The Gaming Capital. a Study of Gaming Communities through Bourdieusian Theories
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Melbourne, Australia
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Scholars debated the nature of gaming communities adopting different perspectives and definitions. Gaming has hence been studied prevalently as a subculture (Krzywinska & King, 2005; Boellstorff, 2006; Williams et al., 2006; Crawford & Rutter, 2006; Downing, 2011; Ruffino & Carbone, 2014) or postmodern subculture (Hodkinson, 2002; Meikle, 2013;), and less often as a lifestyle (Dutra, 2021), a youth scene (Adamus, 2012), as a tribe (Maffesoli, 2008; Caizapanta, 2011), or as neo-tribe (Bennett, 1999; Bennett, 2005; Law, 2016; Hardy et al., 2018; Marechal et al, 2019), whilst the original definition of “virtuaculture” (Crowe and Bradford, 2007) seemed to not be common in academic literature. Other scholars overcome the limitations of such categories adjusting Bourdieu’s cultural capital to this context. The gaming capital (Consalvo 2007; Consalvo 2009b; Walsh & Apperley, 2009) represents a powerful instrument to study gaming communities, whilst other elements of the bourdieusian theory may complete the toolbox for sociological analysis (Malaby, 2006; Toft-Nielsen & Krogager, 2015; Vossen, 2018; Keogh, 2021; Jaćević, 2022). Nevertheless, a complete theory of the gaming capital has not been structured yet. This study strives to understand how different kinds of video games players access and gain gaming capital: in particular, the present study will investigate the difference between hard-core gamers (Poels et al., 2011; Braegger & Moeller, 2021) and casual gamers (Juul, 2010). The research is informed by semistructured interviews to young people aged between 18 and 30 years old who are part of the Australian gaming community. The data are transcribed and coded via computer assisted analysis (Mortelmans, 2019).
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XX ISA World Congress of Sociology
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Pitroso, G, The Gaming Capital. a Study of Gaming Communities through Bourdieusian Theories, XX ISA World Congress of Sociology, 2023, pp. 609-609