Abstract
This article outlines how gaming and video gameplay among Danish youth can be integral parts of everyday practices. The article is based on a mixed-methods study of video gameplay patterns among Danish children and young people aged 10–18 years. The study included a survey with a stratified random sample (N = 1560), follow-up in-depth interviews using purposive sampling from the survey respondents (N = 19) and focus group interviews with boys and girls (N = 2). We argue that pronounced differences in boys’ and girls’ gameplay patterns and preferences can be explained by the different ways in which gameplay is embedded into the social patterns of everyday life with family and friends. We identify two predominant gaming practices, one organised around competitive social play in teams and another around non-competitive solo play. These findings are discussed in the context of practice theory and existing work on gender and video games.
Introduction
This article seeks to explore and illustrate how gender differences with regard to video gameplay can be framed and interpreted in relation to the wider social and, to some extent, individual practices of which everyday life activities such as gameplay form a part. More specifically, we argue that the pronounced differences in boys’ and girls’ gameplay patterns and preferences can be explained by the ways in which gameplay is embedded into various practices in their everyday lives. Within this micro-sociological framework, video gameplay is seen as a more or less integrated part of larger scale practices, in which gaming activities become intertwined with instantiations of more general everyday activities, such as maintaining social relationships and taking a break between duties. Our argument unfolds as follows: First, we describe a range of everyday activities, many of which are related to various media. We then argue that these activities can be fruitfully seen as more or less integrated parts of larger scale meaningful media-related practices. Second, we argue that these practices can only be fully understood if we take into account gender’s role in structuring these practices. The result is an outline of a media practice theory that integrates a range of purposeful activities into socially situated, gendered gaming practices, which form a key part of young people’s everyday lives.
Everyday life, media practices and gaming
Within contemporary media studies, one of the more popular frameworks targeting media use in everyday contexts is media practice theory. It is common to introduce practice theory as somewhat heterogeneous (Reckwitz, 2002; Warde, 2005), and we do not propose a solution to some of the thorny philosophical issues surrounding this body of work (see Schatzki, 1996; Schatzki et al., 2001). Our aim is more pragmatic, in that, we see several aspects of this overall body of work that dovetails with our objective of understanding the place of computer gaming in young people’s everyday lives. We, thus, follow several of the general recommendations set forth in Couldry’s (2004) proposal for media practice theory and some of the subsequent work within media studies (e.g. Braüchler and Postill, 2010). First and foremost, we agree that media products and their usage should be regarded neither purely as texts nor as isolated from context. Media products and their usage can instead profitably be seen as embedded in everyday life. By adopting this viewpoint, of course, we are not arguing that all media use must be seen through this lens. We instead believe that investigations into everyday media use will benefit substantially from increased attention to the embedding of this media usage into the wider set of practices belonging to everyday life. It has always been the case that various media have been embedded in everyday life, but the recent proliferation of mobile and personal media has rendered this aspect more obvious to many observers.
Interest in everyday life and media obviously has a pre-history. Couldry (2004) emphasises studies of television in the UK, as exemplified by Buckingham, but one might also cite work by authors such as Morley and Silverstone (Morley, 1986; Morley and Silverstone, 1990), Lull (1980) and work within the uses and gratifications (U&G) tradition. Our most explicit allegiance in the present article is to the shared central motivation of both U&G and media practice theory, that is, an attempt to give better answers to the question, ‘What do people do with media?’ U&G has been criticised for various shortcomings in its endeavours to answer this question (see, for example, Blumler (1979) and Swanson (1979) for an early exchange and Jensen (2012) and Swanson (1992) for more recent assessments), and we will focus here primarily on a central problem, namely, that U&G may lead to an overly isolated view of media use. Practice theory can be leveraged to remedy this weakness: While U&G of media remain central, media use must be seen as integrated with the larger scale practices of the conduct of everyday life. We believe that a general media practice theory offers a particularly apt framework for combining and encompassing many of the aforementioned concerns. We, thus, identify at least seven interconnected points that are useful for studies of media in the context of everyday life:
Individual activities can and often should be seen as integrated parts of larger scale meaningful patterns of activities, that is, practices.
Practices, then, are ‘arrays of activities’ (Schatzki, 2001: 2) which collect these individual activities together into more meaningful structured patterns of behaviour spanning both time and space. These practices are both routinised and reflexive (Barnes, 2001; Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 1996).
Everyday practices should be seen both as belonging to an overall ‘field of practices’ and to the subset of practices that comprise everyday life (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 1996; Schatzki et al., 2001; Warde, 2005).
Many everyday practices involve media, and everyday practices increasingly involve media of various kinds, yet media are involved to varying degrees: A given medium may or may not be central to a given practice (Couldry, 2004).
As a consequence of the previous points, media practice theory shifts the perspective away from textual analysis towards analyses of situated activity, primarily because the content of media may be of minor importance to the activity and its place in a given practice (Couldry, 2004; Lull, 1980).
There are, nevertheless, some practices for which the medium (and potentially its content) remains absolutely central.
Media end up playing a less than peripheral role even for some practices that are not centrally organised around media.
We should also emphasise that, even though practice theory might be regarded as one version of ‘non-media centric media studies’ (Morley, 2009), our focus on video games here is not incidental. We believe that the proliferation of video game genres across both stationary and mobile, personalised platforms is reason enough to analyse them as potentially important elements of everyday practices. This potential centrality of gaming in everyday life means that the establishment of empirically driven connections between these two concepts may be central to understanding them both. We argue here, on empirical grounds, that gaming activities and distinct gaming practices are indeed central to the meaningful organisation of everyday life among substantial segments of the youth demographic. In order to understand the everyday lives and diverse practices of young people, we must, thus, pay closer attention to the various roles played by different video games, the differences between playing video games alone or together and the specific role of gender differences, the latter of which we will discuss briefly before moving on.
Gaming and gender
The original aim of the study presented in this article was to identify and discuss instantiations of ‘problem gaming’ as reflections of everyday problems and practices. Yet, the gender differences observed in the initial survey were so pronounced that we found it relevant to include gender as a key perspective in the follow-up interviews and analyses. These gender differences have been observed in a range of studies within the recent decade (Harvey, 2015; Medieråd, 2017; Quandt et al, 2013; Rasmussen and Due, 2010). These studies document how the relative share of women in the overall gaming population has increased significantly during the recent decade, yet, they also point out that considerable gender differences still prevail with regard to genre preferences and gameplay patterns (Crawford and Gosling, 2005; Harvey, 2015; Quandt et al, 2013). Crawford and Gosling (2005) found that female gamers from a UK student population preferred particular genres, predominantly played on mobile, personal platforms. Quandt et al. (2013) find similar patterns in Finland, Flanders, Germany and Singapore, and these observations are confirmed by reports documenting children’s and young peoples’ media habits in Denmark and Scandinavia (Medieråd, 2017; Rasmussen and Due, 2010). Moreover, even though they do play video games, women are less likely to self-identify as gamers (Fox and Tang, 2017; Harvey, 2015). Several explanations have been given for these differences, including differences in gameplay motivations across gender (Vermeulen and Van Looy, 2013) and ‘cycles of sexism and exclusion in video games’ (Kowert et al, 2017), which cover (among other things) the predominance of males in the games industry leading to specific types of games, how online gamer culture is systematically hostile to women and how the concrete contexts in which gameplay takes place preclude women in specific ways.
Regarding types of games, a long tradition of research has addressed the gendered content of video games. Cassell and Jenkins’ From Barbie to Mortal Combat (Cassell and Jenkins, 1998) addresses the ‘girls’ games movement’, and later studies have focused on the way gender is represented in games and game-related marketing (Fox and Tang, 2017; Williams et al, 2009), how games aimed at women imply specific ‘designed identities’ (Chess, 2017), but also how the relationship between representation, identity and identification might not be as straightforward as is sometimes being assumed (Shaw, 2015). Regarding online gamer culture, another branch of research has identified ‘toxic player cultures’ (Consalvo, 2012) and sexism in online game communities (Fox and Tang, 2017). From this perspective, women’s avoidance of specific types of game genres including online social gaming may be due to the sexism and misogyny currently dominating online player cultures with the case of #gamergate being one notorious example. Finally, an explanation for the observed gender differences can be found in the ‘physical contexts of play’ such as domestic spaces. Bryce et al. (2006) argue for the relevance of leisure constraints: Within the typical household, male members keep girls and women away from gaming technologies since these technologies are placed in what the authors refer to as ‘male spaces’. Included here are technologies such as game consoles, which typically belong in the living room, while mobile gaming, to extend this argument, may be more accessible to girls due to its individualised nature. Thornham (2008) makes a somewhat alternative argument, stating that gaming is a ‘normalised as well as normalising activity’ (p. 127). In her ethnographic study of gaming households, she demonstrates how gender is continuously performed and negotiated around gaming activities rather than given at the outset. In the households she studied, men tended to ‘perform competence’ when gaming, while women ‘performed incompetence’ even when they were obviously proficient at the game. Harvey (2015), from a similar ethnographic approach, studied households and the way parents regulated their children’s gameplay. She demonstrates how this involves a process of gendering tied to the roles taken by mothers and fathers, specific expectations of boys and girls and the explanations given when children do not act in accordance with such expectations.
Thornham and Harvey both base their studies on Butler (1990), where gender is defined in terms of performance: Gender is continuously produced and reproduced in the process of social interaction. Our approach is by no means in conflict with this framework; yet, our aim is to demonstrate how a practice theoretical perspective on gaming may provide additional context to claims of gendered activities. Like Thornham and Harvey, our theoretical and empirical focus is on the contexts of gameplay.
We argue that the use of various media technologies, including games, is integral to wider practices of everyday life, and we show how differences in boys’ and girls’ video gameplay may be interpreted as different ways of integrating media technologies, including games, into such practices. Finally, we discuss the degree to which these differences in practices are due to leisure constraints, negotiation of gender or the ways in which different media technologies seem to support or obstruct the specific ways in which boys and girls, respectively, organise their activities.
Having outlined our theoretical framework, we now describe the mixed-methods study that forms the basis for the empirically grounded part of our argument.
The study
Our combined data sets derive from a mixed-methods study conducted in Denmark between 2014 and 2016. The study was initiated with a survey using a stratified random sample (N = 1560) of 10- to 18-year-old Danes. The survey focused on their gameplay patterns in relation to other aspects of everyday life. The initial result of analysis of these data was a typology of gameplay patterns based on the ‘social configuration of gameplay’, as presented below. In this phase of the study, we became aware of some quite distinct gender differences with regard to gameplay patterns and preferred game titles. Because of this, gender and the identified gameplay patterns were key criteria in the purposive sampling of participants for a round of follow-up semi-structured interviews (N = 19), which were primarily conducted with 14- to 16-year-olds. This age group was sampled for three interconnected reasons. First, this age group exhibited the most salient indications of problematised gaming behaviour in our survey, and problem gaming was the original motivation for the study. Second, and more relevant for present concerns, we saw indications that this period was important with regard to overall differences in the gaming and communication patterns, as detailed below. Third, and equally relevant, we had a hypothesis that this age group would be more reflexive in their exercise of agency, since they would be transitioning from primary school to secondary school. As the main aim of the study was the problematisation of gaming in everyday contexts rather than negotiation of gender, our survey questions and follow-up interviews were less focused on such issues as exploring and challenging dichotomous notions of gender and more focused on questions relating to the way gaming was integrated into the broader contexts of everyday life. This led us to expand the typology to include more aspects of everyday purposes as well as a deeper understanding of the gendered nature of these purposes. To further expand the latter and probe for additional theoretical dimensions related to gender, we conducted a set of focus group interviews (N = 2) with boys and girls, respectively (same age group as the semi-structured interviews, that is, aged 14–16 years). As described above, the study as a whole has aimed to describe video gameplay in everyday life as a matter of media-related practices. For this reason, survey data analysis has focused on patterns in data as expressions of everyday practices rather than, say, as universal laws, and the follow-up interviews and focus group interviews have aimed to uncover ‘emic’ perspectives on such practices as experienced by social actors (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011). The study does not include participant observation, which would be an obvious means of studying ‘practices in practice’. It is, however, difficult to gain such access to the private contexts of video gameplay. We have instead asked respondents to photo-document their gameplay activities during the week leading up to the interview (Allen, 2011; Sheridan et al., 2011; Van House, 2011) and have made this a key point of reference during the interviews.
In the following, we first demonstrate how girls and boys differ more with regard to video game consumption than they seem to do with regard to other types of media consumption. After this, we consider the different gameplay patterns suggested by these differences, with special focus on solo gaming, competitive gaming and game title preferences. We discuss how this points towards two distinct overall gameplay practices in the context of everyday life, that is, ‘Gameplay as focused social interaction’ and ‘Gameplay as individual pastime’. We then contextualise these with findings from the qualitative components of the study to elaborate upon the nature of these practices and video game-playing’s role as an integrated component of them.
Gameplay compared with other types of media use
Starting with descriptive statistics related to video game usage, our findings clearly support the general notion that games are no more just ‘a boys’ thing’ (Thornham, 2008), as shown in Table 1. Around four fifths of the girls (dependent on age) play video games, and even though the boys play even more, it can be determined that video games represent a major cultural phenomenon among both boys and girls.
Gameplay distribution across age and gender.
These patterns are similar to those found elsewhere in studies of gaming among school children; Bryce et al. (2006) quote studies that give percentages ranging from 90% boys and 75% girls to 97% boys and 88% girls.
When we take a more detailed look at gameplay patterns, however, important differences become visible. In the survey, we asked all respondents three questions related to media use, namely, whether they (1) played video games, (2) watched television and (3) performed a range of other activities the previous day. In case the answer was yes, we asked whether they did this in the morning, throughout the day, in the afternoon, in the evening and/or in the night. We have visualised the answers in Figures 1 to 3. While there seems to be no real gender difference with regard to television viewing and mediated communication in general, there is a considerable difference between boys and girls when it comes to gameplay patterns. Indeed, throughout the survey, gameplay is the one key variable that sets boys and girls most distinctly apart. Note also that while the gameplay activity for boys in the afternoon and evening is clearly higher than for girls, mediated communication activities for the genders are more or less on par for this period. In other words, there are indications that boys communicate while playing games almost as much as girls communicate while exhibiting a lower level of activity when it comes to playing video games.
Boys’ and girls’ video gameplay activity throughout the previous day.
Boys’ and girls’ television viewing throughout the previous day.
Boys’ and girls’ mediated communication throughout the previous day.
Gameplay patterns and their distribution across gender
In addition to the distribution of the gameplay activity throughout the previous day, we also asked a set of general questions regarding the respondents’ gameplay patterns and preferences. These included questions that tapped into respondents’ preferences for competitive, cooperative, and solo gameplay; online and offline gameplay; gameplay with close friends or acquaintances; and favourite game titles.
For this set of questions, the variables concerning different ‘social configurations’ of the gameplay activity with regard to competitive and cooperative gameplay turned out to possess the greatest explanatory value. As indicated by Table 2, three large and one somewhat smaller group emerge when the relative preferences for cooperative and competitive gameplay are combined. We have named these groups very competitive team players and moderately competitive team players, on the one hand, and moderately competitive solo players and non-competitive solo players, on the other.
Gameplay patterns in terms of cooperative and competitive play.
Once we break down these groups by gender, we can see that gender distribution is a key aspect of these gameplay patterns and that the aggregated statistics obscure some clear tendencies with regard to gender preferences. As evident from Figure 4, more than 40% of the male players belong to the group of very competitive team players, relative to 2% of the female players. In comparison, more than 40% of the female players belong to the group of non-competitive solo players, relative to approximately 9% of the male players. If we collapse the two team player groups and contrast the resultant category with a similar collapse of the solo player categories, the gender distribution is 70% male team players versus 20% female team players. So, the dominant mode of play for boys is not only quite pronounced within the group of boys, but it is also emphatically different from the dominant mode for girls.
Video gameplay pattern distribution across genders.
We also included a question in which respondents were asked about their favourite game (only one title allowed as answer). Table 3 lists the 10 most popular games in Denmark according to our sample and the corresponding gameplay patterns for the respondents in question. Some very pronounced preferences are evident from this table as well.
Top 10 favourite titles distributed by gameplay patterns.
FIFA: Fédération Internationale de Football Association.
We would here like to draw the reader’s attention to the tendency for certain games to be played almost exclusively by very competitive team players. This tendency is clearest for what are arguably the current market leaders within competitive online gaming, that is, League of Legends and Counter-Strike. Note also the distribution for what arguably used to be the champion of online gaming, that is, World of Warcraft (which is, at this point, played almost exclusively by competitive team players as well) and the quite pronounced opposite patterns for titles such as The Sims, Candy Crush Saga and Hay Day.
The identified gameplay patterns relate to other variables in the survey in ways that indicate that they are integrated into the social and communicative practices of everyday life in quite distinct ways. As mentioned above, the distribution of media use and gameplay throughout the day indicates that some of the boys communicate while playing. Figure 5 visualises communication patterns coupled to the identified gameplay patterns, and it shows that very competitive team players are the most communicative among the game-playing groups, indicating that competitive gameplay is integral to social and communicative activity in this group.
Mediated communication on the previous day.
We can explore this further by bringing in a question of whether they had lost or gained any friendships through their gameplay activities. Figure 6 shows the combination of this question with the player typologies, and it shows a pronounced association between competitive team playing and making friends. This runs counter to public, dystopian notions of gaming being an antisocial activity, but the reader should bear in mind that the group of very competitive team players is comprised almost exclusively of boys (see Figure 4).
Respondents who have gained new friendships through their video gameplay activity.
Altogether, the patterns observed in the survey data indicate two different overall gameplay practices embedded in everyday life. Computer gameplay can be a type of focused interaction, an activity shared with friends online or in the same physical space. In these cases, it is a highly social endeavour that not only is embedded in the fabric of social life but also forms a key part of the actual patterns of sociality: This practice integrates social interaction with gaming to such a degree as to render them mutually constituted. In contrast, computer gameplay can be seen as an individual pastime, something undertaken between activities and social interaction, as something predominantly undertaken alone. In these cases, social interaction forms the necessary context for gaming, but the gaming activity itself is, to some extent, defined by its tendency towards minimisation of social interactions. Furthermore, these two practices seem to be highly gendered so that video games are, to a larger degree, a social endeavour among boys and an individual endeavour among girls. In other words, boys and girls seem to integrate gaming into very different types of practices.
Gameplay as everyday activity in the lives of boys and girls
In our follow-up and focus group interviews, we set out to challenge and expand our survey findings. Due to the seemingly strong relationship between gender and gameplay patterns in the survey, we specifically aimed to sample male and female competitive team players and non-competitive solo players. However, it was immensely difficult to locate and recruit girls who reported engaging in competitive team play, so we only managed to include one of those in the follow-up interviews (see Table 4 below for composition of interviewee sample). Given this distribution, the findings below relate predominantly to the three groups of comparatively larger size.
Overview of gender and gameplay patterns for interviewees.
The interviews aimed at mapping participants’ everyday life situations, including family, friendships and situation at school, as well as to understand the role of gameplay in this more general order of everyday life. This allowed us to expand and contextualise the gameplay patterns identified in the survey data analysis. While the interviews largely confirmed that video gameplay could be interpreted in accordance with the wider themes of social interaction and individual pastime, the interviews allowed us to describe in more detail how such gameplay patterns fit into the individual life situations of the young people in question.
For instance, video gameplay as a form of social interaction in some situations represented a key activity shared with one or a few friends in everyday life. In these situations, a shared interest in particular game titles or a shared ‘history of gaming’ was a key feature of strong ties in everyday life: I play to have fun, I don’t play to compete. It’s just that it’s more fun when I’m with my friends and it’s really cosy to sit and play and skype and it was actually this way I met [a close friend]. (Boy, 14)
In other situations, gaming as social interaction served the purpose of staying in touch with old classmates when moving to a new educational setting, or in contrast, as a means of ‘gaining ground’ in a new educational setting:
When did you start playing [League of Legends]?
Boy (16 years): I just started studying at [a business college] and then there was someone who talked about it, so we are myself and two guys from my class who play now and then.
Accordingly, video gameplay can be a distinct resource in establishing and maintaining friendships, where the specific constellation of weak or strong ties will depend on the context. In a similar manner, the rather general label of ‘individual pastime’ turned out to cover a range of everyday purposes. In some cases, video gameplay as individual pastime would be a way of taking a timeout and relieving pressure in an otherwise socially demanding everyday life. In other cases, few participants used individual gameplay as a way of managing loneliness in an everyday life marked by solitude and lack of social interaction. Video gameplay as individual pastime can, thus, be seen as a way of handling both ‘too much pressure’ and ‘too much time alone’ in the everyday contexts of the young people in question:
I play a lot on the bus because it’s really boring with half an hour on the bus every morning.
So you’re not sitting with anyone on the bus?
No, it varies, because it’s 7 in the morning so …
How about your neighbour?
She gets a ride. But I’m not welcome to join, I’ve been told.
However, the follow-up interviews also indicated some uses and activities that were insufficiently covered by our distinction between social interaction and individual pastime. Most importantly, a few cases pointed towards video games as a form of hobby and collecting that situated the participants within a larger, geographically distributed community of passionate interest. While this gameplay pattern was also highly social, it differed from the other ‘social gamers’ by having gaming as a primary point of identification for the individual. Many participants engaging in competitive team play reported that gaming could be one among many possible ways in which they would spend time with friends and acquaintances. In contrast, this small subset of passionate gamers would invest more of their identity and, indeed, large sums of money in the games as hobbies and collecting. In addition, the social group with which they shared this activity would go well beyond friends and family in the nearest social surroundings. One respondent, for instance, seemed to have built his primary identity around the particular idio-culture of Japanese console gaming, and he clearly treated games and related artefacts as collectibles. His emotional attachment to both the material and representational aspects of this culture was visible both in the extensive collection of games and consoles on display in his room and in his responses during the interview.
Nintendo collection owned by boy, 14.
Accordingly, even though the two types of purposes definitely overlap, we found it useful to distinguish between social video gameplay and the more passionate gaming as hobby and collecting.
The highly gendered nature of gaming and its various purposes stood out in the qualitative interviews as well. Indeed, it turned out to be very difficult to locate and recruit female competitive team players for the follow-up interviews, and this gendered gaming pattern tended to repeat throughout the interviews. For the young male participants, video gameplay was an obvious way of staying connected with friends and classmates, while the girls used the games as a way of taking a timeout on their own and would connect to their peers in other ways than through games. The few female competitive team players we managed to include either played with a boyfriend or connected to social circles beyond their nearest social surroundings, as described in the section above. This observation is supported by survey data showing that female competitive team players are more likely to play with people they only know online relative to male competitive team players (see Figure 7).
Typical player groups of male and female competitive team players.
Accordingly, the gendered nature of competition seems to be one key explanation for the gender differences observed in the domain. In the next section, we elaborate upon this point.
Can gendered practices of friendship explain differences in video gameplay?
The findings presented so far indicate that video gameplay can be integral to different practices in the lives of young girls and young boys. Video gameplay seems to be an important resource in the establishment and maintenance of social relations among the boys, whereas gaming primarily serves the purpose of individual pastime among the girls. Those girls who have an interest in playing competitive video games need to move beyond their nearest social surroundings. One obvious way of interpreting the gender differences in the data would be to assume that boys and girls practice their friendships in different manners.
In two follow-up focus group interviews, we decided to explore this assumption a bit further by moving the discussion to the group level. We sampled two groups of five boys and nine girls in the age range of 14–16 years, who knew one another from school, in order to discuss games with them. The key themes in the focus group discussions were the types of games being played and the types of gameplay activities to which these gave rise. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these focus group interviews challenged an overly dichotomous view of boys, girls and competition, and introduced some alternative perspectives to the discussion: On the one hand, the video game preferences of the young people in question did reflect the gender patterns observed in the survey data. On the other hand, the sort of gameplay practices to which these video games gave rise did not fall neatly into the distinction between competitive team play and non-competitive solo play.
The young people often discussed the notion of competition in a highly gendered manner. The girls explicitly defined competition as something boys were into, while they would play games in different ways: Girl 1: I think Battle Run is for fun. It’s a pastime but also a kind of competition. Girl 2: The boys compete in that a lot.
However, when digging deeper into the reported types of video gameplay activities, it turned out that less obvious and more subtle types of competition were present in girls’ video gameplay as well. They would just use other types of game titles for this purpose, and the competitions were not necessarily set up in one-on-one or five-on-five game matches as is often the case in conventional competitive video games:
Is Hay Day also a competitive game?
Well, it’s sort of cosy because you have your own farm, but it can also be a competition because there are different levels, so you can progress. But you can help each other too.
Moreover, it was possible to detect a range of strategies across the girls’ and the boys’ focus groups with regard to competition among friends, family and strangers. This included a distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ competition and an assignment of different types of competition to different types of contexts; this distinction between hard and soft competition arose in both groups. In the interviews, we asked participants to sort different video game titles into two different piles, one that was named ‘competition’ and one that was named ‘pastime’. In both cases, participants indicated that competition can mean many things and that the same game title could give rise to ‘hard’ competition and to more ‘relaxed’ competition, depending on the context:
So none of you will ‘chill’ during a game of Counter-Strike?
Well, I do.
How do you do that?
If we have a café team, and there’s 10 minutes left, then we go to Counter-Strike and play.
Interestingly, hard competition seemed to represent a challenge among boys and girls alike, meaning that the negative feelings this might entail would have to be balanced in some manner. One way of doing this would be to assign different types of competition to different contexts and relationships. For instance, boys and girls alike would prefer to practice hard competition against strangers on the Internet and soft competition against friends in everyday contexts: These days I play Minecraft on a server where you play against other people from all around the world, and then you have to communicate in English. Then it becomes sort of a challenge, that you have to communicate in another language, and then there’s more competition about Minecraft. Then it’s not just a pastime. When I’m just playing with one of my friends in a normal world, it’s not a competition. Then it’s more a pastime. So it depends on how many people I’m playing with and who they are. (Girl from focus group interview) I have this group of friends. We’re 13 altogether. And it’s not very often that we’re all online at the same time, but most of the time we have a Skype conversation that we can join when we feel like it, and then sometimes we sit in the same conversation even though we’re playing different games … (Boy from focus group interview)
The boys would, thus, distinguish between ranked and relaxed games in online competitive team play, the former involving teams of friends against strangers and the latter involving a broader and more flexible range of constellations. In comparison, the girls would distinguish between playing with friends, siblings, mothers or fathers with regard to the type of competition this would entail:
I think, you can be more of a ‘tomboy’ with your dad, like ‘Heeey, seee I killed you’ [pronounced in a deep voice] and while playing Battle Run, like ‘Ha ha, I outpaced you’.
What happens if you do this with your mum?
She might become a little insulted, like ‘Well, now!’ [pronounced in a pointed voice].
While this excerpt reflects a number of gender norms in relation to gaming, it is also obvious that these norms are set up as possible positions between which one can choose. One may choose to engage in soft competition with close friends or one’s mother, or one may choose to join one’s father and his friends to take part in ‘louder’ competition. Accordingly, it would be overly simplistic to state that girls do not compete with their friends. It instead seems that boys and girls manage the balance between competition and close relationships in different ways and that different types of video game titles seem to offer different affordances for doing so. We will address this in greater detail in the discussion below.
Discussion and conclusion: video gameplay as a reflection of gendered practices
At this point, we wish to briefly summarise some strengths and weaknesses of a practice approach. This perspective promises, among other things, the integration of various scattered activities into meaningful larger scale practices. We believe that this is indeed a virtue of the framework, and it has allowed us to track the role of mediated communication, game playing and various other game-related activities and their places within larger scale practices. We identified two predominant gaming-related practices and labelled them competitive social gaming and gaming as individual pastime. These two practices form, as it were, the outer poles of a continuum in which gaming can be highly competitive and highly social at one end and almost devoid of social interaction and competition at the other end.
Described in this manner, gameplay is inscribed into different types of everyday practices involving different temporal and spatial logics and social obligations. We, thus, see the outline of a (perhaps familiar) pattern in which boys use gaming to gear into a social domain of cooperative team play where social connections with male peers are established and maintained through competitive gaming practices, often with great intensity. In contrast, most girls seem to use gaming to get away from the otherwise intensely social lives they lead both face to face and on social media. Gaming is more often than not a solitary activity, is seldom competitive and is often undertaken on personal mobile units. Games for these girls are primarily means of ‘zoning out’, of dislodging themselves from the pressures of everyday sociality. Such a neat dichotomy may, however, be a potential weakness of a practice approach. By stabilising gaming activities into a limited set of distinct practices, one runs the risk of missing similarities and differences inside and across the organisation of these practices. Boys also wish to relax with games and girls also compete: We have, thus, found expressions of a common need across genders for balancing competition and sociality. These two needs can become orthogonal, with too much competition leading to toxic sociality through adversarial relationships, blame for poor skills and so on. Gaming practices are, thus, flexible arrangements in which individual actors exercise reflexive agency (Archer, 2003) and constantly arrange and re-arrange themselves and their gaming activities in order to achieve a balance of relaxation, excitement and sociality in their everyday lives. If one posits a limited number of practices, one must also be willing to open up these practices and acknowledge the nuances within the overall patterns.
Returning to potential strengths of a practice approach, it allows for the flexible integration of media-related activities into wider integrative practices in the sense described by Schatzki (1996), where the place of video games as well as the cohesiveness of the practice may differ across situations. Games are sometimes brought into existing social gatherings as resources, while, at other times, activities are structured around games. Both of these integrative moves are present in both of the predominant practices, but they are present to different extents: In competitive social gaming, the activity is typically structured around particular games, and the opposite is true for the individual pastimes, a finding similar to Toft-Nielsen and Krogager’s (2015). In both cases, the specific game title may not be particularly important; what matters is the possibility for the desired arrangement of the social and the placement of the individual therein.
With regard to questions of media centrality and internal coherence, we find it another virtue of the practice approach that it allows identification of distinct and particularly meaningful gaming practices. We have offered one example of one informant whose gaming practice was highly focused on particular aspects of particular games. The organisation of the practice was very coherent, specific video games played an indispensable role and the practice formed what appeared to be an essential component of his personal identity.
A dilemma related to practice approaches should also be mentioned: It is not always obvious whether an activity is central to a practice, and it is not obvious where one practice ends and another begins. This issue has been reported by other empirically inclined researchers (see the contributions in Braüchler and Postill, 2010), and it has been present for us throughout our work. We have opted for a two-pronged approach and presented two predominant and widespread practices as well as a single highly distinct practice together with an overview of some of the cross cutting and diverse situated concerns that young people may have. We do not believe that a practice approach necessitates that every situated action be integrated analytically into researcher-constructed coherent practices: We see clear indicators of some practices being highly organised and cohesive while others can be much more loosely organised.
While an analysis of boys’ and girls’ gameplay patterns as practices allows us to explore the social contexts in which gameplay takes place, it does not entirely explain why gender differences are so pronounced with regard to video gameplay relative to other types of media use. That is, if the gender differences observed in gameplay can be attributed to more general gendered practices in everyday life, why is it that these practices do not frame other types of media use to the same degree? In our introduction, we sketched a few possible explanations for this, including ‘leisure constraints’ (Bryce et al., 2006), video gameplay as the performance of gender (Thornham, 2008) and the role of parents in this gendering process (Harvey, 2015). The notion of ‘leisure constraints’ covers the idea that the males of the households control the gaming spaces. This line of argumentation has a long history in media studies (see Lull, 1980). However, the large-scale diffusion of personal media platforms has rendered generalisations across contexts problematic, and this explanatory framework is only partly supported by our data. The participants in the study do seem to discuss platforms in gendered ways. Most notably, the PlayStation is on several occasions mentioned in relation to fathers and brothers. Other data, however, go against this assumption. For instance, the absolutely most gender skewed of the top 10 favourite games was The Sims. This game was mentioned as the favourite game only by girls, whereas League of Legends had a gender distribution of 95% boys. Both of these games are typically played on PC platforms. Thus, access to platforms seems to have limited explanatory value.
The idea that video gameplay is a context for the performance of gender finds more support in our data. The ways in which participants discuss gender in relation to video gameplay, especially the ways in which girls in the focus group seem to switch between ‘male’ and ‘female’ modes of competition, support the idea that gaming is a key context in which gendered practices are negotiated and reproduced. Similarly, the importance of parent’s attitudes and expectations towards boys and girls can be observed in our data. However, as our analysis also suggests, it is important to link these performances to the wider contexts of gendered practices in everyday life. That is, boys and girls do not play games with the explicit aim of performing or negotiating gender, but they do seem to socialise around games in ways that reflect and define ‘boyish’ and ‘girlish’ ways of socialising.
One final perspective could be added. As mentioned above, gender differences in preferred video game titles are quite pronounced. Sims, a favourite among the girls, is primarily a non-competitive solo game while League of Legends is a key title in online competitive team play, and this seems to support the widely held notion that girls do not compete. However, our focus groups suggest that girls do engage in competition within and beyond video games, but they do so in ways that are not covered by conventional notions of competitive team play. Taken as a whole, this study suggests that the pronounced gender differences may be due to leading video game titles in the field of competitive team play failing to cater to the specific ways in which girls seem to negotiate competition and friendships. From this perspective, reasons for pronounced gender differences can be found in the affordances of competitive video game titles and the degrees to which they support different patterns of competition and socialisation. Further research can profitably explore the manifold interconnections between age, gender, gaming, media use, competitive and non-competitive sociality and the various practices involved.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
All semi-structured interviews were conducted by Anne Brus. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was funded by The Independent Research Fund Denmark.