Exploring Digital/Non-digital Entanglements Through Everyday Practice Connections in Young People’s Gaming

Abstract

With the digitalization of everyday life, the distinction between online and offline life is less relevant. Thus, we suggest that researchers ask how the digital and the non-digital are entangled, rather than if they are. In this study, we explore how video gaming is a digitally saturated practice that is embedded in young people’s everyday lives. We analyse 56 qualitative interviews with young Danish video game players to investigate how their gaming connects to and is formed by other practices. By examining gaming’s linkage to friendship and family practices, we show how connections are preformed and sustained through both digital and non-digital social interactions of dialogue and exchange. Additionally, we show how the values of video gaming travel beyond the game and have an impact on the wider social and cultural positions of the young practitioners. Focusing on practice connections adds new perspectives to the complex relationship between digital and non-digital elements. Unravelling these practice relationships is important if we are to understand how the lives of contemporary youth are increasingly formed by digitalized practices.