An "Easy Life" or "No Freedom of Expression"? Men's Experiences of Game Culture

This paper examines how men experience gender within game culture, a topic that has received comparatively little scholarly attention because research on gaming and gender has largely centered on women's experiences of marginalization, exclusion, and harassment. Its central aim is to move beyond the assumption that toxic masculinity defines gaming, instead documenting a more varied range of masculine expressions among players. Drawing on Andrea Waling's call for phenomenologically oriented accounts of masculinity, the authors position their work as an extension of earlier studies of gaming and masculinity by Maloney et al. and Taylor and Vorhees.

The study is based on interviews with 21 Norwegian men aged 16 to 57 who regard video games as an important part of their everyday lives. Data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative method suited to exploring how individuals make sense of significant experiences. The sample is limited in geographic scope to Norway, and the findings reflect the subjective interpretations of participants rather than generalizable population-level patterns.

Among the key findings, all respondents hold a clear sense of themselves as men, yet they relate to idealized masculine categories within both game culture and mainstream society in varied ways. Many participants are hesitant to adopt "gamer" as an identity marker, reflecting the term's contested status. Nonetheless, the respondents broadly agree that games and game culture constitute a gendered space, though they offer differing explanations for why this is the case. The authors use these accounts to add nuance to existing conceptual frameworks such as gaming masculinity and gamer masculinity.