Lina Eklund

Recent attention to the question of preservation and exhibition of video games in cultural institutions such as museums indicates that this media form is moving from being seen as contentious consumer object to cultural heritage. This empirical study examines two recent museum exhibitions of digital games: GameOn 2.0 at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm (TM), and Women in Game Development at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, Oakland (MADE). The aim is to explore how games are appropriated within such institutions, and thereby how they are configured as cultural heritage and exhibitable culture. The study uses actor-network theory in order to analyse heterogeneous actors working in conjunction in such processes, specifically focusing on translation of games and game culture as they are repositioned within museums. The study explores how games are selectively recruited at both institutions and thereby translated in order to fit exhibition networks, in both cases leading to a glossing over of contentious issues in games and game culture. In turn, this has led to a more palatable but less nuanced transformation of video games into cultural heritage. While translating video games into cultural heritage, the process of making games exhibitable lost track of games as culture by focusing on physical artefacts and interactive, playable fun. It also lost track of them as situated in our culture by skimming over or ignoring the current contentious nature of digital games, and

Digital technology is increasingly used to enhance museum experiences for visitors. Concurrently, research shows that people seldom visit museums alone, yet design often focusses on creating individual experiences. This article addresses this conundrum by examining visitor's social interaction and meaning-making in museums in order to provide empirical results actionable for design. It does so through an ethnographic approach combining observations and extended focus group interviews in an analogue museum. Results highlight how museums are social spaces, made so by active participant visitors. Processes of social meaning-making occur as visitors draw on objects in social identity-making and recontextualization-linking the past to the present-, play, share knowledge, and engage in embodied practices. The study suggests shifting from designing personalized toward interpersonal experiences. Four design sensitivities are presented: Interpersonalized meaning-making, playful sociality, social information sharing, and social movement.

This study investigates the relationship between playable, interactive games on original hardware and the representation of game culture using the case of the exhibition GameOn 2.0, often considered to be the largest exhibition of digital games in the West so far. Qualitative interviews with museum staff were used in order to elicit their perspective on the relationship between playability and contextualization. Our results suggest that play as a way of engaging with games as museum objects has limitations which make it necessary to add other means of contextualization in order to afford critical engagement with digital games as cultural heritage. Play excludes visitors who lack necessary gaming skills as well as many genres of games which need longer or different kinds of interaction than a museum can allow for in the context of an exhibition. Moreover, we show that not all games can be exhibited in the same way and that we need to adapt exhibition strategies to individual games and their properties and contexts.

Digital games have become a central part of contemporary culture and society. At the same time digital games provide numerous challenges for collections, preservation efforts, documentation, and exhibitions. This article investigates the challenges and opportunities implicit in LAM convergence and collaboration with actors outside of the LAM-sector itself. These actors are stakeholders of various kinds within game culture: game makers and industry, players, and rogue archives. More specifically, we turn to the collaboration in two Nordic museums in their work with digital games: The Finnish Museum of Games and the National Swedish Museum of Science and Technology. We draw on their
actual efforts at collaboration between LAM-institutions and outside stakeholders and analyze them through the lens of political participation and agonistic pluralism. These concepts come from an interpretation of the participatory agenda in cultural policy that aims to resolve inconsistencies in the participatory agenda specifically around neoliberal logics of participation. The paper asks: How can the preservation of digital games be supported through participation of stakeholders inside and outside the LAM sector, and what policy changes would such collaborations require?
This paper concludes that political participation and agonistic pluralism are useful concepts for the modeling and understanding of game preservation and provide a possible solution for the paradoxes of the participatory agenda in Nordic cultural policy. Our comparison of the work in two museums shows that approaches that empower participants can lead to successful and surprising exhibitions not possible without the sharing of curatorial power. Policy regulating LAM-institutions should change in order to accommodate players, makers, and rogue archives as participants in game preservation efforts. For the future the participatory agenda in cultural policy should be interpreted through the lens of political participation and agonistic pluralism as calling for truly empowering participants in order to elevate participation in game preservation from lucky accidents to a political participation policy.

Crowdsourcing, as a digital process employed to obtain information, ideas, and solicit contributions of work, creativity, etc., from large online crowds stems from business, yet is increasingly used in research. Engaging with previous literature and a symposium on academic crowdsourcing this study explores the underlying assumptions about crowdsourcing as a potential academic research method and how these affect the knowledge produced. Results identify crowdsourcing research as research about and with the crowd, explore how tasks can be productive, reconfiguring, and evaluating, and how these are linked to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, we also identify three types of platforms: commercial platforms, research-specific platforms, and project specific platforms. Finally, the study suggests that crowdsourcing is a digital method that could be considered a pragmatic method; the challenge of a sound crowdsourcing project is to think about the researcher's relationship to the crowd, the tasks, and the platform used.

Today adolescents grow up and make friends in an increasingly digital society, which has led to the study of potential effects of digital gaming on youths' friendships. To date studies have tended to focus on online settings with a knowledge gap concerning the role of gaming identity for friendship formation in offline settings. The current study addresses this, applying a longitudinal social network approachdto investigate whether being a gamer impacts adolescent friendship formation. Data was collected by questionnaire from an entire cohort (n ¼ 115) of pupils (age 16e18) on three occasions during their first year in a Swedish high school. Data was analysed using a stochastic actor-oriented model, developed for testing hypotheses concerning social network changes. Results show that being similar in terms of identifying as a gamer at the later part, but not the start, of the school year makes a friendship 1.5 times more likely. We conclude that shared identities related to digital gaming influence individuals' offline, everyday social relationships as, in the analyses of changes over time to youths' school networks, digital gaming seems to motivate friendship formation.

This empirical study investigates social digital gaming habits through a national survey of Swedes aged 12–100. The enquiry concerns patterns of gaming and compares playing with different co-players in order to map out this growing practice among the general population. Logistic regression models are used to analyse the data. Results show support for the importance of separating different social gaming contexts according to the relational status of co-players: whom people play games with – family, friends or strangers – affects how players engage with games. Social gamers were younger, had higher achieved education, were more dedicated and spent more time on gaming. Furthermore, contrary to expectations, male gamers are more social than female gamers. Results show how digital gaming adapts to life rather than the other way around. Finally, digital gaming is shown to be situated in a complex weave of interactions and structures that go over and beyond the gaming itself.

Studies of virtual worlds are often based on the dichotomous ’real world’/’virtual world’, yet research has indicated that this division is far from unproblematic. The aim of this study is to examine empirically the link between online/offline using the example of social online gaming. The data consist of individual and group interviews with 33 adult gamers. The results explore three themes—sociability and design; group membership; norms and rules—and show how on-and offline are inexorably linked through the social organizational demands of Internet gaming. Individuals ground online group membership in offline relations and shared characteristics, aiming to maximize game-play gains and support sociability. Gaming with ’people like us’ facilitates creation of norms and expectations, which aids in producing stable social groups. Thus the boundary between online and offline becomes contingent on links between people. The study shows how important offline connections are for online interaction.


Highlights
•    Online/offline is connected as users meet demands on collaboration to achieve goals.
•    Online/offline is linked through preferences for leisure that supports sociability.
•    Online/offline division is highly contingent on the practices engaged in.
•    Techno-utopian ideology hides preference for ties between users based on similarity.
•    Homophily facilitates shared norms, which produce stable social groups.

This explorative study focuses on the performance of gender and sexuality in World of Warcraft (WoW), an online game, following Butler’s performance theory. Through interviews with female WoW players, gender and sexuality is analysed. The article argues that we cannot study gender online without also looking at sexuality. Gender performances are discussed within the framework of four themes: the avatar; strategies; sexuality, and the contextual importance of WoW. Results show that gender identity construction in WoW is an ongoing process highly dependent on the social context of play. The women interviewed created gendered and sexualized identities constrained and empowered by the rules of the game and the opportunities it offers as well as of their social relations. Although a heterosexual norm rules, there are possibilities hitherto unrecognized for queer performance within the gendered role play in WoW and the game offers the possibility of multiple and alternative performances of the self.

Digital gaming is a still expanding activity and many games are engaged in together with others. The study builds on previous research investigating social digital gaming using a representative survey sample. The aim is to investigate who the social gamers and social gaming companions are in order to capture this growing practise. Logistic regression models and descriptive statistics are used to analyse the data. Using a representative sample of digital game users, the results show support for the importance of separating different social gaming contexts according to the relational status of gaming companions. Furthermore, results show, contrary to expectations that male gamers are more social than female gamers. Also, social gamers where younger, had higher achieved education, where more dedicated and spent more time on gaming. However, different social gaming contexts, gaming with family/frinds/strangers online, where all predicted by different variables.

This empirical study focuses on online collaboration and social interaction in temporary group formations. A case study of a massive multiplayer online game World of Warcraft explores these issues. Within this context little attention has been paid to temporary collaboration groups. The phenomenon is analyzed using interaction data complemented with interview data, forum data and consideration of game design.

We found two main types of interaction, sociable and instrumental, but investment in the social situation was exceedingly little. We conclude that the low levels of social interaction observed are the result of a game design that makes the cost of social play high and restricts the available space for players to act within the designed architecture of the game, thus limiting the possibilities for played sociality. The connection between designed and played sociality is crucial for understanding online collaboration as it shapes online social worlds and therefore users’ experiences within this social context.

This dissertation is an exploration of the practice of social digital gaming, using a mixed methods approach with complementary data and analytical methods. The main themes are the prevalence and meaning of gamers’ experiences of social gaming and the underlying structures limiting or assisting social gaming, both material and social. Applying an everyday perspective, focus is on gamers’ day-to-day practices and experiences. Studies I and II enquire into relational aspects of social gaming based on interviews and survey data. Study III investigates the relationship between game design and gamer agency and its importance for social interaction with strangers, using in-game participant observation. Lastly in Study IV, building on interviews, female gamers come to the fore as their gender construction in an online game is examined with the aim of understanding the connection between online and offline.

The main result concerns how social gaming takes place in various social relations. How gaming comes to be―what it means―is dependent on the relations between gamers, be they family members, real life friends, Internet friends or strangers. In these interactions, gender and sexual identity are realized; in the relations between gamers, physical proximate or online. Finally, virtuality is shown to be a social accomplishment of the people engaging in games rather than a property of the games themselves.

Focus on the relational unveils how gaming comes to be in the process of interaction, a process at the same time dependent on underlying structures, i.e. games as designed platforms with certain affordances for social behaviour. We are able, thus, to reconcile the social constructivist position that (social) gaming is created in the relations between gamers engaging in games with the more formalist approach that games are rule based structures. Games create a foundation for interaction that can further develop into the creation/maintenance of relationships and identity.

"This study explores how rationalization logic and rationalization processes influence digital gaming by looking at how players value and manage the time they spend on games. The study is framed in a discussion of leisure time, critical theories of computation and rationalization theory. Qualitative interview data is used in an inductive and phenomenology inspired approach.

The results show two frames of understanding of gaming. First, games are perceived as media products and playing as a waste of time. Secondly, digital gaming is a hobby, a social activity highly valued within the framework of a rational time economy. We conclude that even though we are seeing a rationalization of leisure time in gaming, that rationalization process must be understood in the context of individualization within the new network society. This means that players are involved in a 'rational individualization' process where their management of leisure time and gaming activities are part of an ongoing identity project."