“It's A Boy Thing”

Abstract

The recent proliferation of videogame theory has opened up a body of work concerned with legitimating the videogame as a viable cultural text. However, there is still a significant gap in research around addressing the lived cultures or cultural practices of gaming as an embedded domestic leisure activity. Furthermore, research into the “cultural practices” of videogames reveals that predications to play, perceptions about, and actual play are highly gendered in ways that reveal gaming as a normalised and normalising technology. This article is the result of nearly four years ethnographic research, during which I interviewed and recorded gamers and gameplay. Six out of the eleven participatory households are represented here. The scope of the research is also expanded through the questionnaire of, at the time of writing, 118 respondents. Included in this demographic are all-female and all-male households, mixed gender, sexuality, and ethnicity and diverse geographical intake from Northern Ireland to southern England. Throughout my research and this article, I argue the political and social necessity of including gamers into research on gaming, in order to better understand the significance of gaming and gaming discourses on our social and political lives.