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

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Author

Summary, in English

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.

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Publication/Series

Digra

Volume

10

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

Digital Games Research Association - DiGRA

Topic

  • Ethnology
  • Human Aspects of ICT
  • Gender Studies
  • Computer and Information Science

Keywords

  • Play
  • gender
  • family
  • game-time
  • game-space
  • performance
  • practice theory
  • culture
  • ethnography
  • anthropology
  • everyday life
  • choreography
  • scenography
  • staging-play
  • material culture
  • ludotopia
  • mobility
  • domestic
  • design of everyday life
  • history-of-play.
  • digital culture

Status

Published

Project

  • Games and Play - For Better, For worse
  • Program K.

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2342-9666