This presentation was delivered on October 21, 2022 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022: Role-playing, Culture, and Heritage.
Description:
Gaming capital – a fifteen-year-old theory detailing how one’s gaming knowledge can be conceptualized into something tangible. Consalvo in her book “Cheating: Gaining advantage in video games” presented the term gaming capital to give a name and meaning to the collective understanding of both the individual player and the communities that entails the discussions about the game, genre, or the platform – including topics like knowledge, experience, and skill. Yet, there has not been much scholarly attention given to where one would situate gaming capital between cultural and symbolic capital, and where would social capital influence the transformation of knowledge to gaming capital. A study conducted by Walsh & Apperley about the gaming capital and its formation between classmates showed that social interaction (capital) is needed for cultural capital to turn into more social capital and/or symbolic capital. Bourdieu divided cultural capital into three categories: embodied, institutionalized, and objectified – and in the context of video games embodied and objectified gaming capital overlaps with symbolic capital. The discussion about gaming capital has been more about what it is, and what can be or can’t be gaming capital, but what steers the gaming capital an entity has at their disposal not been studied enough yet. The world of gaming has moved massively forwards in the fifteen years, and the whole concept of what “gaming” is, has subsequently changed, not only within the online multiplayer video game scene, but within the analogue role-playing games too. Both mediums have their ways of accumulating and spending capital, and not everything is different in terms of gaming capital. Therefore, this study approaches gaming capital within both MMORPGs and tabletop RPGs (Dungeons&Dragons) and discusses gaming through the lens of types of capital and their possible overlaps with definitions and applications of them in both contexts.
Bios:
Henry Korkeila is PhD candidate at the University of Turku. He holds M.Sc. in Internet and our analogue cultures as they inevitably turn into digital cultures. Henry’s research examines avatarization of our analogue cultures as they inevitably turn into digital cultures. Special focus is on avatars themselves, usage of avatars in their different contexts including online video game genres, such as massively multiplayer online and multiplayer online battle arena games and social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Currently, Henry approaches avatars through the types of capital, or resources, they have.
J. Tuomas Harviainen (PhD, MBA) works as Professor of Information Studies and Interactive Media at Tampere University, Finland. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on role-playing in both academic and practitioner venues. Harviainen is a former editor of the journals Simulation & Gaming and International Journal of Role-Playing. His main topic of current research is information sharing between people working in game development companies.
Click here to read PDF of slides (coming).
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This seminar is hosted by the Transformative Play Initiative in the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. This seminar is made possible by financial support from the Sustainable Heritage Research Forum (SuHRF). The Transformative Play Initiative explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.
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Graphic Design by Liliia Chorna. Music by Elias Faltin. Video edited by Rezmo (Mohammad Mohammad Rezaie).