Concerned with Computer Games: A Collective Analysis of Being and Becoming Gamer in Denmark

This paper suggests a collectively developed qualitative approach into inquiring and thereby shedding unexpected light on common concerns as expressed in psychological research on video gaming. For years, “The Video Game War” has been reproducing polarized debates on whether games are harmful or not. The search for universal knowledge and unequivocal answers to individual gaming behavior and its effects produces polarized positions, not only within psychological media effects research but also in opposition to it, as in digital game studies (DGS). In media effect research questions of effective and exact operationalization of variables gain prevalence over questions of conceptual clarity and conceptual development. The complexity of video game concerns, for instance in terms of their digital-analogue entanglements and how these co-enact the effects and meaning of violent video gaming, is neither conceptually debated nor of concern. In DGS, on the other hand, such specificities and entanglements are not considered and issue of concern, leaving yet another conceptual void. This chapter therefore addresses video game concerns from psychological traditions that cross disciplinary boundaries and take their point of departure from within the complexity of video gaming situations. Our approach is concerned with the aforementioned entanglements and the situated, ongoing becomings of sociomaterial and subjective phenomena, including how research itself operates with agential cuts within these becomings. The aim is to transgress one-sided questions and explanations such as video game harm versus personal traits in the gamer as risk factors. By engaging ethnographic material and qualitative methodologies, we sketch outlines of an analytical framework that will enable ways of posing new types of questions and thus leveraging more complex knowledge with regard to video game concerns.