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(Im)politeness and Moral Order in Online Interactions
Edited by Chaoqun Xie
[Benjamins Current Topics 107] 2020
► pp. 99–123

Impoliteness and the moral order in online gaming

In recent years, eSports, online gaming, and live computer game streaming have grown into a global, multi-million dollar industry. In the context of online gaming, however, there is a prevailing moral order (Kádár 2017) that allows and perhaps even encourages impoliteness against female gamers, positioning them as inferior, unwelcome, or peripheral. Drawing from a corpus of over 150 hours of live game streams and concurrent open-forum chat, this study identifies rituals and tropes (such as spam and banter) that reinforce gendered practices as they relate to the moral order in the online gaming setting. It then explores strategies used by one female gamer to manipulate the expectations of the online gaming medium and its hegemonic notions of femininity. In this way, she can resist a moral order which positions her as disempowered, and thereby gain social capital within the community.

Keywords: multimodal, impoliteness, digital communication, moral order, computer-mediated communication, gender
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
    • 2.1Game studies
    • 2.2The moral order and rules of games
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Ritual and moral order in the venue of online gaming
    • 3.2Data
    • 3.3Methods
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Rules as markers of the moral order
    • 4.2Being a “boobie streamer”
    • 4.3Rituals that reflect the moral order
      • 4.3.1Ritual One: Choosing champions
      • 4.3.2Ritual two: Spam
      • 4.3.3Ritual three: “Boobie banter”
    • 4.4Objectification versus morality
  • 5.Discussion and further directions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.107.ip.00014.lam
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