andreas 4. Jet Set Willy 5. Shenmue 6. Pro Evolution 7. Tiger Woods: PGA Tour 8. GTA: San Andreas 9. GTA: Vice City 10. Football Manager 11. Civilization 12. FIFA

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BELFAST 1: Belfast 1 (interview 5.1) was a shared house in Belfast. It consisted of Jess (33), Sarah (26) and Connor (26). I stayed with this house for four days and interviewed them twice. Sarah and Connor were a couple and in the four days I was there, Connor (an accountant) was in the process of moving in with Sarah and Jess. I knew Sarah through one of my housemates when I was living in Belfast: they had done a postgraduate certificate in journalism at the University of Ulster. Jess and Sarah had shown interest in the research, and they both invited me to record and interview them in 2006. I was mostly interested in Jess’s narratives of past game experiences, which insisted on a social setting for her memories. Her conversation highlighted important family politics, which were crucial in the construction of her gaming identity. She is quoted in this book primarily in relation to these memories of gaming experiences. JESS Age at start of research: 33 ‘Ethnicity’: other Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: Native American Profession: Lecturer Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: 10–20 TV viewing hours p/w: more than 30 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Atari Reason: sibling influence SARAH Age at start of research: 26 white ‘Ethnicity’: Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: Northern Irish Profession: journalist Relationship Status: in a relationship with Connor Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: 5–10 Reading hours p/w: 20–30

Appendix 1

175

20-30

10-20

Figure A.5 Belfast 1: Gaming hours per week First ever gaming console: BBC computer Reason: hand-me-down from brother CONNOR

BELFAST 1: GAMING HOURS PER WEEK

Age at start of research: 26 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: Northern Irish Profession: Accountant Relationship Status: in a relationship with Sarah Gaming hours p/w: 10–20 TV viewing hours p/w: 10–20 Reading hours p/w: 5–10 First ever gaming console: Atari Reason: Christmas present Games Played: 1. Pong 2. Pac Man 3. Atari Flashback (Space Invaders)

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4. Final Fantasy X-2 5. Crazy Taxi MANCHESTER 1: Household 6 (interview 6.1) was one of the initial households in Manchester. There were four housemates, Hannah (23), Rach (25), Simon (25) and John (24). It broke up in early 2005 when Rach moved out. She lived alone until moving to Leeds in April 2006, when she (and Rob) agreed to continue to participate. They all described themselves as middle class. Hannah worked in a bank, Rach was a data analyst and John was a production analyst. This household is primarily used as supportive quotes due to its short input (in terms of time) to my research. RACH Age at start of research: 25 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: Data Analyst Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: 20–30 TV viewing hours p/w: 10–20 Reading hours p/w: 20–30 First ever gaming console: BBC Computer Reason: ‘educational’ gift from parents HANNAH Age at start of research: 23 white ‘Ethnicity’: Sexuality: homosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: works in a bank Relationship Status: in a relationship Gaming hours p/w: 10–20 TV viewing hours p/w: 20–30 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: GameGear Reason: sibling influence

Appendix 1

177

more than 30 10-20

20-30

Figure A.6 Manchester 1: Gaming per hours per week JOHN Age at start of research: 25 ‘Ethnicity’: white MANCHESTER 1: GAMING HOURS PER WEEK Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: Production analyst Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: 20–30 TV viewing hours p/w: 10–20 Reading hours p/w: 5–10 First ever gaming console: Commodore 64 Reason: nagged parents SIMON Age at start of research: 24 ‘Ethnicity’: other Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: Computer Man

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178

Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: 20–30 Reading hours p/w: less than 5 First ever gaming console: Sinclair ZX Spectrum Reason: ‘best computer at the time for programming which is what I was interested in’ Games Played: 1. Gran Turismo 2. Micro Machines LEEDS 2: Leeds 2 (interviews 8.1–8.2) was the house into which Rach moved when she moved to Leeds. It consisted of her and Rob (32). I followed Rach when she moved to Leeds from Manchester. Rob was a plumber and worked locally in Leeds. I use Rach and Robs’ gameplay as a springboard to discuss the politics of performance during gameplay. I argue that the politics established in the construction of gaming subjectivities continues to be negotiated during gameplay. Rach and Rob also watch replays of themselves gaming, and they try to analyze what they see. Rob is quoted precisely because he attempts to analyze what he sees, but the initial unease and the continued narration of the game is a trope common to all the gamers. They also discuss gender and gaming, and play out some interesting politics, which (like households 1, 2, 3, 4, and 9) actively prioritizes social gaming as the norm. ROB Age at start of research: 32 ‘Ethnicity’: white heterosexual Sexuality: Class: middle British Nationality: Profession: Plumber Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: 20–30* TV viewing hours p/w: 10–20 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Amiga Reason: Christmas present

Appendix 1

179

RACH Age at start of research: 25 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: Data Analyst Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: 20–30* TV viewing hours p/w: 10–20 Reading hours p/w: 20–30 First ever gaming console: BBC Computer Reason: ‘educational’ gift from parents * both gamers game for 20–30 hours per week Games Played: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

GTA: San Andreas Final Fantasy X-2 Pro Evolution 5 Tomb Raider GTA: Vice City Breakaway

LONDON 1: London 1 (interviews 9.1–9.3) was the house into which Sara moved when she broke up with Simon and became a researcher in London. It was the final addition to the households and was all-female in constitution (although Ian participated in one of the recordings). Clare (26) was a business consultant, and Chloe (27) was a travel agent. This house was used to discuss gender performance along with household 2. As it was an all-female household, it contributes to assertions that gender is not an essential marker for performative difference, but is instead aligned with the politics of the house so that the authoritative and competent gamer is also performing certain kinds of stereotyped performances of masculinity. Sara offered insights and reflections on her time in the Brighton house when we were momentarily left alone, which contribute to discussion around temporality and identity. She tells me that her time in the Brighton household was a performance of someone she no longer recognizes, and this leads to a wider discussion around the performance of subjectivity and its relation to household politics.

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SARA Age at start of research: 24 ‘Ethnicity’: other Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: completing an MA at start of research. Temped whilst in Brighton. Became a researcher for a publishing company when she moved to London. Relationship Status: was in a relationship with Simon. They split up when she moved to London Gaming hours p/w: 10–20 TV viewing hours p/w: 5–10 Reading hours p/w: 5–10 First ever gaming console: BBC Computer Reason: ‘educational’ gift from parents CLARE Age at start of research: 26 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: middle Nationality: British Profession: Business consultant Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: more than 30 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: Gameboy Reason: to shut me up CHLOE Age at start of research: 27 ‘Ethnicity’: white heterosexual Sexuality: Class: middle Nationality: British Travel Agent/Guide Profession: Relationship Status: single

Appendix 1

181

10-20

more than 30

20-30

Figure A.7 London 1: Gaming hours per week LONDON 1: GAMING HOURS PER WEEK

Gaming hours p/w: 20–30 TV viewing hours p/w: 20–30 Reading hours p/w: 20–30 First ever gaming console: Gameboy Reason: peer pressure IAN

Age at start of research: 29 ‘Ethnicity’: white Sexuality: heterosexual Class: working Nationality: British Profession: Carpenter/cabinet maker Relationship Status: single Gaming hours p/w: more than 30 TV viewing hours p/w: less than 5 Reading hours p/w: 10–20 First ever gaming console: LED handheld Reason: Christmas Present

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182

Games Played: 1. Micro Machines 2. GTA: San Andreas 3. Final Fantasy X-2 4. SingStar 5. Tomb Raider 6. PaRappa the Rappa 7. Logic 3 Dance Mat 8. GTA: Vice City 9. EyeToy 10. Half Life

Appendix 2 Index of Interviews 1.1:

Brighton 1 Date: 02.11.04. Topic: Gaming Pleasures. Household members: Steve, Sara, Simon, Ben Interview Participants: Steve, Sara, Simon Length of Stay: 2.5 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

1.2:

Brighton 1 Date: 09.06.05 Topic: Gaming Memories Household members: Steve, Sara, Simon, Ben Interview Participants: Steve, Sara, Simon, Ben Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 3

1.3:

Brighton 1 Date: 17.09.05 Topic: Gaming Routines and Reflections on Gaming Household members: Steve, Sara, Simon, Ben Interview Participants: Steve, Simon, Sara, Ben, Lorna, Joe Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 1

1.4:

Brighton 1 Date: 15.03.06 Topic: Reflections of Gaming Household members: Steve, Sara, Simon, Ben Interview Participants: Steve, Simon, Sara Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 1

1.5:

Brighton 2 Date: 31.08.06 Topic: Gaming Routines and Reflections/Recordings of Gameplay Household members: Simon, Joe, Lorna

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Interview Participants: Simon, Joe Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

1.6:

Brighton 2 Date: 12.12.06 Topic: Reflections/Recordings of Gameplay Household members: Simon, Joe, Lorna Interview Participants: Simon, Joe Length of Stay: 1 day Number of interviews/recordings: 2

2.1:

Methleys 1 Date: 15.02.05 Topic: Gaming Pleasures Household members: Bob, Duncan, Al, Ben Interview Participants: Bob, Carl, Duncan, Al, Steve, Ricky, Mark Length of Stay: 4 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

2.2:

Methleys 1 Date: 20.02.05 Topic: Gaming Memories Household members: Bob, Duncan, Al, Ben Interview Participants: Bob, Duncan, Al Length of Stay: 3 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

2.3:

Methleys 2 Date: 12.09.05 Topic: New Changes/ Recordings of Gameplay Household members: Bob, Duncan, Al, Ricky Interview Participants: Al, Duncan Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 1

2.4:

Methleys 2 Date: 18.03.06 Topic: Gaming Pleasures Household members: Bob, Duncan, Al, Ricky Interview Participants: Duncan Length of Stay: 4 days Number of interviews/recordings: 1

Appendix 2

2.5:

Methleys 2 Date: 20.09.06 Topic: Gaming Pleasures Household members: Bob, Duncan, Al, Ricky Interview Participants: Ricky Length of Stay: 1 day Number of interviews/recordings: 1

3.1:

Brighton 3 Date: 22.04.05 Topic: Gaming Pleasures Household members: Beth, Celia, Michael Interview Participants: Beth Length of Stay: 3 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

3.2:

Brighton 3 Date: 06.08.06 Topic: Gaming Narratives/ Recordings of Gameplay Household members: Beth, Celia, Michael Interview Participants: Beth Length of Stay: 1 days Number of interviews/recordings: 1

3.3:

Brighton 3 Date: 07.08.06 Topic: Gaming Bodies Household members: Beth, Celia, Michael Interview Participants: Celia, Michael Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

4.1:

Durham 1 Date: 24.12.05 Topic: Recording Gameplay Household members: Grant, Cam Interview Participants: Grant, Cam, Duncan Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

4.2:

Durham 1 Date: 03.01.06 Topic: Gaming Pleasures and Memories Household members: Grant, Cam

185

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Interview Participants: Grant, Cam, Duncan Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 1

4.3:

Durham 1 Date: 24.12.06 Topic: Recording Gameplay Household members: Grant, Cam Interview Participants: Grant, Cam, Duncan Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 1

5.1:

Belfast 1 Date: 01.02.06 Topic: Gaming Memories Household members: Jess, Sarah, Rory Interview Participants: Jess Length of Stay: 4 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

6.1:

Manchester 1 Date: 17.12.03 Topic: Gaming Habits Household members: Rachel, Hannah, John, Simon Interview Participants: Rachel, Hannah, John, Simon Length of Stay: 2 day Number of interviews/recordings: 2

7.1:

Leeds 1 (original Methleys) Date: 04.01.04 Topic: Gaming Habits Household members: Duncan, Ben, Nathan, Al, and Heung Interview Participants: Duncan, Ben, Nathan, Al, Heung Length of Stay: 3 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

8.1:

Leeds 2 Date: 14.07.06 Topic: Gaming Bodies/ Recordings of Gameplay Household members: Rob, Rach Interview Participants: Rob, Rach Length of Stay: 4 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

Appendix 2

8.2:

Leeds 2 Date: 29.11.06. Topic: Recordings of Gameplay, reflections on Gameplay Household members: Rob, Rach Interview Participants: Rob, Rach Length of Stay: 3 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

9.1:

London 1 Date: 01.02.06 Topic: Reflections on Brighton, Gaming Habits. Household members: Clare, Sara, Chloe Interview Participants: Clare, Sara, Ian, Chloe Length of Stay: 3 days Number of interviews/recordings: 1

9.2:

London 1 Date: 17.12.06. Topic: Recordings of Gaming. Household members: Sara, Clare, Chloe Interview Participants: Sara, Clare, Ian Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

9.3:

London 1 Date: 26.02.07 Topic: Reflections on Gaming Household members: Sara, Clare, Chloe Interview Participants: Sara, Clare, Chloe Length of Stay: 2 days Number of interviews/recordings: 2

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Index

Aarseth, E.J. 2 Actor-Network Theory 118–23 Anderson, C.A. and Dill, K.E. 6–7, 152–3 Ang, I. 9–10, 70 Ang, I. and Hermes, J. 70, 154–5, 158 articulating gameplay 47–77 Assemblage Theory 82–4 avatars 56, 58–63, 111, 122, 135, 142 bodies active 102–8 affective 105, 108, 111–12 body schema 111–12 cyborg 112–18 imagined 143–4 gaming 2–3, 18, 26, 98–100, 102–8, 112, 115–18, 143–4 and technology 95–6, 98–100, 107 Butler, J. 20–2, 38–9, 89, 122, 150–2 ‘who is imagining whom’ 20–1, 38–9, 59, 90, 127, 151–2 Bassett, C. 75, 77–8, 97–100, 102, 111–12, 133–4, 151, 153–4 Carr, D. 3, 8–9, 57–8, 61–2 Cartesian subjectivity 17, 28–9, 107–8, 156, 159–60 Cassell, J. and Jenkins, H. 8–9, 57–8 consumption, rhetoric of 58–60 cyberspace 3–5, 64–5, cyborg, the 112–18 de Lauretis, T. 22, 29, 134–5, 137, 156 Dean, J. 141–3 DeLanda, M. 82–4 Dovey, J. and Kennedy, H. 2–4, 84–5, 112–13, 133 ethnography 1–19, 158–60

interpretive 9–10 feminist 9–10 towards 158–60 fantasy-reality 65–7 femininity constructions of 54–8, 83–4 conventions of 25–6, 54–8 negotiated 19–47, 131–4 performances of 44, 54–60, 77–101 management of 48, 58–65 Feminist New Media Theory 4 Final Fantasy 32–3, 56, 58–65 First Wave New Media Theory 107, 116–17, 159–160 Foucault, M. 22–3, 27, 36–7, 67, 117–18 game returning to the 128–34 gameplay 51–4 gaming and affect 6–8 and postfeminism 58–60, 128–33 as Practical Consciousness 108–12 instinctual 51–4 normal 71–2 solo 4–5, 72–4 geek 67–72 gender and ethnography 1–19, and exclusion 54–8, 67–72 and the cyborg 112–18 and power 47–77, 154–7 and the rhetoric of consumption 58–60 and videogames 1–19, 58–60, 128–33, 154–7 negotiations 79–91, 154–7

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performances 38–45, 58–60, 128–33, 151, 154–7 gendered identities 20–47, 154–7 Giddens, A. 18, 100, 108–12 Grand Theft Auto 40, 51–2, 56, 59, 64, 77–101, 129–30, 136 Grodal, T. 105–8 Grodal, T. and Gregersen, G. 1, 3–4, 107–8 Grosz, E. 4, 29, 90, 95–6, 108, 156 Halberstam, J. 154–5 Hansen, M. 108, 111–12 Hayles, N.K. 117–18 heteronormativity 67–74 home, returning to the 74–7 households, the 10–16

and technological language 51–4 failure of 67–72, 157 material, the 91–3 McNay, L. 44–5, 77–8, 90, 95, 111–12, 117, 150 and protensive subject formation 44–5, 112 mediation 18, 21, 70, 74–5, 78, 91, 98, 101–2, 107, 152–3 technological 110–12, 123, 127, 137–41, 151 memory maps 25, 147, 150 Merleau–Ponty, M. 108, 111–12, 117 Micro Machines 59 Murray, J. 2–3

Kerr, A. 32–3, 58–9 King, G. and Krzywinska, T. 2–9, 34, 49, 54, 70, 74–5, 80, 152–4 Kuhn, A. 21–7, 147, 150

narration and desire and subjectivity 134–7, 147 modes of 21–7 narrative and material technology 96–100 and memory 34–8 and pleasure 60–5, 126–7 and the hero 29, 135 and Symbolic Interactionism 150–2 and videogames 2 corporeal 95–6, 109 diegetic 51, 60–3 meta 27–8 micro 27, 44, ontological 9, 16, 21–3, 26–7, 44–5, 77–9, 85, 90–1, 95–100, 102, 105–6, 109–12, 121–3, 150–2 romance 60–3 unarticulable 106–8 narrative structures and femininity 31–4 and masculinity 27–9 Newman, J. 4–7, 19, 33, 38, 64, 70, 85, 106–7, 133 not remembering 137–141

MacKenzie, A. 30 masculinity 27–9, 41, 58, 96, 113, 156–7 active 113, 122–3 and rationality 27–9, 31, 51–4, 134–7

participation 141–4 performance, negotiated 38–45 place 74–7, 93–6 play, problematic 29–31

identification 58–63 identification and misrecognition 144–7 identity, gender and technology 154–7 immersion 2–5, 15 and arousal 2–3 and pleasure 70–2 fantasies of 153 rhetoric of 4–5, 149 immersive experiences 2–3 interaction 15, 17, 149, 152–4 during gaming 55, 79, 88–9, 141 feelings of 127–8 intense 92, 98 multiple 33, 82, 122–3 social 28–9, 34, 51–4, 123 symbolic 17, 38–9, 101–2, 108–9, 117–18, 150–2 ISS/Pro Evolution 55–6, 155

Index playability 51–4 pleasure 125–49, 157–8 and the imagined gamer 125–49, 157–8 and narrative 60–65 pleasurable technologies 34–8 positions of exclusion 54–8, 67–72 Poole, S. 6–7 postfeminist gaming 58–60, 128–33 Power and gender 47–77, 79–89, 94, 115 and technology 47–77 dynamics 1, 8, 10–11, 16–17, 43, 54, 88, 99, 108, 115, 128, 132, 135–6, 153 politics 14, 39, 74–5, 102, 115–8, 122–3 relations 13, 16–18, 38, 43, 83, 91, 99–100, 101, 105, 121–3 structures 38, 57, 84, 120 systems 117–18, practical consciousness 18, 108–12 practices of gameplay, the 77–101 Praxis 16, 38, 43, 77–8, 82–7, 90, 95–100, 102, 106, 109–10 and Actor–Network Theory 119 gaming as 82–7, 95–100 Imagined 143–4 lived 110, 123 Pro Evolution 55–6, 155 psychoanalysis 144–7 Radway, J. 62–3, 157 Resident Evil 103–4 Rheingold, H. 3–4, 64–5 Ricoeur, P. 44–5, 77–9, 136–7 Silverstone, R. 154 Skeggs, B. 158–60 social Gaming Memories 34–8 social, the 93–6 solo Gaming 4–5, 72–4 Somers, M. and Gibson, G. 21–3, 26–7, 97–8, 128, 135 Steedman, C. 22 subject

207

formation 44, 112 performance 77 the masculine 3–4, 28–9 the feminine 28–9 subjectivity Cartesian 17, 28–9, 107–8, 156, 159–60 cyborgian 113, desire for 136–7 embodied 113 imagined 132 gaming 150–1 relational 160 symbolic interaction 17, 38–9, 101–2, 108–9, 117–18, 150–2 technologies, pleasurable 34–8 technology articulating 49–51 humanizing 49–51 and subjectivity 154–7 and narrative 96–100 the material importance of 91–3 television and the PC 13–16 itself 78–9, 91–3 the set 5, 11, 33, 77, 79, 91–3, 158 the screen 13, 147 Thornham, H. 47, 59 Thornham, S. 4, 120, 136–7, 145–6, 150–1 Tomb Raider 59–62 Tomytronics 24 Turkle, S. 64–5 Videogame Theory 2–9, 102–8, 152–4 videogames and affect 6–7, 152–7 and the PC 5–6, 92–3, 149 virtual reality 3–5, 84 Walkerdine, V. 17, 31, 48, 50–1, 60, 83–4, 88, 107–8, 118, 122, 143–5, 150, 151–2, 155–6, 158 Worms 28