Gaming Expertise: Doing Gender and Maintaining Social Relationships in the Context of Gamers’ Daily Lives

Toft-Nielsen, Claus

doi:10.1515/nor-2016-0024

Abstract

This article argues for an attempt to rethink what counts as gaming expertise. Often, expertise is configured as a fixed and measurable rather than relational capacity – having the necessary level of knowledge with a skill to become expert, or to rise above a particular and objectively defined level of competency. Drawing on interviews with women playing the massively multiplayer online game

Massively multiplayer online games are games capable of supporting large numbers of players interacting, competing and cooperating, as they simultaneously inhabit the persistent open world of the game space.

World of Warcraft, the article argues for an understanding of gaming expertise as a relational, highly contextual capacity, operating and embedded in everyday situations. Through the lens of gaming expertise, the article teases out the complex ways in which gender, technology and identity intersect and are constructed and negotiated in different social contexts.

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Gaming Expertise: Doing Gender and Maintaining Social Relationships in the Context of Gamers’ Daily Lives

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