Playing with Sims as a Space of One's Own

Abstract

Studies of women's use of popular media have highlighted how these contested genres may be used by women to create a space of their own. Is this also the case when the media text in question is a digital game and the community around it moves online? Investigated via a netnographic approach, this article analyses the articulated experiences of playing The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 in relation to how the players perceive the activity's function in their everyday lives. Seven emic categories are identified and discussed in the inductive analysis, namely “relaxation and dealing with stress,” “playing according to mood,” “managing and taking control,” “experimentation,” “get what one does not have,” “making something one's own,” and “creative outlet.” A central denominator of these seven categories is the notion of a space of one's own in the widest sense of the phrase. In the discussed accounts playing becomes a way not only to escape other obligations for a while but also in various ways to work with the self and its place in everyday life.

Keywords::

• popular media
• digital games
• gender
• everyday life
• leisure

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the respondents for sharing their lives and playing with me. I am also very grateful for all the insightful comments and criticisms given by the two reviewers as well as the MELVI group at University of Southern Denmark.

Notes

^1. The respondents' written answers to my questions appear here in their original wording, complete with any spelling or grammatical errors. This reflects both the informal, conversation-like mood of the correspondence as well as the fact that several respondents do not have English as their first language.

^2. Internet based communication is often searchable and accessible long after it was created, consequently netnographic data may be more easily traced to the source compared to interviews and observations carried out face-to-face (Kozinets, 2010, 136–156). In order to protect the privacy of the respondents, they as well as their custom made Sims and worlds appear under pseudonyms.

^3. The emic categories may overlap slightly as they seek to reflect respondents' own understandings and vocabulary.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Mosberg Iversen

Sara Mosberg Iversen is an assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. Her research and teaching mainly centres on digital media, particularly digital games. She has studied both digital games as procedural texts as well as their uses, focusing on points of intertwining: the weave of games' mechanics and expressive elements into unique aesthetic works as well as the intersections of games and players in the actualisation of game-texts and experiences. E-mail: [email protected]