Barriers to play: accounting for non-participation in digital game play

ABSTRACT

Playing a digital game is considered to be a leisure activity; therefore playing or not playing is typically viewed as an autonomous choice motivated by individual preferences for how one spends their time not occupied by other obligations. While a growing body of interventionist literature documents new entry points for girls and women into playing or making games, investigations are primarily focused on joining rather than why someone might ultimately leave. To address this gap whereby the study of former and non-players remains under explored, I bring together two disparate areas of academic investigation: leisure studies, specifically the study of barriers and access to leisure spaces, and critical feminist games scholarship. Taken together, these two areas of investigation provide a framework to account for why women might leave a game or never begin playing in the first place. Rather than assuming that playing or not playing is exclusively about choice or interest, I argue that there is much to be learned by asking women about what games they do not play and their reasons for quitting or never purchasing or downloading a particular game in the first place.

KEYWORDS:

• Women and gaming
• YoWorld
• EVE Online
• non-participation
• player studies
• leisure studies

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Big Viking Games, MITACS, SSHRC, and OGS for providing the resources necessary for completing this research. I would also like to thank the journal’s editorial team and anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments when reviewing this article. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the former and non-players who shared their experiences, making this paper possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) [n/a]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [n/a]; Mitacs [IT08657].

Notes on contributors

Kelly Bergstrom

Kelly Bergstrom is an Assistant Professor of Communication at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Her research examines drop out and disengagement from digital cultures, with a focus on digital games. She is co-editor of Internet Spaceships are Serious Business: An EVE Online Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Previously she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s Institute for Research on Digital Learning and a MITACS Postdoctoral Researcher at Big Viking Games. E-mail: [email protected]