Kaufman, Imo
(2025)
A lived and living UK gaming oral history: untangling narratives of resistance and resurgence in videogame space.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
This thesis critically examines gaming subjectivities, games culture, and ideologies that circulate within videogames and their communities. Via a series of oral history interviews, and with an emphasis on a person-centred approach, this research scrutinises the bleed between gaming culture and far-right belief systems, evidenced by issues like identity policing and online harassment. However, rather than focusing on the extreme edges of games culture, which movements of organised harassment like Gamergate made overt, this work considers the gaming mainstream and the experiences of ostensibly “normal” people within gaming; what they think, and how they feel, about videogames, gamer identity and games culture.
As well as examining challenges games culture faces, this work considers how we can resist resurgent discourses within game space. Through a feminist, queer point of view – that is grounded in the thesis’ theoretical approach – this research seeks to not only understand the ideological knots and contradictions that far-right discourses operate through in gaming, but how we might begin to untangle them. This untangling is facilitated by an overarching concern and implementation of affect as a theoretical and analytical framework; emphasising the importance of how videogames make people feel. Part of this emphasis is framing gamer as an “affective” identity. In other words, gamer identity as made, maintained and disturbed through feeling and emotion.
I am concerned with how videogames are meaningful to the interview participants here, players in gaming communities, players outside of gaming communities, and the stereotypical gamer. Examining this meaningfulness requires understanding how we relate to gaming histories, as well as how we think about gaming in the present, which has implications, in turn, for how we do or do not connect with gamer identity. What is at stake in conversations about videogames and gaming culture, the stories, opinions and thoughts that interview participants articulated, is often more than just videogames; it is about access to spaces, belonging to a community, how we perceive our own identity, and our ability to play and have fun. Ultimately, this research is about people in gaming spaces, and how videogames are meaningful to them in ways that are inherently subjective and personal. This subjectivity is reflected in the research’s interview-led approach. This thesis contends with what is difficult about videogame culture but is also concerned with the people who exist within and move through it, and how they feel about videogames, and why this matters.
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