“That was so mean :D” – Playful virtual violence and the pleasure of transgressing intersecting emotional spaces

Abstract

This paper explores how virtual violence in computer games is used to enact the pleasure of transgression. It draws on theories of violence, virtuality, play, and space, combining them with an ethnographic perspective on pleasure as enacted emotional experience. I will analyze communicative emotional practices, observed in gaming videos on YouTube as well as during participant observation in online multiplayer games and in qualitative interviews, to come to a better understanding of the emotional experiences enacted when players transgress feeling rules within intersecting emotional spaces between games and everyday life.