Digital gameplay is now firmly embedded in everyday practices in many Scandinavian homes. This paper deals with the constitution of such practices by taking a closer look at the choreographing of the material objects essential to play and their role in the “design of everyday life” (Shove et al. 2007). Previous studies have looked at how players’ gaming habits are tied up with time restrictions and time allowances that to a large extent are gendered (Enevold & Hagström 2008; Enevold & Hagström 2009). Here I turn to the domestic spaces of play, scrutinizing the home environment, in which the large part of today’s playing of digital games takes place. Thus, instead of looking at how gaming1 is moving out of the bedrooms and into big LAN-landscapes (Taylor & Witkowski 2010), this paper turns to the “domestication of play,” and thus goes back inside the house, to see what it is doing to families and what families do with it. Domestication is understood as the process which makes play an everyday practice of the domestic realm and “bends” it to the wills and norms of the family. This article also investigates influence in the opposite direction: how play conditions domestic practices.
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