Violência simbólica e joysticks: práticas comunicacionais e masculinidades na comunidade sobre jogos digitais

Abstract

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