RESPAWN, REPRESENTATION, OCH RELATIONER. En kvalitativ intervjustudie om HBTQpersoners syn på deras sociala upplevelser inom onlinespel

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this study is to examine how HBTQ-individuals experience and useonline games as a social arena. To answer this question, three questions wereformulated. The first question of the study is how HBTQ-groups perceive the reasonsfor their social online gaming. The second question is how marginalized groupsexperience the possibilities of exploring a new identity in a virtual world. The lastquestion is how HBTQ-groups reason about spending time in an environment thatisn’t always designed with them in mind. The baseline of this study is that digitalgames today have moved past only as a form of entertainment but now also work asa tool for communication and as a way to engage with a larger community. Previousresearch suggests that this is true for many players but that gaming as a culture oftenhas been shaped by masculine and heteronormative ideals, where the imaginedgamer is male, white and heterosexual. This study aims to explore the possibility ofonline social play for marginalized groups and whether HBTQ individualsexperience positive or negative effects from it. A qualitative interview methodologywas chosen for this study. Six qualitative semi-structured interviews took place,where the participants all identified as HBTQ and had experience with onlinegaming. The findings show that online games function as a place where socialmeetings can take place and where the participants could spend time with friends orfamily. The results showed that the participants felt like online games could work tomaintain relationships across longer distances and to exhibit self-representation andidentity exploration. Through means such as the creation of characters or otherdigital forms of expression, the participants felt that there were many ways to accruepositive social experiences. Several participants described that these opportunitieswere conditional. For many, it was common to experience toxicity, homophobia,transphobia or other forms of discrimination. Such behavior from other players wasespecially common in competitive gaming environments, where many of theparticipants felt that hegemonic masculine values were the norm. As a result, it wasoften they chose to avoid interaction with others from that environment, either byavoiding voice chat or hiding parts of their identity or by avoiding that type of gamealtogether. The results of this study show that marginalized groups experience onlinesocial play differently from the heteronormative group. HBTQ individuals cannotexpress their identity as freely without the risk of facing discrimination andharassment. For many, it has become the norm to avoid interacting with most otherpeople online and limit their play to friends, family, or other people they feelcomfortable with, such as those who are also identifying as HBTQ. To summarize, itis possible that online games can work as a social space for HBTQ individuals. It canwork as a safe place for identity exploration and to find similar people to interactwith and create relationships with. In many cases, the issue lies in theheteronormative players who reproduce exclusionary norms from offline society. Itwould require a large change in both the gaming culture but also in the industry as awhole, to truly be able to make it a safe place for social interaction to all the differentgroups that can be found in the online gaming sphere