Events and collusions: A glossary for the microethnography of video game play

Giddings, Seth

Abstract

This essay draws on a number of recent research projects that record and analyze video game play. The "microethnographic" approach that they develop suggests methodological strategies, both for analyzing gameplay and for identifying and conceptualizing relationships between technology, agency, and aesthetics in everyday technoculture across and between the virtual and the actual. It suggests a new model of technoculture in everyday life, shifting analytical and critical attention away from established research objects and notions (the "impact" of technologies, consumption, identities and subjectivity, interactivity) and toward the "event" of gameplay as one with nonhuman as well as human participants, and brought into being by relationships, and translations, of human and nonhuman agency. © 2009 SAGE Publications.

• Journal Article Type: Review
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 8, 2019
• Journal: Games and Culture
• Print ISSN: 1555-4120
• Electronic ISSN: 1555-4139
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 144-157
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412008325485
• Keywords: videogames, technoculture, ethnography, microethnography, microethology
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/997036
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1555412008325485