100Percenting It: Videogame Play Through the Eyes of Devoted Gamers1

100-Percenting It: Videogame Play Through the Eyes of

Devoted Gamers1

Preeti R. Khanolkar2 and Paul D. McLean3

We describe salient aspects of the idioculture of videogame play, based on interviews conducted with

20 devoted videogame players and several hours of observation of small-group game play. We explore

the meaningfulness of videogame play for participants, specifically through an examination of the

social quality of play, interaction during play, the enactment of status differences in and through

play, and players’ desire to play games perfectly and ⁄ or completely. We elicit players’ comments

about acceptable and unacceptable forms of cheating, and we explore their management of the stigma

attached to playing violent games and playing excessively. We conclude by highlighting game players’

penchant for finding moral content in their favorite games and game characters.

KEY WORDS: idioculture; play; stigma; videogame; violence; youth.

INTRODUCTION

And, uh, my greatest achievement … I think it was June 4, 2004. It was 4:15 in themorning. … And I played with the weakest character of the three [in the game Shinobi],so there was definitely something I was trying to do, just to prove to myself that I can.… And I spent over, I would say, six hours, with breaks, trying to beat the final boss.… I was dealing cheap damage—it was, it was like scratches to him. And in the end, I

1 The original project on which this article is based received funding from a Jerome and LorraineAresty Research Scholarship, the Aresty Research Center, and the Henry Rutgers ScholarsProgram at Rutgers University. We thank Wayne Brekhus, Ka Po Chu, Judith Gerson, NehaGondal, Eli Liebell-McLean, John Levi Martin, Michael Pinto, Sourabh Singh, EviatarZerubavel, and the Sociological Forum reviewers for their input. We particularly thank VaninaLeschziner and D. Randall Smith for their detailed comments and criticisms. Our greatest debtis to our study participants, whose rich insights made this article possible. A previous versionof this work was presented at the Eastern Sociological Society Undergraduate Poster Session inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, March 15–18, 2007, the Woodshed Workshop at RutgersUniversity, October 16, 2008, and at the American Sociological Association Meetings inAtlanta, Georgia, August 14–17, 2010. The views expressed in this article are our own and arenot those of the National Labor Relations Board or the United States government.

2 National Labor Relations Board, 1099 14th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20570; e-mail:[email protected].

3 Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, 26 Nichol Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901;e-mail: [email protected].

Sociological Forum, Vol. 27, No. 4, December 2012

DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2012.01364.x

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� 2012 Eastern Sociological Society

was ready to go to bed. But those extra fifteen minutes I decided to stick around and Ibeat him. I just—it was almost a heart attack. There was one part where he had half ofhis health bar left and I managed to land that one critical strike, and in a second—thisis the beauty of the game—you can, even the most, uh, difficult bosses you can kill inone strike if you know how to. Your timing has to be perfect. Nonetheless, I managedto land that strike. And his health instantly went down from about a half to an inch.BAM! I could just hear my heart pounding in my ears all of a sudden: boom, boom,boom. I’m like, ‘‘Okay. Okay, I am not going to screw it up this time.’’ And I didn’t. Itwas [pauses] my greatest achievement. (Derek)

For many people like Derek,4 videogames arouse this level of passion andfocused attention. Despite the pejorative connotation they suffer in somecircles, they resemble other kinds of focused activities, like chess, or crosswordpuzzles, or birding, or wild mushroom hunting. They arouse the same desirefor perfection, for completeness, for mastery. On the day of this interview,Derek also told us that videogames stimulate him ‘‘like a digital version ofRed Bull,’’ and they give him ‘‘something to write about.’’ For him, video-game play is among life’s most meaningful activities.

In this article, we examine videogame play from a cultural sociologicalstandpoint. More precisely, by means of interviews with especially devotedgamers and drawing on several hours of observation of play, we offer an illus-trative study of the idioculture (Fine, 1979, 1987) of videogaming.5 Devotedvideogame players—a category we define below—play the games with consider-able seriousness and a yearning for complete mastery. They reflect thoughtfully,and at length, on game content and design, thus treating their games as worthyvehicles for expressing their aesthetic and moral judgments. They develop asense of the informal rules of play, and use the games as opportunities for play-ful sparring with each other—playfulness that is carried over into the talk thataccompanies game play—in much the way that other forms of play have longbeen arenas in which status claims are made and honored, solidarity is rein-forced (e.g., Lyman, 1987), and individual mettle is tested (Huizinga, 1955).

We describe not the violence in the games, but how players talk about(and therefore manage) the violence they encounter in the games and thestigma they face from those outside the gaming community who belittle orexcoriate devoted game play. We also present videogame playing as a sourceof identity formation, as players identify with game characters and imputemoral traits to them. In sum, while it can be a solitary activity, and while itnecessarily involves considerable human-machine interaction, devoted

4 Pseudonyms have been used throughout this article.5 Fine (1979:743) defines idioculture as ‘‘a system of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and customsshared by members of an interacting group to which members can refer and employ as the basisof further interaction.’’ The full concept involves detailed specification of how certain practicesand attitudes are known, usable, functional, appropriate, and triggered by group members(Hallett, 2007). We use the term loosely, although in the spirit Fine intended. We analyze groupdynamics in a limited way while also using interviews extensively to tap into game players’ men-talite about the games, their own play, and what counts as appropriate action. We recognizethat videogame play idioculture can in turn be subdivided into myriad, local idiocultures, just asFine noted was true of individual Little League teams. See Ducheneaut (2010) for one elegantlyelucidated example of a server-based idioculture from the world of videogame play.

962 Khanolkar and McLean

videogame play has rules and styles created first and foremost by interactingmembers of the playing community, rather than by programmers.

SITUATING A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF VIDEOGAME PLAY

By many measures, videogame play is a vast and growing element of theeconomy and of popular culture,6 especially for youth. The PEW Internet andAmerican Life Project determined in 2008 that over 90% of American teens—both boys and girls—play some kind of videogame (Hung, 2011:81). Not sur-prisingly, then, the videogame phenomenon has sparked a set of disparate,voluminous scholarly literatures.

One substantial literature examines the physiological, cognitive, andpsychological effects that videogame play induces, especially in relation to thethemes of violence and aggression.7 Another body of work explores game playin relation to the topic of gender,8 while several studies interpret videogameplay in terms of various social functions it purportedly serves.9 Quite differentin orientation is a body of research that considers, from a design standpoint,the way space in games is engineered to approach verisimilitude and allowplayers to feel like they are truly together in a space.10 Aligned with such workbut also distinct from it is another substantial literature consisting of a consid-erable number of philosophically and hermeneutically oriented studies, many

6 The videogame industry generated approximately $10.5 billion in revenue in 2009 (Entertain-ment Software Rating Board, 2010). A large percentage of gamers are adults, ages 18–49. Asreported in the New York Times on November 14, 2010 (Cyran and Crane, 2010), Call of Duty:Black Ops set a record for games by registering $360 million in first-day sales. Internet gamedownloads are increasing, and the makers of some newer games such as Rockstar Games’ L.A.Noire are posting high returns and garnering critical acclaim.

7 See Anderson and Bushman (2001), Barlett et al. (2008), Carnagey and Anderson (2005), Funk(2005), Hummer et al. (2010), Nowak et al. (2008), and Sestir and Bartholow (2010). Somestudies link excessive computer use, including gaming, to bad outcomes such as obesity (Atte-well et al., 2003) and bizarre dreaming (Gackenbach et al., 2009).

8 For example, Behm-Morawitz and Mastro (2009), Burgess et al. (2007), Lin (2010), and Ter-lecki et al. (2011) have studied differences in portrayals of male and female characters and dif-ferences in amounts and effects of game play by gender. Cassell and Jenkins (1998), as well asthe more recent collection edited by Kafai et al. (2008), offer many insights more from a criticalinterpretive stance than an experimental psychological perspective.

9 For example, Chess (2005) argues that playing the game Grand Theft Auto actually reinforces‘‘the uses of delinquency in a disciplined society’’ (2005:85). Shaw (2010) claims that war-basedvideogames assist in blurring the soldier-civilian distinction and accustom players to a ‘‘colo-nialist aesthetics.’’ Colwell (2007) argues that play affords challenges and stress relief. Bain-bridge (2007) and Mayo (2009) explore the pedagogical value of videogames or videogame-liketechnology. Durkin and Barber (2002) see other positive effects on adolescent development,such as an above-average level of school engagement, a healthy self-concept, and friendshipformation. Smyth claims that those assigned to play massively multiplayer online role-playinggames (MMORPGs) in an experimental setting suffered health and sleep-quality problems andinterference in socializing and academic work, but they also reported ‘‘greater enjoyment inplaying, greater interest in continuing to play, and greater acquisition of new friendships’’(2007:717).

10 See Durlach and Slater (2000), Nitsche (2008), and Rozendaal et al. (2010).

Videogame Play Through the Eyes of Devoted Gamers 963

examining the narrative structure and symbolic content of videogames astext.11

We parse this dense landscape of themes and topics schematically inFig. 1. On the left side, we locate topics that focus on the structure, form,and content of games themselves, primarily from a design and hermeneuticstandpoint. In the center panel, we locate topics pertaining to the relation-ship between player and game. Some of our own attention is directed here,notably toward players’ commentaries on games and their relationship togame rules, characters, and aesthetics (but not the psychological consequencesof game play). The rightmost panel emphasizes social interaction aroundgame play, precisely the zone where a sociological approach is most enlight-ening.

Research in this third area appears to be less abundant, yet growing insalience.12 Boellstorff (2008), Pearce (2009), and Taylor (2006), for example,offer stimulating analyses of the culture and social dynamics of online gameplay in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Still, apparently fewer

Internal Structure andInterface Among Users, –‘‘cheats’’

–‘‘mods’’

Content of the GameVirtually or in Person–avatars and character

identification –emotional involvement–appeal of side quests

imagined tie to game designer

I f b–rules

i t d t il

––physiological effects on user–psychological effects on user

Interface etween Game and User

–environmen , details, creation of perspective

–design, affordances, simulating reality

–genre (quest vs. life world) –informal norms of play–narrative structure–amount of violence and sexual stereotyping

–character development

–instructional talk, directives–insults and trash talk–banter–claims to status –camaraderie andshared reminiscence

Fig. 1. Mapping the literature on videogames.

11 See the essays in Garrelts (2005) and in Atkins and Krzywinska (2007), for example. Bogost(2007) treats computer game play through the lens of rhetoric, while Berger (2002) explores therelationship between games and broader cultural phenomena. Richardson (2010) and Wright etal. (2010) are among those challenging the traditional notion of boundary between game worldand external world. Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin (2006, 2009) have gathered a multitude ofessays exploring aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of contemporary ‘‘texts’’ like video-games on their own terms. A wide range of philosophical equipment has been deployed tostudy the simulated worlds of videogames, from Barthes, Bataille, and Baudrillard, to Fou-cault, Freud, and Haraway.

12 Here we would include work by Jansz and Martens (2005), Newman (2002, 2008), and Snod-grass et al. (2011), plus the website for Gamestudies.org.


than one in four U.S. teens report participating in these kinds of games(Hung, 2011:81). Far more commonly played are first-person shooter (FPS)games and fighting, action, and adventure games. Notwithstanding the lessexplicitly social quality of such games, there are important social dynamicsto analyze there, too. FPSs may be ‘‘repurposed by their users as complexsocial worlds’’ (Ducheneaut, 2010:200). People relate to each other duringplay, and in fact are jointly ‘‘involved in games in different ways at differenttimes (or simultaneously)’’ (Henricks, 2010:33). Videogame play cannot besufficiently understood simply in terms of how the software leads a playerthrough the game, as such an approach ignores both how the players domes-ticate the technology, and how the game is interwoven with multiple simulta-neous storylines in the players’ surrounding environments. Furthermore, in arecently published, explicitly ethnomethodological work, Hung urges scholarsto look at interaction among players within games and in particularcontexts, to examine interaction between players and in-game characters, toobserve how norms of fairness are negotiated, and to find out what video-games mean to those who play them (2011:82). This set of desiderata echoesthe impetus that initially drove our research.

DATA COLLECTION AND METHODS

We base our analysis here primarily on in-depth interviews with 20highly devoted videogame players, 17 male and three female, ranging in agefrom 18 to 27. We targeted seven of these interviewees for their membershipin a university student gaming club. We approached another intervieweebecause he managed a videogame store; we randomly recruited another in anon-campus video arcade. We found the rest through snowball sampling ofweak-tie networks: friends of friends of the first author, or acquaintances ofthe earlier set of interviewees who were nominated principally for playing ‘‘alot of videogames.’’13 Interviews lasted between 40 and 90 minutes. We tape-recorded 14, video-recorded one, and transcribed the rest by hand. We con-ducted all the interviews one-on-one, although other interviewees or gamerswere sometimes present in the room during the interviews—either out ofcuriosity or because they were waiting to be interviewed. Some of those wait-ing played videogames (onscreen or handheld) in the interim, occasionallyeavesdropping and responding to an interviewee’s comments. Likewise, inter-viewees would occasionally speak to other people in the room who wereplaying videogames.14

In addition we draw on approximately 12 total hours of participant-observation of videogame play by the first author in an off-campus settingand 10 hours of participant-observation by the second author in an on-

13 A handful of such contacts declined to be interviewed, for various reasons.14 The schedule of interview questions is available from the authors upon request.


campus setting.15 For this article, we draw chiefly on three sessions held bythe first author at one interviewee’s home, where four of our intervieweesgathered periodically to play videogames. The room had a large televisionscreen and an impressive selection of videogames and gaming systems (hun-dreds of games and at least nine videogaming consoles). These three sessionswere held on December 25, 2006, January 11, 2007, and January 26, 2007,and all were voice-recorded in full. Finally, we also administered a question-naire with 50 questions concerning videogame use to 101 female and 69 malecollege students ranging in age from 18 to 25. We use some results of thatexercise here, but only sparingly to help us define the category of ‘‘devotedgamer.’’16

FOCUSING ON THE ‘‘DEVOTED GAMER’’

We use the term ‘‘devoted gamer’’ to refer to persons who play muchmore often, and are much more attached to videogames (as distinct from per-sistent online game worlds, like World of Warcraft), than the average personor casual gamer. This definition is doubtless imprecise, yet we are convinced ittaps into a real phenomenon. Although we can offer no objective definition ofa ‘‘devoted gamer’’ in terms of hours played per week, or number of gamesowned, we based our selection of participants for this study on our assess-ment—and to a large extent, participants’ own self-assessment—of their gam-ing habits and their much higher than average intensity of commitment to thegames.17

Our usage contrasts with that of scholars using the term ‘‘problem videogame playing’’ (e.g., King et al., 2011) or ‘‘obsessive engagement’’ (Przybylskiet al., 2009). We might have used the term ‘‘hardcore’’ gamers, but few surveyrespondents and interviewees self-identified as ‘‘hardcore,’’ even though manyinterviewees used the word, unprompted, in the course of conversation. Manyseemed to worry that ‘‘hardcore’’ meant ‘‘playing to excess.’’ One respondentwrote that he was not hardcore, but also claimed that he plays 10 hours ofvideogames a week and the Nintendo Wii ‘‘kicks ass,’’ indicating a certainlevel of engagement in gaming culture. Another who claimed to play 20 hoursa week answered the question, ‘‘Do you consider yourself to be a devoted or‘hardcore’ videogamer?’’ by circling neither ‘‘Yes’’ nor ‘‘No,’’ but instead by

15 The first author played several interviewee-recommended games on her own, including MetalGear Solid: The Twin Snakes, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and Grand Theft Auto: SanAndreas. She also participated in and observed game-playing sessions in which the followinggames were played: Donkey Konga, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Pokemon Puzzle League, Poke-mon Stadium 2, Advance Wars: Dual Strike, and Meteos. The second author played andobserved play of a racing game, Test Drive 5, the FPS game Star Wars Battlefront, and anotherFPS game, Halo: Reach—the last in a LAN multiplayer setting.

16 That questionnaire and the results are available from the authors upon request.17 As a modest indicator of how numerous ‘‘devoted gamers’’ may be, in our questionnaire

67.6% indicated that they played at least one hour of videogames per week, but only 17respondents (14 males and 3 females) identified themselves as ‘‘devoted’’ gamers.


emphatically circling ‘‘devoted’’ in the question, thereby trying to avoid somestigma attached to the word ‘‘hardcore.’’ Another asserted, ‘‘I ONLY PLAYSPORTS GAMES’’ in very large print.

Similarly, several of our interviewees felt the need to qualify their self-identification. One of them, Senbun, noted, with repeated hesitation: ‘‘Myfriends and I get together sometimes and we’re like, you know, me and myfriends are like, you know, ‘gamers,’ but we also see other gamers like, youknow, people who do, you know, stay in their basements like weirdoes. Wedon’t want to do that.’’ Isabelle distinguished herself from ‘‘one of those peo-ple that plays World of Warcraft all day and every day.’’ Peter tried to empha-size the capacity of expert videogame play to garner a person prestige fromthe outside world, if properly framed.

If you say, ‘‘Oh, I’m a good videogame player,’’ that will probably get no reaction fromsomebody. But if you say, ‘‘I’m ranked third nationally,’’ then that’s impressive. That’s,sadly, something you can put on your resume. … It’s like, ‘‘I won this tournament.’’

Unfortunately for Peter, though, a nearby gamer greeted his commentwith derision, finding his comment ‘‘geeky’’ and his faith in the positive repu-tation of gamers too naıve.

To summarize, we believe that focusing on devoted videogamers providesaccess to elements of game play not readily observable were one to study aver-age consumers of games. That position as devoted player is loosely definablein terms of an expressive passion for the games, knowledge of the games, and,frequently, some awareness of the risk of being labeled as excessively commit-ted to them.

A SOCIOLOGICALLY INFORMED INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORK:

PLAY

Our approach to the social aspects of videogame play grows out of classicwork by historians, philosophers, and sociologists defining play as a primaryform of sociability, an arena for agonistic social encounters and a path tosocial integration (Caillois, 1979; Fine, 1987; Fink, 1974; Henricks, 2006,2010; Huizinga, 1955). Here, we note several defining features of play andbriefly discuss their applicability to the world of videogame play specifically,before proceeding to a subset of themes examined in greater detail using ourinterview data.

Play Is Enthralling

Play is a voluntary activity, but it also readily absorbs the attention ofthe player (Jansz and Martens, 2005; Stromberg, 1999), creating an intenselyfelt ‘‘presence’’ (e.g., Nowak et al., 2008), which in turn creates an attitude


with significant potential to become obsessive. Our interviewee Marco, forexample, described in detail and with some ambivalence his occasionalpenchant for two-day gaming binges.

Sometimes you plan it out. Sometimes you’re just like, ‘‘It’s vacation. Screw every-thing.’’ Next thing you know, you’re playing for two days, or in my cousin’s terms,three days. … When you wake up, it’s like a hangover. It is hell. … It’s like alcohol.Because it’s like something sweet, but then it’s a snake in the end.

Marco decided to emphasize that such a single-minded orientation to playsurfaces ‘‘only if you don’t have balance.’’ Yet he repeated the phrase ‘‘Oh mygod’’ several times as he narrated his own experience of passing milestonehours of play—3:00 a.m., 9:00 a.m., 10:00 p.m., the next day—without sleep.

In the case of videogames, it is evident that this enthrallment is producednot only by play of the game itself, but by peripherals that make the game amore absorbing totality. As Neal stated, ‘‘I play videogames for the artisticquality because, I don’t know, I like art. And seeing videogames, I guess, isanother way of observing it.’’ Derek expressed a similar idea when he noted:

Not a lot of games are good enough to have unique atmospheres—something that whenyou play the game and when you hear the music from the game afterwards [it is] some-thing that sends chills down your spine . . . . It’s hard to elaborate on that, but that’swhat I try to seek out when I play: ‘‘Does this game feel any different?’’ … Music playssuch a huge role! Because, I would say, in some aspects it’s important in the game,more important than gameplay—which might sound ridiculous. But I’m willing to suf-fer through bad gameplay and unfair difficulty if the storyline is good enough and ifthe game has that unique atmosphere.

Luke told us he has spent about a thousand dollars ‘‘just ordering sound-tracks to videogames,’’ adding that he has bought U.S. soundtracks ‘‘just so Ican support the industry [in the United States].’’ Marco reminisced about hischildhood enjoyment of the soundtrack for MegaMan X, seeking confirmationof his enthusiasm by earnestly saying to us: ‘‘That was good stuff, right?’’And Josh commented, somewhat defensively:

I know some people don’t regard videogame music as, you know, actual music. But,you know, someone did compose it, someone did go through the time of, you know,recording it and whatnot. … That’s why I appreciate sites like OverClocked ReMix,whose mission is to show that it’s an art form in and of itself.

For others, the instruction manuals that come boxed with the gamesprovide a kind of side involvement (Fine, 1987) that enhances their overallgaming experience. Eric is a case in point.

One of my favorite videogame manuals of all time is the Donkey Kong Country onebecause they always had Cranky Kong on the side of the manual saying funny things.… And probably my favorite videogame manual ever is the very original The Legend ofZelda manual. In fact later on in life mine got all torn up and I bought my friend’smanual off him for two dollars. … I used to just like looking at the map and really letmy imagination run wild. It was like reading a book.

Derek emphasized seeing videogames as an entire aesthetic package.


The game I recommended to you, Metal Gear [Solid], it’s—it’s a masterpiece . . . . Thisgame is, oh man, first of all it set the standard for voice acting. In 1999, this was unbe-lievable. . . . The game has been inspired by a huge amount of movies. You always seesome Escape from New York inferences, a little bit of Terminator inferences here andthere because the creator is a huge movie fan. And [it has an] extremely complicatedstoryline. It works on so many levels!

Play Generates Rules

Obviously, games and the arenas in which they are played typically haveexplicit rules and objectives, which lend them a degree of logical coherenceand structure not as elegantly instantiated in the real world. But games are‘‘rule-bound’’ in more subtle ways as well. Apart from the explicit rules, play-ers feel some kinds of actions in games are off limits, even if not explicitly pro-scribed by ‘‘the rulebook.’’ Fine’s (1987) observation of a proscription againsteating ice cream in the dugout is one classic example. Videogame play has sim-ilar implicit norms. Consulting the game manual or online help may be onesuch proscription, sanctioned because players sense that such an action is aform of quasi-cheating (Consalvo, 2007) or constitutes some other embodi-ment of dishonorable behavior or ‘‘bad faith’’—toward opponents, towardoneself, toward the game itself. As Josh noted, ‘‘I don’t like to use walk-throughs, but if I am really stuck in the game I might look it up just for thatpart of the game; but then I feel stupid afterwards.’’ Or as Derek said, ‘‘Idon’t think seeking help through Gamefaqs[.com] and walkthroughs is cheat-ing but my ego is hurt when I do it.’’18

Furthermore, some actions in game play take quite specific forms, eventhough the official rules give wide latitude for those actions. In baseball, eachplayer bats; but how they bat, their stance, whether and how often they scrapethe dirt with their cleats and spit—all these nonessential ways of batting com-municate competence. Similarly with videogame play. Body movement in toomuch sympathy with movement on the screen, for example, was considered byvarious interviewees to be somewhat gauche.19 Pearce (2009) and Taylor(2006) write beautifully of the ‘‘emergent culture’’ in online games—a cultureconstituted by a vast array of norms about social interaction, favor-giving,killing, and so on, that must be learned in situ. Ducheneaut (2010) providescompelling evidence of how norms can be socially created and interactionallyenforced on individual players in MMOGs. There are, then, myriad ways ofplaying a game—etiquette, styles, gestures that distance oneself from the activ-ity or draw oneself nearer to it, enactments of stoicism, degree of participationin the lingo of the game, willingness to trash talk and to do so on appropriate

18 These examples may sound like matters of individual preference, but we find that they arerepeated often enough that they must be widely diffused, and hence are at least partially afunction of interactions and imitation within a ‘‘community’’ of players.

19 Contrast this judgment with the inherent requirement of bodily motion on the Nintendo Wii.Perhaps this is why so many devoted gamers find the Wii gimmicky and silly.


occasions—that express the extent of one’s commitment to the game and theextent of one’s belongingness in a gaming community. We discuss these ideasmore in the section on the etiquette of gaming below.

Play Has a Contrapuntal Relationship with the Real World

Caillois (1979) stressed that play is make-believe, separated from the realworld, and Huizinga (1955:9) referred to both its ‘‘limitedness’’ and itsextraordinariness. To play is to cross some threshold—into a world of specialknowledge and a distinctive lexicon (e.g., mod, noob, pwn, spawn, teabag,frag), for example, that effectively limits participation in the game. Wepartially agree. Partly that boundary is established by game design. Partly,though, it is created by outside-the-game tactics of the players themselves, asMarco indicated:

I make sure my room has a positive atmosphere, so this way I’m feeling positive. Nextthing, I get my pillow, so my neck is comfortable and I take the controller and put itunder the blankets and put the blankets over me. And I put a fan on so it’s nice andcool. And from that point on it’s like being in a different world.

Yet while entry to the game world may be marked, a noteworthy featureof contemporary videogames is that they aim maximally to blur the distinctionbetween reality and virtual reality (Juul, 2005; Richardson, 2010)—more sothan in many other pastimes.20 This blurring may encourage players to assumemore ‘‘stake’’ in the game—that they are expressing themselves through it,and that their virtuosity in play somehow signifies their worthiness in ‘‘real-ity’’—recalling Geertz’s idea that some play has the phenomenological charac-ter of being ‘‘deep,’’ or ‘‘really real’’ (1973:chs. 4, 15). Success in play may beinterpreted symbolically as indicative of success or worthiness in other spheres.Thus we saw that Derek saw an exceptional game moment as ‘‘his greatestachievement.’’ Likewise, Frank said of the winners of the Street Fighter tour-naments he attended:

the admiration that I have for someone that is good at a game is usually because I alsoplay the game, and, you know, um, so that admiration is borne out of my own desireto improve and, you know, my having tried to improve and knowing what it takes tobe so good makes me able to appreciate it even more.21

The counterpoint between reality and virtual reality is not just that thegame purports to be real and effectively simulates reality; rather, the player

20 For example, Newman (2002:417) describes how the designers of Metal Gear Solid createdeffects within the game—like a seeming video input error—to mimic real-world disruptions ofthe game. Similarly, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem tricks players into thinking that theirtelevision has turned off or that their game data have been erased.

21 Videogame players are quite aware that this world they temporarily occupy is imagi-nary—understood in a pejorative sense—and they understand that their play world may bedeemed insignificant, trivial, and ⁄ or abnormal by outside observers. Thus Frank felt the needto qualify his admiration of excellent players by saying, ‘‘I admire them, you know, within thewhole hobby aspect, not in a greater, you know, general sense.’’


actively finds in play a source of meaning or inspiration or symbolic signifi-cance for the conduct of life in the ‘‘real’’ world. That is, while the game exertsa certain kind of control over the player, encouraging a certain degree ofenthrallment and absorption in its environment, and encouraging compliancewith its rules, the boundary between the game and the real world is in realitynegotiable and porous. Furthermore, as we show below, players can mentallyand conversationally step in and out of the game in the course of play. Thuswe concur with Cole and Griffiths (2007), who find that games provide ‘‘highlysocially interactive environments’’ in which social interaction forms ‘‘a consid-erable element’’ in player enjoyment. We strongly echo Newman’s plea(2008:13) for developing a science of the ‘‘situatedness of gameplay.’’ The zoneof play, while partially demarcated by the game, is substantially accomplishedby the player himself or herself, or the players jointly.

We pursue five themes related to these points in the balance of this arti-cle. We consider important social aspects of game play activity; we explore thethoroughness players bring to game play; we lay out some of the informal rulesof play that gamers adopt; we examine how videogame players manage stigmaand their sense of who is ‘‘allowed’’ to play games; and we discuss game playas it pertains to players’ sense of identity.

GAMING AS SOCIALLY SITUATED ACTIVITY

Almost all interviewees enthusiastically asserted that videogame play is asocial activity. Anthony suggested that ‘‘videogames [are] more social thanwatching television [with other people] because you can interact with otherpeople in the game and you can also talk about the game [while playing it].’’When played collectively, games lead to the formation and solidification offriendships. Eric reported that he became friends with another gamer, Gabe,because ‘‘he used a character called Xiaoyu [in the game Tekken 4] and Istarted using her and we were the only two that respected and liked this char-acter.’’ We often heard that games are frequently topics of friendly conversa-tion when play is not in progress. Isabelle asserted that when gamers attendgaming society meetings, ‘‘they meet people and they talk to people. And I’msure this isn’t an isolated thing.’’

We also observed an interesting discrepancy between what people sayabout others and what they think about themselves in terms of the effect ofvideogames on sociability. While many interviewees speculated that gamesmade ‘‘most people’’ less sociable, all save one stated that videogames hadmade themselves more sociable. Thus while the stereotype of the socially iso-lated gamer persists, even among gamers, they shun it as a description of theirown experience.

We find other, more striking dimensions to this ‘‘social’’ quality of gameplay. For one thing, players have a keen sense of mapping game play to socialtype. Said Hazel: ‘‘If an adult plays Grand Theft Auto it is weird, but with


Nintendo games, like Nintendogs, it is more acceptable. There’s no stigmawhen adults play videogames, unless it’s violent, confusing, or too tricky andadvanced.’’ Peter remarked that ‘‘if my parents started playing, like, modernday games, that would be creepy.’’ He continued:

I think it would depend on the game. I mean, like, as far as like [Legend of] Zelda andWii Sports, I wouldn’t have a problem, but if [my mom] started playing, you know,Resistance: Fall of Man, or something like that, that’d be a little weird.22

So, while devoted gamers deny the uniformity of the stereotypicalgamer—in Ray’s words, ‘‘guy with glasses, greasy hair, Cheetos stains on hisshirt … sitting in his mom’s basement’’—they do not surrender all sense of forwhom game play is appropriate.

Another important social dimension of game play is status. Within thegaming community, there is an ‘‘ability gradient’’ (Fine, 1987:95) of whichplayers are keenly aware. Differential ability plays a role in people’s atti-tudes—a complex mix of admiration and criticism—regarding game play.When asked about the skill of the player who beat him in a tournament, Sen-bun commented, ‘‘I respect it. … Because that was probably the first fight Ihad in a long time where it was really exciting and I was extremely nervous.’’Games are better—more exciting, more enthralling, more meaningful—whenthey take place between well-matched, ‘‘equal’’ opponents.23 However, thecomputer adds another dimension to the assignment of prestige or status forhigh-quality videogame play. Cameron, for example, was ambivalent about atournament winner he observed: ‘‘I thought the player who won was reallyprecise. But [the way he played] turned that game into a machine, so it wasn’tfun anymore.’’

Many interviewees reported preferring play against human opponentsover play against computer-controlled players.24 Anthony, for instance,explained:

Computer players suck because … they play the game the way the programmers pro-grammed them. … Human players are good, because they can break their pattern. …When I play a game, I try to recognize a pattern ‘‘play style’’ because most of the timethat’s what happens. Most people fall into a set sort of pattern. It might not be obvi-ous, but you can recognize a couple of things a player does and you can adapt andchange to it. And that’s what keeps the dynamic of the game fun. If you manage to findsomeone who is your equal, they’ll constantly keep changing the way they play, andyou’ll constantly keep changing the way you play, so the match always stays close tothe end.

22 At the same time, he opined that if someone else’s mom played, that would be ‘‘cool.’’ Thesense of ‘‘weirdness,’’ then, was a function of his social proximity to his mom, not based onwhat is appropriate or inappropriate for an adult per se.

23 Compare Geertz’s (1973:ch. 15) description of the social basis of cockfights, in which the enthu-siasm of those betting reflects their assessment of the evenness of the match, as well as reflect-ing the structure of role relationships which they inhabit.

24 Ravaja et al. (2006) report that emotional responses and appraisals of threat are more pro-nounced in games played against friends than in games against the computer. Players may alsoenact and enforce social norms differently depending on the perceived humanness of their alter,and ⁄ or their perceived social distance from their opponent.


Anthony’s comments are reminiscent of Bourdieu’s (1990:66) discussionof expertise in social interaction using the model of the expert athlete who hasa ‘‘feel for the game.’’ Virtuosity in play—a combination of quasi-instinctualbrilliance and a capacity to do the unexpected—was highly regarded by manyof our interviewees.

Some of our informants used the ability gradient to express status superi-ority on other social dimensions. For instance, Hazel told us that ‘‘as a kid, Itried to get higher scores than my sister in Tetris so [that] I could write myname on the high score list as ‘Camille sucks!’’’ Tyrone mentioned that hewould specifically play pinball on his brother’s computer in order to taunt himby listing his own initials on his brother’s Highest Scorers list. Omar told ushe enjoyed playing Battlefield 2142 ‘‘to piss off other people, specificallyadministrators of servers, which are most likely twelve-year-olds who feel as ifthey have a lot of power.’’

Most intriguing perhaps is the complex counterpoint we observed betweensocial interaction among the players and the interaction simultaneously occur-ring among characters within the game. During one participant-observationsession, Anthony, Eric, Greg, and Peter played a popular Nintendo Game-Cube fighting game, Super Smash Bros. Melee. In the game, each player picksone of 25 available characters to fight with on a two-dimensional platform.The four players selected a two-on-two team game, with Anthony and Peteragainst Eric and Greg. All four players fight simultaneously, so the fightingcan get extremely hectic. During the fight, teammates constantly talked to oneanother and shouted out instructions to one another using their own firstnames. Thus, near the start of a new match, Eric said, ‘‘Greg, you see that bigfucking, uh, dragon [Bowser] over there? Go kill him.’’ By contrast, teammatesreferred to the players on the other team using their characters’ names. ThusEric spoke sarcastically to Greg about Peter: ‘‘Yeah, Greg, way to just look atYoshi [i.e., Peter’s character].’’ In another fight, Eric shouted, ‘‘Aw, fuckingBowser!’’ referring to Anthony’s character.

This effect was so pronounced that when one of the players picked afemale character, the other team would refer to the character (and, by exten-sion, the player) as a ‘‘she.’’ The persona of the character dominated the per-son of the player in the eyes of his or her opponents. In addition, playersreferred to the opposing team only by their characters’ names during the fightitself, but not between fights, such as when Anthony said to his teammate dur-ing a break, ‘‘Peter, keep Greg off of me as much as you can,’’ rather thanreferring to Greg as ‘‘Captain Falcon’’ as he did during the fight itself. Thesame distinctive cognitive sorting of interaction alters into the distinct catego-ries of allies-cum-players versus enemies-cum-characters, and the same sortingof time into game time versus interlude time occurred when the teams wereswitched.

Observation of videogaming sessions also reveals that participants regularlyengage in social interaction during play that may be unrelated, or only weaklyrelated, to the games themselves. The following excerpt provides one example.


GREG: Yo, this is the gayest song.

ERIC: Yo, this song’s so bad, man. I can’t get into it at all. [Anthony laughs loudly atthis comment as Eric mimics the song in a feminine voice] ‘‘Our courage will pull usthrough.’’ [Anthony snickers while Eric continues to mimic] ‘‘You teach me and I’ll teachyou, Pokemon!’’ [More people laugh] Yo, I remember this.

ANTHONY: Yo, no one ever remembers this part though. It ain’t over!

ERIC: Yo, I hummed the solo, what do you know about that?

GREG: Yo, I saw the [Pokemon] movies.

ANTHONY: Did you say ‘‘I saw the movies?’’ [Laughs]

ERIC: I saw the first one, when Ash dies.

ANTHONY: What the fuck, you …? Yo, man, I never saw any of that garbage.

ERIC: Mewtwo kills his ass and Ash turns to stone. And then Pikachu comes andbrings him back with his tears.

ANTHONY: Yo, what the—?

ERIC: All the Pokemon cry and they, like— [Everyone else bursts into laughter]

ANTHONY: [Recovering from laughter] Yo, that—Oh, God. That must be worse thanthat fucking Scientology movie. What the hell’s that shit? Battlefield Earth? [Laughter]

It was common to observe this kind of side banter in the course of agame, ranging variously between topics close to the playing of the game andothers only tangentially connected to play. The game here clearly functionedas a device mediating social interaction. Indeed, we believe that we canscarcely understand game play without situating it in this kind of potentiallyribald social interaction.

GAMING AND THOROUGHNESS

Many gamers talked about the feeling of enjoyment and simple escapethat games provide. For example, Josh commented that videogames provide‘‘an escape from whatever is going on … not to be a part of this world for alittle bit.’’ Tyrone told us he sometimes plays Grand Theft Auto games in aparticularly violent way if he has had ‘‘a really bad day,’’ ‘‘just to get frustra-tion out.’’

But in addition to these motivations, devoted gamers take on somethingapproaching an ethical orientation to gaming, a kind of duty toward the gameand sometimes a feeling of obligation and respect toward the game designer.Although playing with and performing well against other players wasdescribed as a satisfying aspect of videogaming, 14 of our interviewees also feltthat they had accomplished something when playing a single-player game. AsFrank noted:


to see the time you put into [a videogame] and working your way through a game andat the end of the day looking at the catalogue of games that you have and [thinking],‘‘Wow, I beat all these games. I have all these games to my credit. … I completed them.100 percent,25 you know? That’s extremely satisfying.

Like Neal, who said, ‘‘If I didn’t get 100 percent, I felt like I could dobetter,’’ many devoted gamers mentioned that they believed in playing video-games thoroughly and completely. A game can be beaten, typically simply bykilling the main villain. But the figure of 100 percent is symbolic of a player,like Taylor’s (2006) ‘‘power gamer,’’ completing a videogame to the fullestdegree: collecting every treasure, beating every opponent, and exploring everycrevice of the game environment. Ray explains:

Usually, I want to beat [a videogame] as like—I don’t want to use the word ‘‘brutally’’ aspossible—as ‘‘completely’’ as possible. Like, getting every possible thing you can get. Like, Iguess that’s maybe more of an addictive-type personality where you just want to have every-thing—have everything complete before you can do it. Like, I mean, I know some peoplewho will play games, and they will just go on and beat it in a few hours or whatever, but,like, I have to make sure I have gotten every little thing you can get before you beat it.

Eric elaborated earnestly on the tension between beating a game and win-ning thoroughly.

I do really like to beat games—I want to beat every one of my games. However, I alsowant to play through them thoroughly, and that’s kind of my whole conflict that I’vebeen having. I don’t have the time to play these games thoroughly, so I feel this incom-pleteness that haunts a lot of my gameplay.

For Derek, 100-percenting a game is a kind of homage to the designer.

I’m very picky when it comes to my games. I try to stick to a certain genre. I’m alwaysextremely thorough. I never half-ass [them by using] a walkthrough, it defeats the entirepurpose.26 I guess I just—it just takes me longer to complete games . . . . You’ve gottatake the most out of the games, everything that the creators intended. You need toactually put some effort into it to get the maximum enjoyment. It’s kind of like a feed-back or a way of showing respect for the creators of the game . . . . I am a ridiculouscompletist. It’s a pride thing for me.

Derek here expresses the attractiveness for him of the purity and integrityof the experience of play, and the appeal of a feeling of communion with thedesigner. Marco similarly said he wanted ‘‘everything perfect’’ in his play of agame. Anthony’s desire for completeness was so strong that he spoke of it asa kind of self-binding commitment.

I play fewer games now [because of schoolwork], but I will play [more] later, when Ihave time. I am not cutting any games out. I will still play the games I play thoroughly[even though I don’t have time for them], which is why I must delay playing [all my

25 Consistent with the use of this term by several mutually unacquainted interviewees in ourstudy, ‘‘100 percent’’ probably comes from earlier games (Super Nintendo or earlier) where acounter on the home screen or ending scene recorded the percentage of the game the playerhad completed. One may have beaten the game (i.e., killed the main villain), but at everyrestart, one could see that it had been, for example, only 83% completed.

26 A walkthrough is a guide designed to help players when they are stuck in certain parts of a vid-eogame. Newman (2008:ch. 5) provides an interesting analysis of them.


games] at once. … I like to play all the games I am interested in to the fullest . . . . Ilike the feeling of completeness.

Eric spoke in another way that indicates a kind of ethical orientation togaming. He wants to work in the videogame industry. However, as he notes, hisdistinctive contribution would not be technical, but instead aesthetic and intuitive.

I have a very elitist mindset that I know what’s really good in games and nobody elsedoes, and so I’m going to tell everybody what I think should be in videogames today.And [I would] have these cronies [i.e., designers, programmers, musicians] to do all thework, because I don’t know the first thing about programming, I don’t know graphicdesign, [and] I can barely play my guitar anymore . . . . But I can tell you what makesthis game so good. So I guess it’s like the critic in me that I want to mobilize, in asense, and make productive.

What defines ‘‘devotion,’’ then, is not so much exceptional skill—althoughthat is usually a given—but, more crucially, cultivation of an understanding ofthe game from the inside, an intuitive sense of what will render it the mostbeautiful and enveloping experience.

THE ETIQUETTE OF GAMING

Fine (1987) reminds us that, in Little League baseball, most boys want towin, and they expect (and are expected by others) to try as hard as they canto win, sometimes even pushing the envelope of good sportsmanship. Similar‘‘rules’’ apply in videogaming, as Kristina noted.

I try not to [lose on purpose] because whenever I lose on purpose, people get angrywhen they find out. They’re like, ‘‘Oh, my god. You’re losing on purpose to me? Oh,god. I’m offended!’’ [I feel the same way] ‘cause I really hate it when people lose onpurpose, it’s like they are not taking me seriously.

The gamers we spoke with generally considered spoilsports more irritatingthan cheaters, as they disrupt other players’ enthrallment with the game. AsEric noted:

at least the cheater is playing the game and then you can cheat back or beat the chea-ter. The spoilsport is worse because they don’t let you play the game. You can beat thecheater on their level, like if it’s a first person shooter you can screen cheat, too, or youcan pick the same cheap character as them.

Eric’s comments imply that a certain amount of cheating is acceptable, andperhaps even to be desired as a signal of competitive commitment to the game.27

Anthony used the term ‘‘bad cheating,’’ condemning that kind that was excessiveor not possible for other players to overcome. All but one interviewee claimed tohave given up using cheat codes long ago,28 or that they used them only whenthey wanted to have a different kind of fun with the game—that is, when they‘‘keyed’’ their game play as ironic ‘‘horsing around’’ or willfully destructive,

27 See Consalvo (2007) for a detailed and nuanced treatment of cheating.28 ‘‘Cheat codes’’ refers to keystroke combinations that may be entered during a game to make

the game easier, such as by rendering a player invincible.


somewhat akin to the idea of ‘‘playfighting’’ discussed by Goffman (1974:ch. 3;see also Hung [2011:ch. 6] on different ‘‘forms of play’’). Hazel commented that,by contrast, ‘‘screen cheating is okay, since [the opportunity] is right there infront of you.’’29 Omar complained about screen cheating in the Halo games, butlaughed, ‘‘I’m kind of guilty of it myself sometimes, so I can’t really say stuffabout it.’’ Finally, Greg explained that he was opposed to using walkthroughsand he considered checking on the Internet to be cheating. But in a statementthat affirms the social quality of gaming, he suggested that ‘‘asking a friend [forhelp] just adds to the experience because you can find common ground withother people rather than consulting texts.’’

In speaking about cheating, many players also made use of the word‘‘cheap,’’ clearly a part of their shared lexicon. Anthony explained that ‘‘cheapwould be [to use] a tactic that is unfair.’’ The distinction between cheapnessand cheating is apparent in Luke’s comment: ‘‘It’s not fun to play Mario KartDS online anymore because people ‘snake.’ … It’s not cheating because it’swithin the parameters of the game, but they’re making it not fun. It’s beingcheap.’’ Thus, choosing to be a character in a game cannot be cheating, butusing certain characters may be considered ‘‘cheap’’ because they are excep-tionally powerful and render the game less challenging. Luke remarked:

It’s like taking Marvel vs. Capcom and just using what’s called ‘‘burn characters.’’ [Thecharacter Cable] has a super-hyper combo where he pulls out a giant gun and shootsyou. And if you block it, it still takes away a lot of energy. [So people will pick him]and Iron Man, who has the same kind of move.

Being cheap implies not taking up the challenge of the game to the fullestextent, which impugns one’s integrity, courage, and fortitude as a player.

A rather different element of gaming etiquette—one that speaks far moredirectly to the social interactional aspect of videogame play—involves trashtalk and taunting. Trash talk is widespread, and it may be seen as acceptableeven by those on the short end of the stick. According to Luke, being the tar-get of trash talk ‘‘adds a layer to the game.’’ Trash-talking may be a tool, likeattacks on cheaters, for putting players who deviate from game etiquette ‘‘intheir place,’’ as Eric reported. But it is a risky strategy. As Peter pointed out,‘‘I’ll trash-talk on purpose ‘cause, you know, it’s pretty much funny. But I’musually quieter like if it’s people I don’t know because if I trash-talk and thenI get wrecked, then I’ll look like an asshole.’’ In-group and out-group dynam-ics are fundamentally different (see Ducheneaut, 2010). The gamers we inter-viewed clearly were in agreement that trash-talking among friends is funnyand desirable, but trash-talking strangers in face-to-face play is imprudent.30

29 Screen cheating is the term used when players in a multiplayer game look at one another’s sec-tion of the screen in order to determine what each is doing. This is most pronounced in FPSgames, where each can see when he or she has been targeted by others.

30 The dangers trash-talking poses can sometimes be overcome not by cutting it back, but byengaging in it to such an extreme that it becomes funny—as Frank noted, to be ‘‘so ridiculousthat you know I’m joking.’’ Another interviewee argued that trash-talking may be leastrestrained by social norms in online settings, where strangers’ reprisals are less seriously feltbecause the opponent is both geographically and (in a way) socially distant.


Thus trash-talking, in its most frequent forms of usage, conveys players’involvement in the group and in the activity of gaming. Despite its outwardlycarefree and beyond-the-rules character, trash talk seriously expresses players’engagement, and thus it plays an important role in the repartee that sustainsboth the competitive and cooperative elements of videogame play.31

CONTEXTUALIZING VIOLENCE IN VIDEOGAMES, AND VERBAL

VIOLENCE IN PLAY

The violence of certain videogames has assuredly drawn considerablemedia attention, but our interviews with devoted gamers lead us to believethat they are discerning consumers of this violence. What may be of greaterconcern than the violence in games is the habitual use of racially and espe-cially sexually charged language between players in the course of game play.We devote this section to articulating these claims.

Various meanings can be attributed to identical violent acts depending onseveral factors (Cerulo, 1998), including the characteristics and intentions ofthe violent actor, the nature of the violent act itself, the context in which theviolence occurs, the traits of the victims, and the consequence of the act. Inaddition, the specific sequence in which the violence is presented to someonecan also affect whether they judge a violent act to be normal, deviant, or mor-ally ambiguous. Most central for our purposes, setting violence within a comi-cal or ‘‘play frame’’ frequently dissipates its perceived effect.

Because the definition of violence is so context dependent, nearly identicalviolence in two different games may be construed differently. Various infor-mants identified the Grand Theft Auto games as clearly violent, but refused toclassify Mario or Pokemon games as such, even though they identified jumpingon heads, electrocution, and imprisonment as elements in those latter games.They were violent perhaps, ‘‘but not in a bad way’’ (Eric). Cameron, a TaeKwon Do practitioner and a fencer, argued that whether an action in a gamewas violent or not ‘‘depends on the environment in which the violence ispresented.’’ He saw both of his other hobbies as potentially involving violentbehavior, but did not judge them to be violent from a moral standpoint. Theviolence in them was framed as self-defense, in the case of Tae Kwon Do, andas defanged, in the case of fencing. Ray, among others, judged Grand TheftAuto games and others of that ilk as especially violent because ‘‘those gamesseem like mindless violence.’’ Unlike games where one is ‘‘killing bad guys,’’here the violence serves the selfish and ignoble purpose of mere acquisition.But even in Grand Theft Auto games, the fact that people’s heads ‘‘pop off’’

31 The computer itself can become the object or the instigator of trash talk. During one session ofDonkey Konga, Eric directly addressed the computer-controlled character in the game, saying,‘‘Seventy six? Kiss my ass, computer!’’ after the computer had scored higher than all three ofthe people playing the game. In the series Guilty Gear, the character Chipp Zanuff spews, inDerek’s words, ‘‘a ridiculous amount of trash talk.’’


when they are shot tends to render the violence in them more cartoonlike, andthe violence is taken ‘‘almost to a ridiculous point’’ (Neal), thereby renderingit banal or even humorous—as with excessive trash-talking.32

In short, devoted gamers were reflective and adept at contextualizing vio-lence when confronted with it. Perhaps more problematic than the presenta-tion of violence is the apparent centrality of sexist, racist, and otherwiseabusive epithets deployed routinely and seemingly unreflectively as part of theeveryday language of interaction in multiplayer games. This is undoubtedlynot unique to videogames. Fine (1987:114) long ago acquainted us with theabundant use of terms like ‘‘queer’’ and ‘‘faggot’’ by Little League ballplayerswho had little sense of the meaning of these terms, apart from their apparentvalue as abusive epithets. However, we believe such language speaks to thedeep embeddedness of certain prejudicial attitudes in U.S. youth culture. Thelanguage may not reflect outwardly held beliefs, nor values these gamerswould act on, but these commonplace discourses may undermine the more lib-eral beliefs that gamers express as part of their official and self-conscious pre-sentations of self.

So, for example, during part of our interview with Frank, Anthony andEric played Advance Wars: Dual Strike in the background. In the course ofplay, Anthony yelled, ‘‘I ain’t gettin’ no ass pounding from these little fags’’in reference to his two in-game, computer-controlled opponents. And again,after being hit by a missile: ‘What the fuck? You’re so fucking gay! [Everyonelaughs] … God, I just got fucking boned.’’ At the initial participant-observa-tion session of the first author, Greg exulted during a game in which he wasdoing unexpectedly well: ‘‘Yo, I’m raping your ass!’’ Then, during the secondsession, when Greg decided to sit out briefly, he was taunted repeatedly byAnthony: ‘‘Yo, you’re gay. You know we’re going to start playing andyou’re going to be like, ‘Yo, it looks mad fun.’’’ Subsequently, at the thirdsession, Anthony taunted Eric by telling him, ‘‘that was a seven-chain[attack that I sent you].’’ In turn, Eric said, ‘‘Yo, I’ll seven-chain my cock inyour ass.’’ Anal sex was used repeatedly as a metaphor for ludic domination,and as an expression of how victory symbolizes the emasculation of theopponent.

At another time during the second session, while being attacked by otherplayers, Anthony yelled out, ‘‘Get the fuck off me, you dirty whores!’’Moments later he referred to his opponents as ‘‘bitches,’’ then ‘‘mother fuc-kers,’’ and in a move beyond sexual discourse into another domain of abuse,‘‘illegal immigrants.’’ During the third session, and during the playing of a dif-ferent game, Eric commented that ‘‘this level’s so Mexican’’—apparentlysomething of a derogatory reference. Anthony replied, ‘‘Gabe [our friend]would feel right at home.’’ When Eric corrected him, commenting that‘‘Gabe’s Colombian,’’ Anthony retorted, ‘‘Yeah, but we always call him a

32 Kristina bent over backward to argue that even Grand Theft Auto need not be played violently,but at the end she proffered the remarkable claim that ‘‘people are just—it’s human nature tolike violence, I guess. [pause] I find it funny to run someone over, too.’’


Mexican.’’ Eric responded by indirectly chastising Anthony: ‘‘I don’t knowwhy that is. I always call him Gabe.’’ Thus Eric refused the identification ofhis friend, not only with the wrong nationality, but in a sense with any nation-ality.

We draw these examples from only one set of gamers. Still, the use ofsuch derogatory language, while not essential to videogame play (i.e., not defi-nitional), is arguably an integral style for conveying (male) players’ commit-ment to the activity of play (Lyman, 1987). Indeed, it expresses theircommitment to a form of sociality of which games themselves become a kindof metonymic representation. The use of such language would fly almost com-pletely below the radar if our only source of data were interviews with gamers.Furthermore, although again we are dealing with one case, players seem farmore intent on policing racist language than sexist invective, a preference wesuspect is reproduced in U.S. (youth) culture as a whole.

GAMES, IDENTITY, MORALITY

Our devoted players obviously appreciated games as whole packages, butthey also found ways to let specific characters within games speak tothem—sometimes identifying with them, sometimes treating them as worthyalters. We conclude our exegesis by examining some of the ways games informdevoted players’ moral visions.

For example, Neal spoke of the character Ky Kiske in the Guilty Gearseries as ‘‘a totally good person, you know,’’ ‘‘even though he’s a little naıvein his ideals.’’ Derek appreciated the underdog quality of Chipp Zanuff inGuilty Gear. Frank and Eric both favored Ryu from the Street Fighter seriesfor his dedication and perseverance. Frank suggested that ‘‘what this characterembodies forms a lot of the philosophy that I consider very much close to myheart.’’ Eric opined that ‘‘you never get a bad vibe from him,’’ a commentthat involves imposing a good deal of autonomous motivation and mentalcapacity on the character. Perhaps most notably, Marco spoke reverently ofKirby, a pink, marshmallow-like being from the Kirby game series (Fig. 2).

I identify with Kirby. He’s so humble and courageous and funny. He’s a cool guy. He’sgreat, and at the same time, he’s not the kind of person who will exalt himself above allthese other people. It’s like—in the game it shows you his personality. He never is likeKing Dedede [the bad guy] where he’s always showing off or something. Like inone—this sounds gay, too—you get to battle King Dedede in a wrestling match and,you know, they thought Kirby was, you know, all small and stuff but then you beatKing Dedede. Kirby’s so cool.

Fascination with characters extended to ‘‘bad’’ characters as well—typi-cally, though, and consistent with our discussions of aesthetics and violenceabove, when their badness was both aesthetically appealing and could be ade-quately contextualized. Neal spoke favorably of a demon lord in the seriesDarkstalkers, whose goal of eliminating evil ‘‘was admirable’’—even though,


as it involved destroying and then remaking the world, ‘‘he was obviouslygoing about it in a bad way.’’ Frank described the main villain in the ‘‘verycinematic’’ game Metal Gear Solid as someone whose ‘‘intentions were good’’but whose ‘‘methodology is questionable, to say the least.’’33 Greg mentionedthe ‘‘badass’’ character Ganondorf from the Legend of Zelda series, withAnthony echoing: ‘‘He’s black. He’s so black.’’ In fact, the ‘‘pure badassnessin battle’’ of bad characters was seen in itself as a redeeming quality; it wasseen as ‘‘something that separates them,’’ in Derek’s words, ‘‘from just [a]cardboard bad guy.’’ Badassness makes a character fun to fight, and some-times even fun to be, as protagonists too could be labeled badass.

Finally, our interviewees expressed various forms in which videogamescould inform their moral concerns. Neal claimed to have altered his views onreligion from playing games, allowing him to realize that ‘‘maybe I shouldn’tbelieve everything I see.’’ Kristina believed videogames taught her how to be amore patient and persevering person. Eric believed Link from the Legend ofZelda series may have inspired him as a child to ‘‘stand up for a kid that wasgetting picked on one day.’’34 He also told us that his collection of gamesexpresses his ‘‘very good taste.’’

Fig 2. Kirby.

33 Frank explained that the villain’s goal is to undermine a shadow government that rules theworld by means of threatening to unleash a nuclear war—perhaps too blunt an instrument ofchange. Derek argued that no character in this game can be clearly qualified as good or bad, afact that, in his judgment, adds considerably to the appeal of the game. The ending he referredto as ‘‘a very, very profound scene’’ and the game as a whole as ‘‘very, very postmodern.’’ Hecontinued: ‘‘Metal Gear [Solid] breaks down the barriers.’’

34 Link, like many lead characters, is famous for being ‘‘silent.’’ The creators intended for him tohave no specific personality so that the character would be a ‘‘link’’ between the game and theplayer. It is noteworthy, then, that Eric regards him as heroic, as if the character were a projec-tion of the player’s own latent positive self-concept.


Videogames, then, have a capacity for enthrallment. Devoted gamers playthem intent on playing them as completely as possible. Playing the games,thinking about the games, and owning the games is an aesthetic and moralexperience, and while that aesthetic feeling can be experienced in solitude,devoted gamers play games according to informal norms, they frequentlyparticipate in joint play, they use game play to enact claims to status, and theyweave a complex relationship between interaction occurring among characterswithin the game environment and interaction occurring among themselves inthe real world, thus crafting a richly social experience.

CONCLUSION: LIMITATIONS AND DIRECTIONS FOR FURTHER

RESEARCH

Our goals have been several in this article. We have situated the socio-logical study of videogames in the context of the broader scholarly literatureon videogames and the classical literature on games and play. More impor-tantly, we have sought to augment the sociological analysis of videogameplay by exploring its meaning-making capacities, and by examining a few ofthe things young people do alone or together in the context of videogameplay. While the games themselves actively ‘‘construct’’ players to some extent,the players also domesticate the games, tasking them for their own purposesand playing them in the context of their own lives and coincident streams ofactivity.

Our study has been limited in several ways. Certainly, it would be desir-able to have a larger sample of devoted players, drawn from more diversebackgrounds. We relied on modified snowball sampling to obtain our set ofinterviewees. Such a strategy may be desirable from an idiocultural standpoint,as it is quite likely that videogamers who play together or even in proximatevenues will develop a shared, emergent style of play and perhaps a sharedethos about games, based on their shared experiences of play and the stockpileof conversational references they have jointly accrued outside the games. How-ever, this approach neglects by design the likelihood that specific manifesta-tions of devoted gaming vary considerably across settings, making it harder todevelop adequate generalizations. As with any study that relies on structuredinterview data and participant observation, it is possible that the content ofquestions and the presence of the researchers (and occasionally other intervie-wees) affected responses and behaviors. More data, and especially more ses-sions of observed gaming, would improve our understanding of the socialsignificance of videogame play. Furthermore, it is evident that different typesof games may evoke different experiences of co-presence, different intensitiesof involvement, and different opportunities for social interaction of varioussorts—instructional, comedic, contentious, focused, casual, and so on. Gather-ing more case studies would permit us to pursue a comparative approach,thereby developing a better understanding of the entire terrain of human


interactions with videogames, and the innumerable interactions amonghumans that are mediated by videogames.

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100Percenting It: Videogame Play Through the Eyes of Devoted Gamers1

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