Introduction
This paper offers a consideration of the location of gaming within patterns of everyday life. Building upon earlier work (such as Crawford 2006, and Crawford and Rutter 2007) we continue the argument for considering gamers as a media ‘audience’, as this allows useful parallels to be drawn with literatures on (other) media audiences. Specifically here, this paper argues that the concept of ‘scene’, borrowed most notably from music fan studies, provides a useful mechanism for understanding digital gaming culture. In particular, we suggest that the concept of scene is useful as this highlights how ‘elective belongings’ are located within our identities and ordinary lives, but can take on extraordinary meaning in certain (physical) spaces.
Though this paper is largely theoretical in its arguments, and endeavors to provide a basis for further and more detailed empirical work, the paper does draw on some illustrative examples in the last section to support our arguments. This data is gathered from ongoing ethnographic research into the everyday lives of digital gamers. To date, this research includes interviews with 82 gamers (66 male, 16 female) in the UK, media use diaries, and observations of gamers at play in their own homes, at several LAN events and in games arcades.
Audiences and Narratology
Crawford and Rutter (2007) argue that rather than being understood as an ‘audience’ much of the literature on gaming continues to situate gamers as individual players.
In particular, the case has often been made that gamers are simply not an ‘audience’. Eskelinen and Tronstad (2003) suggest that like many other games, such as soccer, having an audience present is not a requirement of play. However, Eskelinen and Tronstad present a very limited understanding of what an audience is; assuming that any one individual cannot occupy the positions of participant and audience at the same time, and what they do not recognize, is that through their gaming performances, gamers create spectacles, to which they are also a viewer of, and audience to (Rehak 2003).
Gamers can also be understood as an audience in a much more traditional sense. As Newman (2004: 95) writes: ‘it is essential to note that videogame experiences are frequently shared by groups, perhaps crowded around a television set in a domestic setting, or as Saxe (1994) has observed, around coin-op machines in arcades’. And recent research is increasingly highlighting the limitations of a focus merely on the individual gamer and game (Crawford and Rutter 2007).
However, there continues to be a reluctance by many (though notably not all) writers on games studies to align discussions of digital gamers with those of other media users. The basis of this rejection of the idea of gamers as a media audience needs to be understood as a wider rejection of the idea that games and gamers can be understood using theoretical and methodological tools borrowed from literary and/or film studies, such as narrative analysis.
In particular, in recent years there has been mounting and enthusiastic (and not wholly unconvincing) argument against the use of literary and film theory, and in particular narrative, in understanding digital games. For instance, several authors point out that not all games tell stories, and even those that do, tend to have very limited narratives or do this in different ways to other media forms (for instance, see Juul 2001).
This leads onto a further key criticism of a narratological approach; that unlike traditional narrative-based media forms (such as literature, television or cinema), which are ‘representational’, digital gamer are ‘interactive’ and ‘simulation’ based.
There is little doubt that the activity of playing a digital game is quantifiably different to watching a film or reading a book, and that it is an oversimplification of media forms to suggest that these can be studied in the same ways. However, while we do not wish to advocate the wholesale application of ‘second-hand’ theories borrowed from other disciplines, we would similarly warn against, not adopting (and if necessary adapting) still applicable ideas and tools and also making connections with other disciplines and areas of study.
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