Paper short abstract:

At computer game events ritual and play are fused to become a playground for ritualized practices, community building and playful engagements, enabling participants to grow beyond their own expectations in a middle-zone between “pretending” and “believing”.

Paper long abstract:

Computer game events attract thousands of people to celebrate digital gaming culture at locally situated events. Digital communities meet in manifested settings, making the contemporary entanglements of “the digital” with everyday practices visible. Playing games is the proclaimed purpose of the events, but they also facilitate making a game out of everything, by affording playful engagements with oneself, other people, objects and processes. Being a gamer becomes a ritualized performance, that allows people to overcome perceived limitations of who they are as an individual. But playing also becomes a medium for the communicability of togetherness, being part of a collective and shaping an imagined community. While this community oscillates between strong bonds and loose temporary alliances, many people return year after year, developing ritualized practices and forming family-like relationships. This includes extensive preparations of bodies, objects and event spaces to allow an intense yet playful experience, exemplifying how the boundaries of inner spaces and “magic circles” are situatively formed and broken up.

Based on a multi-methods and multi-sited ethnography at 16 computer game conventions in Europe, I will discuss the contemporary dynamics of entangled online and offline worlds, in which the distinctions between game and ritual are collapsing. The events become a playground for ritualized practices, playful explorations and challenging encounters. Rituals are merged with games to serve community building and allow the participants to grow beyond their own expectations, combining “pretending” and “believing” to become “bigger than oneself”, in a middle-zone between ritual and play.