Programme full

Wednesday 15 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 2
The paper explores the phenomenon of a growing video game culture (Crawford, 2012; Newman, 2013), which
encompasses a wide range of different social transformations: the increasing number of people who play video games
regardless of their age, gender or social status; a flourishing video game industry that is becoming hegemonic; an
incipient presence of video games in the fields of education; the multiplication of the presence of video games in the
media; the penetration of video games in popular culture.
The paper sets out the methodology used in my research, which draws principally on the Actor-Network Theory
(Latour, 2007; Law, 2004), focusing on the innovative aspects of digital ethnography (Hine, 2000) and how it
intertwines with more traditional methods.
Then, the paper illustrates some of the main themes I have found in the research so far with a series of examples,
which includes, how developers seek to affect and influence video gamers, how people define themselves in relation
to the activity of playing video games, and how they depict the community of gamers.
Talent or Connections? A Social Network Analysis of Early Career Artists in London
O’Brien, D.
(Keele University)
Inequality and culture is a key issue for both political parties and for a range of arts and cultural organisations. There is
already an extensive sociological contribution to the question of how cultural audiences and participants are stratified,
whether around age, gender, education or social class. Recently questions as to the sociology of cultural production
have emerged as similarly important. Although debates over cultural production go back to classics in the field, such
as Becker's Art Worlds, it has only been in recent years, in keeping with concerns about the representativeness of
other elite positions, that the question of who is successful and the basis of this success have become part of
mainstream public, media and policy discourses. This paper addresses these concerns in two ways: in the first
instance by applying the methodology of social network analysis to understand how artists develop their careers.
Second by showing how existing social inequalities are replicated in fine art graduates' experiences, irrespective of
questions of talent or skill. The paper's focus on fine art contributes to existing applications of social network analysis
in music, to provide further evidence of the link between the exclusion of individuals from the system of cultural
production as a result of social stratification.
The Militarization of First Person Shooter Video Games
Duell, A.
(Keele University)
Since the inception of E-sports we have seen casual video game players develop into professionals who push the
boundaries of game mastery to new heights via coordinated team play. This short paper explores how a group of
video game players adopt military-style communication methods and strategies to coordinate their actions in the
popular tactical First Person Shooter (FPS) video game DayZ (Bohemia Interactive, 2014). Utilising the key
components of team interaction in the context of distributed and ad-hoc military teams (Pascual et al., 1997), it is
shown how a group of players evolved their interactions from team play to squad play. It is argued that squad play is
an advancement of the strategic and tactical thinking embodied in team play through the adoption of real-world military
interaction and communication strategies.
Families and Relationships
M225, GEORGE MOORE BUILDING
NARRATIVE TECHNOLOGIES OF INTIMACY IN TRANSITION
This panel addresses transition and related questions of progression and regression in connection with narrative
technologies of intimacy - interpersonal stories about previously ‘private’ issues, and various forms of online,
‘personal’ narratives – that are now being deployed to negotiate the fields of gender, sexuality, and parenting. We
thus focus on how technologies of personal lives, in reinventing themselves, both reproduce and depart from earlier
modes of governing subjects. These processes have regressive as well as progressive aspects; they position
personal lives and the technologies that perform them as socially transitional, often precarious. In this panel, we turn
to narratives, technologies that perform intimacy at a number of levels, to understand better the technologies of
intimacy in transition. Papers address stories about the previously privatised field of sexuality among Turkish women,
and the stories’ relation to ‘modernity’; Moroccan women’s groups’ use of the internet as a technology of modernity,
89 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University