In recent years, a 'professional' digital gaming industry has emerged in North America: this interconnected series of organisations and leagues host competitive gaming tournaments (often televised) in which young, mostly male participants compete for increasingly lucrative prize money and sponsorship contracts. Taking up Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter's (2005) challenge to confront the ways girl gamers are rendered 'invisible' by gamers, researchers and designers, this paper maps the various ways women participate in a set of practices around the organisation, promotion and performance of competitive gaming, framed as the exclusive domain of (young, straight, middle class) male bodies. Mothers flying their sons' teams to events all over North America, female players participating in tournaments or promotional models operating sponsorship booths, the women who participate in competitive gaming tournaments negotiate different expectations and carry out different kinds of embodied work. Each of these 'roles', however, is tenuously maintained within a community that most commonly reads female participation in sexualised terms: mothers at events describe themselves as 'cheerleaders', female players risk being labelled as 'halo hoes' and promotional models become 'booth babes'.

Although video gaming is becoming a more widespread activity beyond its historically core demographic of young males, participation in competitive gaming remains largely male dominated. Addressing this issue, this research examines the experience of female players in one of the world's most popular games, League of Legends. Two studies-one qualitative (with 15 participants) and the other quantitative (with 16,821 participants)-confirm that although female players accrue skill at the same rate as males, there remains a dearth of female players in this community. Moreover, those females who play with a male partner are less confident in their skills and often focus on supporting their partner's advancement, not their own. This work suggests that one way to address the gender gap in gaming is to better understand and improve the social dynamics within popular games.

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This article explores the play practices of EVE Online industrialists: those primarily responsible for generating the materials and equipment that drive the game's robust economy. Applying the concept of ''immaterial labor'' to this underattended aspect of the EVE community, we consider the range of communicative and informational artifacts and activities industrialists enact in support of their involvement in the game-work that happens both in game and crucially outside of it. Moving past the increasingly anachronistic distinctions between digitally mediated labor and leisure, in game and out of game, we examine the relations of production in which these players are situated: to other EVE players, in-game corporations, the game's developer, and the broader digital economy. Seen from this perspective, we consider the extent to which EVE both ideologically and economically supports the extension of capital into increasing aspects of our everyday lives-a ''game'' in which many play, but few win.

Collegiate esports in the U.S. and Canada have grown tremendously over the past decade, through intensive investments by both universities and esports publishers. Although post-secondary institutions are believed to offer more hospitable conditions for gender-inclusive esports than professional scenes, the institutionalization of collegiate esports might be transforming these conditions. Drawing from 21 interviews with leaders of both esports clubs and varsity programs in North America, this article describes a two-tiered system of collegiate esports in which opportunities for cultivating greater gender diversity are found primarily among esports clubs, student-run and often precarious. Well-funded varsity programs, by contrast, remain overwhelmingly male-dominated, a disparity held in place by efforts within these programs to recruit-rather than develop-highly skilled players.

In 2011, Mojang released Minecraft Pocket Edition ( PE), a mobile version of their popular Minecraft franchise for Android and iOS devices that allows the infinitely blocky sandbox worlds to be manipulated directly through touchscreen interfaces. While the virtual worlds created by Minecraft players have drawn attention of various researchers, the configurations of play made possible by different gaming devices—particularly touchscreen devices—have been largely under-examined. Using Barad’s notion of apparatuses to conceptualize gaming interfaces as sites of intra-activity, our study reports on a microethology of young Minecraft PE players engaged in collaborative play sessions. Over seven play sessions, which included two sessions observing Minecraft play on personal computer (PC)- and console-based versions, we examined how players’ bodies and gaming apparatuses collaboratively materialize gaming events that highlight the space-time biases of these different modes of Minecraft play that what we call momentary and monumentary.

Electronic sports (e-sports) represents an increasingly popular and profitable array of organizations, communities, and sets of practices, all of which place tremendous value on audiences; for example, playing games competitively, in front of a crowd, represents the legitimization of gaming as spectator sport. This article reports on an audiovisual ethnography of a community of competitive gamers for whom the video camera became not so much a research tool but a promotional resource. Examining the transformations the camera enacted, both to the practice of ethnographic fieldwork and to participants’ embodied performances of competitive gaming, this article explores the central role played by recording technologies in the production of e-sports. It concludes by considering some of the intersections of surveillance, gaming, and emergent leisure practices – including the use of digital recording technologies to collect social scientific data, at a time when watching and being watched is increasingly pervasive, pleasurable, and problematic.

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