Digital Materialities and Family Practices. The gendered, practical, aesthetical and technological domestication of play

Summary, in English

Digital gameplay is now firmly embedded in everyday practices in many Scandinavian homes. This paper deals with the constitution of such practices in families 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

• Author: Jessica Enevold
• Department/s: Division of Digital Cultures
• Publishing year: 2014
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association - ToDigra
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 2
• Full text: - 137 kB; Download statistics
• Links: http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/download/12/18
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Digital Games Research Association - DiGRA
• Topic: Cultural Studies
• 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
• Status: Published
• Project: Gaming Moms: Juggling Time, Play and Family Life
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 2328-9422