In digitally saturated environments, digital media users of all kinds, engaged in different areas of activity, are increasingly categorised in terms of their ability to appropriate and use digital media; they are regarded as non-users, experts, literates, or as someone possessing a natural expertise, as digital natives, for instance. Often, expertise is configured as a fixed rather than relational capacity – having the necessary level of knowledge with a skill to become expert, or to rise above a particular and objectively defined level of competency. Expertise is here regarded as something that is measurable. This is apparent in studies where expertise has been conceptualised as pertaining to a specific domain, as exceptional experts such as chess grandmasters (Chase & Simon 1973) or in comparative studies between expert and non-expert practices (Proffitt et al. 2000). When turning to the field of game studies, we find that the same conceptualisations of expertise often pervade; more specifically, expertise in relation to digital games and gaming has been framed as a particular kind of literacy (e.g. Steinkuehler & Duncan 2008), connected to cognitive problem-solving and spatial representation (e.g. Greenfield et al. 1994), social skills and cultural capital (e.g. Chen 2009), or sports and professionalism (Taylor 2012). Rather than continuing to view expertise as something displayed in an expert skillset of gamers – a form of superior ability or level of excellence – I want to shift the focus to an understanding of how digital expertise emerges and is negotiated among everyday gamers in domestic contexts.
Yates and Littleton argue that we need to understand “computer gaming as something that is constructed out of a set of practices that computer gamers engage in” (Yates & Littleton 1999: 569). Following this line of thought, I opt for viewing technology and gender as mutually shaping and intersecting
Recently, the margins between gaming culture and gender studies have become highly contentious, as the GamerGate controversy clearly demonstrates (Salter & Blodgett 2012). This controversy is perhaps the most visible eruption of a much more ingrained hegemonic masculinity understood as “systemic structures [of] the industry and gaming culture as a whole” (Chess & Shaw 2015: 208–209). As Consalvo (2012) has pointed out, the current gaming culture can be toxic in many ways. Despite the changing image of gaming being for everyone, there is still a pervasive notion of the ‘gamer’ as the straight, white male. While this article is not about GamerGate or the toxicity of gaming culture, this nevertheless points to an important point. The gendering and hegemony of specific spaces or practices are not novel topics within gaming studies, and not even specific
For the sake of argument, this article will focus on female gamers – on how they experience, articulate and perform their gaming. The male gamers’ point of view will be included in so far as it serves to highlight a certain aspect of the argumentation and exploration of expertise, especially when discussing gaming couples. The analysis of the empirical data of course cannot offer a representative picture of what gaming looks like for European adults; neither can the results be generalised to a larger population. Instead, the intention is to push forward the theoretical discussion of ways expertise operates in different social contexts. What Yin argued furthers the idea that qualitative insights are “generalizable to theoretical positions and not to populations or universes” (Yin 2003: 10). That is, the purpose of such studies is to expand theory and not statistical generalisation.
It is difficult to shake loose the hegemonic discourses and practices that surround and delimit our everyday gendered subject positions, especially in relation to technologies and expertise. While technologies can be understood as gendered due to the context or culture of their production, they also carry with them and embody what we might call particular assumptions
Writing in the context of industrial production and automation in the mid to late 1980s, what was at stake in the McNeil volume was the very question of expertise. Fighting against a craft system of largely male print workers organised in craft-based unions, the jobs of women in keyboarding operating positions were not accepted as requiring skilful computational expertise. What became evident was that technology itself was a highly gendered medium of power; through processes of inclusion and exclusion it acted as “a political economy of expertise […] distributed across both bodies and machines” (Bassett 2013: 209). Half a decade later, Cynthia Cockburn, building on the idea of the social shaping of technology (MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985), furthered this notion by arguing that
the social relations of technology are gendered relations, that technology enters into identity, and (more difficult for many to accept) that technology
These authors highlight the fact that what counts as technological competence and as expertise in regards to these technologies, are highly gendered:
The construction of ‘woman’ and of ‘technology’ are not separate practices, similar, even congruent, power relations obtain. Men's work is often defined as technical, technical work is seen as men's work. And the obverse: women's work is often defined as non-technical, non-technical work is seen as woman's work
Moving to the field of gaming, we find that the same discourses and perceptions pervade. Here, the powerful association of masculine gamers and game designers, as well as the presumption of male technological competence and abilities, have positioned women and girls as less able, less competent and more casual gamers (Laurel 2001). This strand of research on gender and gaming has been identified as a major research pitfall, in which
Research that avoids these pitfalls does so first and foremost by recasting the purpose of gender and gaming research, in which concepts and practices are destabilised or reorganised instead of merely describing and reauthorising them. What is more important is that both women and men
These studies challenge the taken-for-granted presumptions traditionally attributed to gender, mobilising a framing of gender that echoes Butler: “Whether gender or sex is fixed or free it is a function of a discourse which seeks to set certain limits to analysis or safeguard certain tenets of humanism as presupposition to any analysis of gender” (Butler 1990: 12). It is here informative to consider Dovey's concept of The notion of technical virtuosity, of a particular easy adoption of and facility with technology, is a fundamental aspect of the contemporary ideal subject within the technosphere. This historical moment produces technological competence as a key marker for success as a participant in the modern culture. A focus on technicity will also enable us to emphasise the ways in which particular kinds of identity are privileged
Technicity is about the privileging of certain technological skills, the ability to adopt, handle and be at ease with new technologies, as well as the ways identities and gender are increasingly mediated by technologies and abilities, practices and relations with these technologies. The concept of technicity can, in the following, serve as a focal point for studying gaming expertise as the performance of gendered relations. Rather than approaching gaming expertise from the site of the technology or the games themselves, I focus on how these are articulated by actual gamers. This enables us to see how technologies and understandings of expertise connected to these are bound up in discourses concerning gendered identities of users; further, it also enables us to see how “[d]iscourse does not merely represent or report on pregiven practices and relations, but it enters into their articulation and is, in that sense, productive” (Butler 1995: 138). In doing so, I explore the discourses of expertise as a material social relation where gender emerges as a complex enabler of constructed media engagements and through normative practices and behaviours pertaining to gaming.
The empirical data presented here stem from a triangulation of qualitative focus group interviews (Halkier 2008), offline observations of gamers’ physical gaming set-ups in their homes, and three years of in-game participant observations of gaming sessions in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game
The participants were recruited from two A guild is an in-game association of players, formed to make group activities easier and more rewarding, as well as to create a social atmosphere in which to enjoy the game. Membership in a guild offers players admission into a broader social network. A PvE server (Player versus Environment) is a type of server that facilitates a style of play, where the player-controlled characters compete against the game world and its computer-controlled denizens – as opposed to Player-versus-Player (PvP) servers, where players fight other players. PvE is the dominant form of MMORPG games.
The participants all knew each other in-game and they all participated in the guild-specific gaming practice of
One of the most obvious results emerging from the first study on gendered gameplay is how the three women during the couple's focus group interview all claimed a secondary or outsider position in relation to their husband or boyfriend. Despite the fact that the couples played together every day and two of the women played more often and in longer sessions than their husband/boyfriend, the three women all positioned themselves as less able, less skilled and less knowledgeable than the men. The women constructed themselves as gendered and therefore initially as excluded as the normative gamer is gendered male. As a result of this, the women were extremely hesitant to seek out information outside the game on their own, relying solely on their boyfriend or husband to provide the information needed:
“Well, I have a husband that tells me what I need to know”. “Yeah, me too”. “Yeah, I’m leaving that up to Martin to find out…”.
The women positioned themselves as subjected to the more active agencies of their boyfriend/husband whereby traditional gendered power dynamics on and around gaming emerged.
What is emerging here is the notion of expertise specifically in regard to gaming capital. Consalvo introduced the concept of gaming capital “to capture how being a member of game culture is about more than playing games or even playing them well” (Consalvo 2007: 18). The concept is a re-contextualising of Bourdieu's “cultural” capital for the field of gaming and describes a highly contextual and dynamic currency, which entails being knowledgeable about game information, knowing where to find that information and knowing what to do with it. Consalvo recognises that gaming capital is sought by players and becomes instantiated in a diverse range of user practices and productions – such as knowing what to do in-game and when to do it, and installing and configuring game add-ons and interface modifications. We may read this concept in light of digital expertise, which helps to frame expertise as something pertaining to other aspects than just the act of playing the game. Gaming capital connects digital expertise to a range of out-of-game practices, and in all three focus groups the men continuously claimed gaming capital at the same time as the women clearly did not. Both the female and the male gamers coded these out-of-game competencies as strictly masculine, and as such the women left it to the men to perform them.
Moreover, what was echoed again and again in the interviews, by both men and women, was the perception of the normative gamer as gendered male; the women described gaming as “a men's club”, “for the boys”, something “these blokes do”; a masculine domain into which women can be invited, but where “there is a lot of sexism going on” and the women run the risk of being positioned as “the token female”, as one female interviewee describes it. These findings echo earlier studies in that there is “an assumed […] included (men) or excluded (women) position articulated in relation to the medium” (Thornham 2008: 132). What is at stake here is more broadly a gendered technological competence, which:
[H]as less to do with actual skills and more to do with construction of a gendered identity – that is, women lack technological competence to the extent that they seek to
By “Well “Everyone has a PlayStation or a Wii or an Xbox, some kind of console, and it is seen as … cool, what everybody has no matter how different they are, whereas PC games they have always had this … like the geek image or something. It's just how it is, and if you say you are a girl playing it, it's ‘What, why, why would you do that?’... you know”.
We see here how genre choices, the activity of gaming, the technology itself and the cultural heritage of gaming are all gendered and coded as always already masculine, having a “geek image”. All of these must be carefully negotiated if and when the women are to engage with them: especially in regard to what kind of gaming activities are admissible and sought after. Because the women I really agree with the socializing part because my boyfriend, he really didn’t care, he was just doing his quests […] and I was just standing talking to people for hours in-game […]. So I went over to his house to see what he was doing and I got really interested in it just by myself and I thought, hey, this may be a good way to sort of keep in touch a bit more, you know, because he had become a bit more distant, so I bought the game myself.
The women all rationalize their time spent gaming as legitimate due to the
In this final section of the article, I want to shift the focus from the discourses around gaming and instead focus on the various media-related practices that surround and intersect with gaming. In doing so, I aim to show how gaming expertise and gaming practices are deeply interwoven with the fabric of everyday life in such a way that the act of playing a computer game –
As with other technologies, integrating the PC into individuals’ and couples’ everyday lives involves a double-sided process of domestication, in which the technology is adapted to everyday life (Silverstone et al. 1991), at the same time as everyday life is adapting to technology (Aune 1996). Following this line of thought, I examine more closely how gaming as a practice by is no means limited to the individual's consumption of specific computer games, but also involves understanding how the practice of gaming is integrated into and related to other activities, other media, and other practices involving the computer, and how these activities and practices are socially organised.
Despite the differences between the interview participants, two ubiquitous tendencies emerged. First and foremost, the interviewees were very experienced gamers, playing
Twenty-one-year-old Line echoes this when she tells of her introduction:
Well, I used to think it was a shitty game. I had been living with Morten for quite some time and he sat out there and I sat in here in front of the TV. Sometimes I’d go out to him and look at his computer screen and I had
These quotes highlight the fact that the women started to play computer games not because of the games themselves, but in order to spend time with their children, a husband or a boyfriend. Despite the fact that games function fundamentally differently from other media, owing to the complex levels of interaction between player and game (what is normally termed “game play”), games are also social devices. Bird has argued that we need to study the role of media in our culture by focusing on how media outlets are embedded in everyday communicative and cultural practices (Bird 2003) and, in following her, I view gaming as a social practice that extends well beyond the actual moment of game play. As such, it is both inclusive and exclusive, and in order to be included, the women started playing the game, either with or alongside their partner, who in turn helps out with the difficulties the women encounter in relation to gaming. This is yet another instance of gaming capital in use: one person with gaming capital teaches another while at the same time maintaining a relationship. Here, playing the game and using the game console or the PC functions as a technology in the overall, socially organised practice of doing “parenthood”, as with Sharon, or the practice of doing “relationship”, as Lykke's and Line's introduction to gaming demonstrates.
If we shift our focus from the women's descriptions of gaming to the couples’ gaming practices, we find a number of similar coping strategies. In her chapter “Playing Along”, Malin Sveningsson explores how female “My parents have asked me why Thomas and I didn’t spend more time together, watching TV or something…” “But, it's the same thing!” “Yes, it is” “It “Well, apart from the fact that we can’t hold hands while gaming…”
As the women started to play together with their partners, the game itself became an activity they shared, something they did together. Despite the fact that playing a game and watching television require quite different skill sets, the couples came to understand the two different media uses as similar because of their social function. Here, mediated and non-mediated interactions intertwine as the couples engage in and perform two simultaneous, socially organised practices: gaming and relationships. Both their
In this article, I have explored gaming expertise as a socio-material relation through a practice-based approach. The first perspective highlights how expertise is a relational quality and how games and gaming are always already inherently and materially gendered as a
All the women quoted in this article constructed both the normative user, the technology and the computer game as gendered male through positions of exclusion. They articulated a feminine position of technological incompetence as a particular kind of gendered femininity, which seemed to actively exclude technology itself and any kind of digital gaming expertise. When addressing why they
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