Image by N0fX via Flickr
At the beginning of June I was given the opportunity to give the academic keynote address at the annual conference ‘Under the Mask: Perspective on the Gamer‘ at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton. This was a really enjoyable event to go to – and indeed, my first games conference for some time. It was great to see that while there was an enthusiasm for playing games amongst the delegates, the work presented successfully worked at placing gaming within a broader cultural context. As the events organiser, Alison Gazzard had brought together an engaging mix of people with some presentation highlights for me from Carolyn Jong, Ewan Kirkland, Steven Boyer, Souvik Mukherjee, Ashley Brown, Astrid Ensslin and the BAFTA sponsored keynote, Tadhg Kelly.
This was a great opportunity for me to develop a few ideas on what being a gamer actually means and how it is different from being someone who plays games. The presentation I gave, ‘Finding Gamers in 140 Characters: Talk of Games on Twitter‘, started by looking at differences in the use of ‘gamer’ and ‘player’ in the academic literature before turning to gamers themselves to see how the terms are used. This is did through Tweets about ‘Portal 2‘ before moving to look at the way the category of gamer is developed as a practice involving not only playing games, but not gaming and planning gaming.
There is a written draft of the paper which needs a few tweaks to fill a few gaps and smooth the worst of the rough edges after which I’ll post it online. The slides I used (and indeed quite a few I didn’t) for the presentation are available on my Slideshare page though.
Update: The written draft of the paper, ‘Doing gaming on Twitter: Exploring 140 characters of digital gaming practice‘, is now available via scribd.
