Expertise as gender performativity and corporeal craftsmanship: Towards a multilayered understanding of gaming expertise. (August 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Toft-Nielsen, Claus; Nørgård, Rikke Toft
• Is Part Of: Convergence. Volume 21:Number 3(2015:Aug.)
• Page Start: 343
• Page End: 359
• Publication Date: 2015-08
• Subjects: Craftsmanship -- corporeality -- expertise -- gameplay -- gaming expertise -- gender -- performativity -- technicity; Mass media -- Technological innovations -- Periodicals; Telecommunication -- Periodicals; Mass media and technology -- Periodicals; 621.3897
• DOI: 10.1177/1354856515579843
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1354-8565

Abstract

This article is an attempt to rethink the assumptions and presumptions made about work on expertise and gameplay in an effort to tease out how such assumptions and presumptions are not only implicated in our analyses to date, but also misleading with regard to what we would see if we had a different framework for viewing. Our starting point here is that expertise is not a measurable and fixed capacity but rather relational, something produced within a techno-social system, where technology, gender, corporeality and identity intersect in complex multilayered ways, conditioned by the social contexts of use and the corporeal–locomotive expressions of craftsmanship technicity. In this article, we show how different methodological lenses and conceptual frameworks can be used to highlight different but interconnected aspects of the performance of expertise with regard to gaming.