Parties as Playful Experiences: Why Game Studies Should Study Partying

Masek and Stenros argue that partying deserves recognition as a legitimate and understudied subject within game studies, and that a dedicated "party studies" sub-field should be established. Their central claim is that parties share structural features with games, including seemingly inefficient resource use, arbitrary rules, and "as if" spaces in which ordinary social norms temporarily shift, while also producing positive experiences and reinforcing cultural customs over time. They contend that prior scholarship has approached partying primarily through risk, criminality, and marginalized subgroups, often without definitional precision, and that this framing is misleading given that parties of many kinds are normal across cultures and age groups.

The empirical foundation is a qualitative study of 33 highly playful party experiences drawn from 125 interviews with international university students in Finland. From these accounts, the authors identify three types of party-mediated social connection: parties that bring strangers together, parties that strengthen established friendships and family bonds often through shared activities such as volleyball or Minecraft, and parties functioning as broader cultural or structural instruments. Partying was raised in roughly 25 percent of playful-experience responses, and participants judged party success chiefly by the playfulness and connection achieved rather than by consumption or risk.

From these findings, the authors define playful partying as a shared, engagement-prioritizing activity that creates social connection. They acknowledge that the evidence base is narrow, drawn from a single national and demographic context, and that the study is best understood as a first empirical step. The broader contribution is programmatic: a call to expand the definition of partying beyond nightlife and drinking and to bring its playful, social, and cultural dimensions into systematic study.