Gaming Lifeworlds: Videogames in Culture

Abstract

This thesis examines gaming lifeworlds and seeks interventions into the hegemony of gaming culture tied to a persistent imaginary of ‘Gamers’ as young white heterosexual males. Despite attempts to cultivate diversity, most approaches to improving representation in videogames do not demand significant structural or environmental change, and thus generally continue to foster precarity. In thinking about precarity, I establish the concept of ‘(not)coping’ to challenge the assumed dichotomy by which every instance of ‘not coping’ designates a failure ‘to cope’. Rather than viewing ‘coping’ and ‘not coping’ as positive and negative binaries, I write ‘(not)coping’ to highlight the liminal zone in between these affective states. (Not)coping is thus used to further describe the transformative affective spaces necessary for the refusal to cope within and against hegemony. I use qualitative mixed methods, combining semi-structured interviews, ethnographic participant observation, and discourse analysis to examine everyday struggles and how people can become affectively (re)orientated towards and away from certain videogame assemblages – assemblages of objects, communities, and practices. My findings are presented as three main chapters, which investigate videogames in relationship conflicts, videogames in drunk spaces, and videogames in self-care discourses. In the field of game studies, methods of investigation are frequently configured around studying play, players, or the creation of play. However, this focus can ignore non-players, non-play relationship dynamics, and non-play-centric spaces that themselves also significantly shape videogame and play assemblages. Since the study of gaming lifeworlds crucially apprehends videogame assemblages as embedded in materiality, rather than separate from everyday life, I hope to demonstrate its use as a generative framework and model for feminist games, media, internet, cultural researchers to study videogames in culture.