Recent work on education, identity and community has expanded the intellectual boundaries of learning research. From home-based studies examining youth experiences with technology, to forms of entrepreneurial learning in informal settings, to communities of participation in the workplace, family, community, trade union and school, research has attempted to describe and theorize the meaning and nature of learning. Identity, Community, and Learning Lives in the Digital Age offers a systematic reflection on these studies, exploring how learning can be characterised across a range of ‘whole-life’ experiences. The volume brings together hitherto discrete and competing scholarly traditions: sociocultural analyses of learning, ethnographic literacy research, geospatial location studies, discourse analysis, comparative anthropological studies of education research and actor network theory. The contributions are united through a focus on the ways in which learning shapes lives in a digital age.

This article examines territorial negotiations concerning gaming, drawing on video recordings of gaming practices in middle-class families. It explores how private vs public gaming space was co-construed by children and parents in front of the screen as well as through conversations about games. Game equipment was generally located in public places in the homes, which can be understood in terms of parents’ surveillance of their children, on the one hand, and actual parental involvement, on the other. Gaming space emerged in the interplay between game location, technology and practices, which blurred any fixed boundaries between public and private, place and space, as well as traditional age hierarchies.

The present study focuses on the ways in which response cries (Goffman, 1981) are deployed as interactional resources in computer gaming in everyday life. It draws on a large-scale data set of video recordings of the everyday lives of middleclass families. The recordings of gaming between children and between children and parents show that response cries were not arbitrarily located within different phases of gaming (planning, gaming or commenting on gaming). Response cries were primarily used as interactional resources for securing and sustaining joint attention (cf. Goodwin, 1996) during the gaming as such, that is, during periods when the gaming activity was characterized by a relatively high tempo. In gaming between children, response cries co-occurred with their animations of game characters and with sound making, singing along, and code switching in ways that formed something of an action aesthetic, a type of aesthetic that was most clearly seen in gaming between game equals (here: between children). In contrast, response cries were rare during the planning phases and during phases in which the participants primarily engaged in setting up or adjusting the game.

Over the past few decades new ways of conceiving the relation between people, practices and institutions have been developed, enabling an understanding of human conduct in complex situations that is distinctive from traditional psychological and sociological conceptions. This distinctiveness is derived from a sophisticated analytic approach to social action which combines conversation analysis with the fresh treatment of epistemology, mind, cognition and personality developed in discursive psychology. This text is the first to showcase and promote this new method of discursive research in practice. Featuring contributions from a range of international academics, both pioneers in the field and exciting new researchers, this book illustrates an approach to social science issues that cuts across the traditional disciplinary divisions to provide a rich participant-based understanding of action.