Domesticating Play, Designing Everyday Life: The Practice and Performance of Family, Gender and Gaming

Playing digital games is now a common everyday practice in many homes. This paper deals with the constitution of such practices by taking a closer look at the material objects essential to play and their role in the “design of everyday life” (Shove et al 2007). It uses ethnographic method and anthropological practice theory to attend to the domestic spaces of leisure and play, the home environments, in which the large part of today’s practices of playing digital games takes place. It focuses on the stagings of material, not virtual, artifacts of gaming: screens, consoles, hand-held-devices essential to play and their locations and movements around the home. It demonstrates how everyday practices, seemingly mundane scenographies and choreographies, practically, aesthetically and technologically determined, order everyday space-time and artifacts, domesticate play and condition performances of family, gender and gaming. In the process, a history of the domestication of play unfolds

Mama Ludens Goes All-In : Gaming Mothers' Fun Lead the Ludic Revolution

This paper investigates gaming mothers' playing practices, trying to identify their ideas of fun and playfulness. It is a work in progress, the third in a series of empirical studies performed within the framework of the project "Gaming Moms: Juggling Time, Play and Family Life" (Enevold & Hagström, Lund University) undertaken with the aim to revise the usual constructions of gamer identities and examine the contested status of gaming in everyday life. The first paper produced in this project was a critical survey of representations of mothers in popular cultural gaming discourses (Enevold & Hagström 2008) that showed a rather conservative picture of "Mom" in relation to gaming. The dominant image of the mother in this public discourse is far from general notions of fun—she is the police who controls or condemns the playing of others. The second effort (Enevold, Hagström & Aarseth 2008) was a pilot study presenting findings from a small number of interviews with gaming mothers that showed that their gameplay to a great extent involved gendered ideas of work and family roles, particularly time and place constraints. The emphasis lay very much on playing for the sake of relaxation while waiting for something else—for the pasta to cook, for the kids to come home, or in between dinner and putting the kids to bed. Going back to some of the interviews and including a number of new ones, this paper deals with that which was not explicitly or extensively discussed in those interviews, namely what these women think of fun and play. This is related to four themes of gendered sociality, representational exclusion and accessibility in terms of game content and time constraints of gaming - which is understood as a motor of fun – as represented in research, media and web material concerning mothers, fun and videogames. Based on all this material, I conclude that fun in most instances still means relaxation, having time to yourself, being mentally stimulated by a puzzle or a good story. I thus advocate ludic fun for all – do away with the gendered division of labor, play and gamer identity; redefine the concept of gamer once and for all; let gaming become mass culture and allow mothers all over the world to relax "playing for keeps"; bring on the ludic revolution

The Relationship Between Interparental Conflict, Family Attachment Style, and Young Adult Emotion Regulation

The purpose of the current study was to explore the relationship between interparental conflict, family attachment style, and young adult emotion regulation. Family attachment anxiety and avoidance (i.e., mother, father, and sibling) were expected to moderate the relationship between interparental conflict and young adult emotion regulation, such that better quality of mother, father, and sibling attachment anxiety and avoidance would indicate a weaker association between interparental conflict and difficulties in emotion regulation. There were 397 individuals from Illinois State University aged 18 to 22 who participated in the online survey. Three hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to determine if the six family attachment variables were moderators for interparental conflict and young adult emotion regulation. Only sibling attachment avoidance was found to be a moderator since it was the only construct to have a significant interaction with interparental conflict. Looking at the simple slopes, a higher level of sibling attachment avoidance was found to have a weaker association between interparental conflict and difficulties in emotion regulation. The results of the current study were unexpected and should be replicated before being considered valid. Limitations and future direction were also discussed

Game Love : a categorization model

A game ontology, that is, a categorization with the aim of making sense of games and gaming from a particular perspective, namely love

Motivations to become a corsair.

Masteroppgave for lektorutdanning i samfunnsfag - Nord universitet 202

My Momma Shoots Better Than You! : Who is the Female Gamer?

This paper is a component of a three-year empirical study of gaming moms undertaken with the aim to modulate the conventional constructions of gamer identities and examine the contested status of gaming in everyday life. It presents samples of mothers in gaming discourse – from TV, Music-video, forums, and ads. Mothers have been largely invisible in popular gaming discourse or formulaically portrayed as unsympathetic to/ policing the gaming habits of other family members. Now, gaming companies increasingly target women and families, female gamers exceed 40 % of players (US and Sweden), and console gaming is displacing TV-watching as the core living-room activity. The Boy-nerd-in-the-Bedroom is, at least statistically, being dispelled and complemented by the Girl-into-Gaming. Still, a tenacious nineteenth-century icon lingers: the Angel-in-the-House. Mothers today do more than bring Hot Pockets to gaming kids (South Park WoW-Episode) or serve as the implied inferior player populating taunts like “My Momma shoots better than you” (Q3A). Mothers game too. The paper uses feminist critical theory (de Lauretis) to illustrate the situation of the female gamer as oscillating between the fixed sign of “Woman” and the dynamic experiences of “women”. It acknowledges and elucidates both the power and consequences of representation and personal experience in meaning-making processes, to which the growing cultural discourse and practice of gaming belong

Introduction

This is the introduction to the anthology Game Love:Essays on Play and Affection. The first 10 pages were written by Jessica Enevold and the ensuing chapter presentations by Esther MacCallum-Stewart. The whole book was edited together by Enevold & MacCallum-Stewart based on an idea by Jessica Enevold. The Introduction explains the background of the anthology, including an introduction to the ontological model for analyzing game love in games, first drawn up by Jessica Enevold in 2008. It places the book within a context of computer games research, digital culture and HCI-research, making clear some of the connections and selections between previous research of games and emotions and affect and the human component, the player and other roles, of playing games