Domesticating Play, Designing Everyday Life: The Practice and Performance of Family, Gender, and Gaming

Enevold's paper argues that digital gaming is best understood through the domestic arrangement of its material objects, including screens, consoles, and handhelds, which families position and move around the home in ways that domesticate play and reflect broader norms of family, gender, and gaming. Drawing on ethnography and practice theory, the study draws on the "Gaming Moms" project, involving roughly 45 participants, with detailed case studies of several middle-class European households. Its contribution lies in showing that technology adoption and domestic design are mutually constitutive with family life, so that gaming practices are shaped by, and in turn reshape, the performance of family and everyday time-space rather than being determined by individual choice.

The findings consistently show play subordinated to sleep, food preparation, work, and joint family activities. Bedroom computers are ranked by activity, with sleep prioritized above both work and play, and regulation operates through routine and implicit norms rather than overt surveillance. Mothers typically carry the greatest share of domestic labor, and this responsibility shapes the gender-power system that governs who gets access to play. Spatial arrangements, aesthetic preferences, and even cabling infrastructure, such as concealed wires and PCs placed near wall outlets, determine where and how gaming occurs.

The study also traces a historical shift as wireless internet, laptops, and living-room consoles moved play into shared family spaces, while turned-away screens and individual devices simultaneously privatized it. In its concluding argument, the paper emphasizes that families moving devices into bedrooms and onto mobile formats such as smartphones and tablets altered parental control, family interaction, and gendered routines.

Because the work is qualitative and limited to a small set of households, it describes patterns rather than offering generalizable statistics. Its conclusions rest on ethnographic observation and the author's own family experience, framed through the practice theory of de Certeau, Bourdieu, and Shove and colleagues.