'It's in the Game' and Above the Game: An Analysis of the Users of Sports Videogames

This article is a participant-observer case study of a group of sports videogame players. The game played, Pro Evolution Soccer 2008, belongs to the author-designated 'televisual' sub-genre, remediating (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) aspects of televisual coverage such as the broadcast angle, action replays and commentary teams. We investigate the use of these games and their position within both gaming and sport culture. To do so we approach the player from four perspectives: dress, body language, argot (slang, group-specific dialect), and proxemics (examining how people spatially situate themselves in regard to one another within the social environment). These categories then combine to formulate the last section, 'Social Play', where we discuss the social meta-game being enacted between participants to barter social status, capital (Bourdieu, 1984) and specific gamer capital (Consalvo, 2007).