Paper short abstract:

Building upon extensive participant observation in the everyday life of online gamers this paper aims to discuss the methodological opportunities and conflicts of researching communication processes in online spaces of social and emotional dwelling.

Paper long abstract:

My paper builds upon my participant observation in online multiplayer games, which focussed on emotional experiences enacted through playful virtual violence. I spent about 1200 hours in the online audio-communication channels (Teamspeak; Skype) of power gamers. Here, gamers are mostly talking about the gaming processes while playing, but also (and at the same time) they are ‚hanging out' with their friends and talk about other topics, make jokes, watch videos on YouTube together, etc. As they form an important part of their everyday life, these audio channels become spaces of social and emotional dwelling for the gamers. Unlike in offline spaces of dwelling, however, the everyday practices in these audio channels are bound the online presence of the actors through their voice and the actions they can perform through their avatars. In dialogue with existing approaches used in the ethnography of video games and virtual worlds (e.g. the works of Boellstorff, Nardi, Taylor, and others) and considerations in digital anthropology (e.g. Miller and Horst 2012) and digital ethnography (e.g. Pink et. al. 2016) I will ask for the methodological opportunities and conflicts emerging from this kind of ethnographic resource. On the one hand it limits the analysis to online presence alone and makes bodily communication processes invisible. On the other hand it lets the researcher adjust to the actors ways of ‚being-in-the-world' when dwelling online, also opening up an emotional space in which sensitive topics (such as the pleasures of violence) can be discussed openly.