Gaming Expertise: Doing Gender and Maintaining Social Relationships in the Context of Gamers’ Daily Lives

This article argues for an attempt to rethink what counts as gaming expertise. Often, expertise is configured as a fixed and measurable rather than relational capacity – having the necessary level of knowledge with a skill to become expert, or to rise above a particular and objectively defined level of competency. Drawing on interviews with women playing the massively multiplayer online game

Massively multiplayer online games are games capable of supporting large numbers of players interacting, competing and cooperating, as they simultaneously inhabit the persistent open world of the game space.