Paper short abstract:

Digital gaming has become an important everyday pastime and a leading global cultural industry. This paper offers new conceptual and methodological insights as to how anthropologists can approach this “playful digitality”.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses how we can approach the socio-spatial and cultural-political implications of digital gaming ethnographically. What tools are necessary in order to explore the convergence and clustering of on- and offline worlds in gaming? While play has historically been understood as a practice characterized by freedom from corporate and political interests, the digitization of play is driven by global capitalist dynamics and/or by distinct political projects and state practices of censorship or mandatory data-sharing. Gaming, particularly within multi-player games, involves experiencing and co-creating new virtual public spaces. Within these virtual public spaces, interactions may reproduce racialized and gendered inequalities and exclusion, strengthening dominant ways of imagining dystopian futures and political cultures of injustice. Yet within the unique online/offline spaces of gaming, producers and gamers also demonstrate committed efforts to develop virtual commons and to imagine more inclusive alternatives. The study of these intersections of gaming and everyday life, I argue, calls for a mixed-method approach that extends (digital) ethnography with cultural and interface analysis. The in-depth exploration of playful digitality, therefore, may provide media anthropologists with valuable and timely methodological approaches for working in and on the digital age.