“Sometimes I Like Killing as a Treat”: Children’s Transgressive Play in Minecraft

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Mavoa Jane Gibbs Martin Nansen Bjorn
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Children’s play in digital spaces is often discussed in popular discourse and in academia in terms of what kind of effect it may be having on children. One area of concern is the relationship between ‘violent videogames’ and real-world violence. However, little is known about how children actually play in digitally mediated play spaces including Minecraft which offers sandbox style free-play and does not necessarily involve any prescribed violence. We have collected recordings of 6-8-year-old children’s leisure time Minecraft play and used a taxonomic system of play types to describe the range of play observed. Some observed play did not fit neatly into any of the play types. In this paper we describe one such instance of play which involved unprovoked violence and draw on a range of literature in the process of conceptualizing this play as Transgressive. This paper provides much needed knowledge of children’s Minecraft play as it occurs in situ.

 

God is a Game Designer – Accelerating ‘Existential Ludology’

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Leino Olli
2019 DiGRA '19 - Abstract Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix

 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gamer: Reframing Subversive Play in Story-Based Games

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Tanenbaum Theresa J.
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

Much like books have “implied readers” and films have “implied viewers”, games have “implied players”. The ways in which these implied players are constructed have material implications for how games are designed and studied. In this paper I explore a pervasive narrative about the ways in which players seek to subvert the desires of game designers and storytellers. This narrative of the subversive player has informed extensive research and design in both commercial games and scholarly interactive narrative research. I argue that addressing game designs to an implied subversive player intentionally misrepresents the complex processes of meaning making that occur during play, creating an artificial conflict between the player and the designer that is harmful to the development of rich narrative in games. I propose a way of understanding subversive play as part of the process of building the literacies needed by the player to better enact the narratives of the designer, rather than subvert them.

 

Play as Transgression: An Ethnographic Approach to Queer Game Cultures

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Sundén Jenny
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

This paper is based on an ongoing ethnography of a GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) guild in the MMOG World of Warcraft. Drawing on queer/feminist theory, the argument concentrates on sexuality as resource for ‘transgressive play’. The notion of transgressive play is usually taken to mean play against the ‘ideal’ or ‘implied’ player of the game, of playing the game in ways not anticipated by design. For queer gamers, sexuality comes into play in ways that make visible the cultural norms of the ideal player – a player who is at least symbolically male and straight. This ethnographic work indicates that there are queer uses of game spaces that in significant ways make visible – and play around with – norms and expectations that are shaping what online game communities are, and what they could be.

 

I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and The Implied Player

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Aarseth Espen
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper is an attempt to understand Game Studies through the contested notion of the “player” both inside and outside “the game object” – that is the object that game users perceive and respond to when they play. Building on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of games as a subject that “masters the players”, the paper will go beyond the traditional split between the social sciences’ real players and the aesthetics/humanities critical author-as-player, and present a theory of the player and player studies that incorporates the complex tensions between the real, historical player and the game’s human components. Since games are both aesthetic and social phenomena, a theory of the player must combine both social and aesthetic perspectives to be successful. The tension between the humanities and the social sciences over who controls the idea of the player can be found mirrored also in the struggle between the player as individual and the “player function” of the game. Transgressive play, the struggle against the game’s ideal player, far from being a marginal, romanticized phenomenon, is the core expression of this struggle.