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- Enevold, Jessica
(författare)
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Mama Ludens Goes All-In : Gaming Mothers' Fun Lead the Ludic Revolution
- 2009
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Ingår i: ; , s. 1-20
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper investigates gaming mothers' playing practices, trying to identify their ideas of fun and playfulness. It is a work in progress, the third in a series of empirical studies performed within the framework of the project "Gaming Moms: Juggling Time, Play and Family Life" (Enevold & Hagström, Lund University) undertaken with the aim to revise the usual constructions of gamer identities and examine the contested status of gaming in everyday life. The first paper produced in this project was a critical survey of representations of mothers in popular cultural gaming discourses (Enevold & Hagström 2008) that showed a rather conservative picture of "Mom" in relation to gaming. The dominant image of the mother in this public discourse is far from general notions of fun—she is the police who controls or condemns the playing of others. The second effort (Enevold, Hagström & Aarseth 2008) was a pilot study presenting findings from a small number of interviews with gaming mothers that showed that their gameplay to a great extent involved gendered ideas of work and family roles, particularly time and place constraints. The emphasis lay very much on playing for the sake of relaxation while waiting for something else—for the pasta to cook, for the kids to come home, or in between dinner and putting the kids to bed. Going back to some of the interviews and including a number of new ones, this paper deals with that which was not explicitly or extensively discussed in those interviews, namely what these women think of fun and play. This is related to four themes of gendered sociality, representational exclusion and accessibility in terms of game content and time constraints of gaming - which is understood as a motor of fun – as represented in research, media and web material concerning mothers, fun and videogames. Based on all this material, I conclude that fun in most instances still means relaxation, having time to yourself, being mentally stimulated by a puzzle or a good story. I thus advocate ludic fun for all – do away with the gendered division of labor, play and gamer identity; redefine the concept of gamer once and for all; let gaming become mass culture and allow mothers all over the world to relax "playing for keeps"; bring on the ludic revolution!
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- Enevold, Jessica, et al.
(författare)
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Frustrated Mom Kills Dragon: Motherhood, Emotions and Computer Games
- 2009
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Today an increasingly large and diverse audience spends more and more time and money on computer games; the actual player can now be anyone. Gameplay, whether it is raiding online in World of Warcraft, an evening of Guitar Hero in the living room with friends, or a quick round of Sudoku Master on the Nintendo DS while commuting home from work, has become part of the everyday life of millions of people regardless of age, sex and background. Play and everyday life combine in new exciting ways with new patterns of communication, interaction and behaviours emerging as a result.This paper focuses on emotions emerging in relation to gaming— joy, frustration, anger, happiness, boredom, pleasure, satisfaction, annoyance — and is based on interviews with mothers who play, questionnaires and studies of media discourses. On the one hand, there are the emotions connected to the game as such, for example frustration over getting killed or not being able to figure out how to proceed. These can be sorted under the term "ludic emotions" and may encompass the passion felt for a game, "ludic affection" (Enevold 2008). On the other hand there are emotions connected to the gaming situation per se, such as the pleasure experienced playing together with friends, having a good time, or the irritation felt when the telephone rings in the middle of a game. Well aware of interactionism, we here prefer to call these "situational emotions" since we can register these as outcomes of external stimuli, but with difficulty measure players personality traits, internal feelings etc. The paper exemplifies how emotions shared among players in some situations become problematic. Emotions are not just ludic, or situational but also "situated". The person expressing and/or experiencing them is never solely a player but a person located in a historical, cultural and gendered context. The players specifically focused here are mothers— traditionally culturally, socially and symbolically heavily situated figures. Although all players may experience all kinds of emotions, some seem to be more acceptable for some players than others. In popular gaming discourses the mother is often represented as the guardian, who tries to regulate and control the gaming of the children, or as the supportive parent, who serves pizza or drives them to LAN-parties (Enevold & Hagström 2008). That is, she is not even conceived as a player. When playing then, do mothers experience feelings they should not have, or at least not express, given the fact that motherhood implies control, responsibility and liability? In our material, an often repeated feeling is "frustration". What does it mean when a frustrated mother kills a pixelated dragon? This paper reports how that frustration is both ludic and situational, how mothers cope and how their strategies and practices indicate their specific status as players situated in highly normative gendered roles and time- and place dependent contexts.
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- Enevold, Jessica
(författare)
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Mina cykelnycklar
- 2008
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Ingår i: ETN: HOJ. - 1653-1361. ; :6, s. 8-12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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| 7. |
- Enevold, Jessica, et al.
(författare)
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Mothers, Play and Everyday Life: Ethnology Meets Game Studies
- 2009
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Ingår i: Ethnologia Scandinavica. - 0348-9698. ; 39, s. 27-41
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article should serve as an introduction to a relatively new topic in ethnological studies requiring very specific methods as it involves both offline and online research as well as material objects and immaterial practices. How do we embark on an interdisciplinary venture such as this, and be sure to produce qualitative research of high standard? How should gaming mothers best be studied? In what follows we try to answer that question. We also assume that not all of our readers are extensively familiar with games and game culture or have engaged with computer games first-hand or as scientific object of study. We thus begin with a short assessment of its current status as a growing genre, whose image is changing as gamers and game culture become increasingly diversified. We also briefly situate games as an academic subject and outline some of the central concepts focused in the fieldii called Game Studies. Furthermore, understanding the ideological underpinnings of play is vital to understanding the contexts in which games and gaming exist because they constitute some of the fundamental conditions of games research. To explain this, we relate the ambiguous status of game/play to the usage of the term ―the magic circle‖ and of historically ingrained rhetorics [sic] of play. In our survey of the theoretical land, we notice an increasing attention among games researchers to players in addition to the games themselves. We thus assert that ethnologists have a particular methodological edge and a role to fulfill as games research more and more means studying games in relation to gamers, society and political economy and not only the game itself. As part of a huge industry that is a significant economic driver, games take center stage on a global sociocultural and capital market. Educational programs and cross-disciplinary efforts centered on games and gaming grow steadily. Introducing our research project ―Gaming Moms‖ we explain why it is interesting – and now possible and highly apposite – to study gaming from the perspective of culture, the family and the everyday. We give our rendition of how to best study a particular category of players such as mothers and why a marriage between ethnology and the interdisciplinary field of Game Studies is necessary and useful. In doing so, we give specific examples from our ongoing project thus presenting a selection of the various methods we apply in our research. Our examples are chosen around two themes – gaming and time management and representations of mothers in the context of gaming. We conclude with a brief discussion of our findings, having thus proposed an answer to our methodological question, and outline some missing perspectives and future challenges.
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- Enevold, Jessica, et al.
(författare)
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My Momma Shoots Better Than You! : Who is the Female Gamer?
- 2008
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Ingår i: Proceedings - the [player] conference. - 9788779491823 ; , s. 144-167
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper is a component of a three-year empirical study of gaming moms undertaken with the aim to modulate the conventional constructions of gamer identities and examine the contested status of gaming in everyday life. It presents samples of mothers in gaming discourse – from TV, Music-video, forums, and ads. Mothers have been largely invisible in popular gaming discourse or formulaically portrayed as unsympathetic to/ policing the gaming habits of other family members. Now, gaming companies increasingly target women and families, female gamers exceed 40 % of players (US and Sweden), and console gaming is displacing TV-watching as the core living-room activity. The Boy-nerd-in-the-Bedroom is, at least statistically, being dispelled and complemented by the Girl-into-Gaming. Still, a tenacious nineteenth-century icon lingers: the Angel-in-the-House. Mothers today do more than bring Hot Pockets to gaming kids (South Park WoW-Episode) or serve as the implied inferior player populating taunts like “My Momma shoots better than you” (Q3A). Mothers game too. The paper uses feminist critical theory (de Lauretis) to illustrate the situation of the female gamer as oscillating between the fixed sign of “Woman” and the dynamic experiences of “women”. It acknowledges and elucidates both the power and consequences of representation and personal experience in meaning-making processes, to which the growing cultural discourse and practice of gaming belong.
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