Young people, violence and the 'everyday' co-production of geopolitical discourse in Player Unknown's Battlegrounds

This research will focus on the producers of, and young people who play, videogames to understand how popular geopolitical discourse emerges through co-productive, 'everyday' practices and explore the effects of this on young people. Advancing emerging scholarship within popular geopolitics and video game studies, this research will argue that processes of globalisation, such as improvements in online communications, have enabled game producers and the young people who play videogames, to co-produce geopolitical discourses. To do this it aims to engage with the producers of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) to gain insights into the creative practices and processes involved in the (re)production of popular geopolitical discourse through the game. This project also seeks to understand how young people as 'active audiences' and 'geopolitical agents' are involved in the co-production of popular geopolitical discourse, through 'everyday', 'violent' and creative practices of videogaming. Finally, it will attend to the social effects of engaging in practices of geopolitical co-production have on young people. To do this, the project will adopt a participatory mixed methods approach, using hybrid ethnography and semi-structured interviews to investigate how the producers of, and young people who play PUBG, co-produce and live geopolitics (Dittmer and Gray 2010). In doing so this research project will move away from the abstract focus of recent scholarship on how geopolitical discourse shapes everyday life, to instead attend to how producers and audiences alike negotiate and rework geopolitical discourses as part of their everyday lives.