Dissertação
Violência simbólica e joysticks: práticas comunicacionais e masculinidades na comunidade sobre jogos digitais
Fecha
2020-03-25Autor
Mello, Leonardo Andrada de
Institución
Resumen
Playing games is a cultural activity inherent to humanity since immemorial times. Playing
games is also an essentially collective action, in which individuals gather around the act of
playing. This work aims to study the community of people who play, created around the most
recent manifestation of this activity, electronic games. It aims to understand the
communicational practices of the members of the community about digital games, with regard
to Steam platform and among other people who play. It also seeks to understand the symbolic
capital relations with these practices, observing what types of symbolic violence occur in this
community, discussing the impact of this tension between violence and resistance in the games
m arket as well as in the representations of this culture. To do so, the study follows a
triangulation of methods, as proposed by Bourdieu, seeking an analytical framework for a better
understanding of this community with an ethnographic inspired approach in side a WhatsApp
group formed by people who play. From that, we discuss subjects such as representativeness,
violence, prejudice and masculinity, relating the group discussions with the ones on Steam
platform. The results show that: a symbolic capital speci fic to the field, “gamming capital”,
serves as currency for conservation or subversion of the field; that there are several forms of
symbolic violence and that, due to their subjectivity, sometimes they are not perceived by those
who suffer from it and als o are denied by those who perpetrate it; that the market is looking for
ways to react, but it seems that mainly in the sense of expanding the consumer audience; that
hegemonic masculinity is expressed both openly (with attacks and aggressions ) and in smal l
nuances of behavior,; that the community does not understand itself as homophobic, racist or
sexist, but that it presents this behavior expressed in different ways; and that the symbolic
capital invested in certain topics becomes a risk capital for parti cipants in certain groups