Reading Guides – Game Analysis

Week 1: Ellis et al. (2011) Autoethnography as Method

Ellis et al. situate autoethnography in its academic context of anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology (all fields with ties to contemporary game studies). Stemming from postmodernist thought, autoethnography adopts a deliberate value-centered approach rather than assuming or entertaining the thought of an objective, value-free approach. Cultural experience and personal experience are put in conversation with one another, allowing for the disruption of “canonical” narratives, the acknowledgement of researcher subjectivity, and the production of accessible, intentionally affective, analytical texts. As you read, think about the central pillars of implicating, meaning-making, and power; research methods are the toolkit we use to carry out the work of untangling these concepts.

They highlight that autoethnography is both process and product. What does that mean to you?
The authors suggest that autoethnography “attempts to disrupt the binary of science and art” (p. 283). If we turn this binary into a spectrum, where would you position video game analysis?

Week 2: Anable (2018) Playing with feelings

In this book, Aubrey Anable applies affect theory to game studies, arguing that video games let us “rehearse” feelings, states, and emotions that give new tones and textures to our everyday lives and interactions with digital devices. Rather than thinking about video games as an escape from reality, Anable demonstrates how video games-their narratives, aesthetics, and histories-have been intimately tied to our emotional landscape. The introduction posits video games as structures of feelings that can affect the form of our emotional state, moreover, this ability plays a vital role in “why we play games and why they matter”. She also states her two primary claims: “bodies are not machines and that affect is not virtual”. In chapter 4, she discusses failure, its aesthetics, and its role in video games. She points to implicit expectations for games and game design, tied to success and failure, and by referencing a number of games, how these expectations can be diverted.

Anable talks about the affect and emotions games can evoke, what are some emotions that you have felt while playing games? Especially, what type of emotions can games invoke by letting you fail?
In Anable’s definition of affect, she poses that it “speaks to the ways these felt but unexpressed feelings might be held in common and also might stem from actual, material, and nameable conditions.” When you play Life is Strange, can you pinpoint some of these conditions that (could) create an emotion?

Week 3: Ruberg (2020) Empathy and its Alternatives

Contemporary game design has given rise to a significant number of games that “tackle” marginalized experiences, made by and for marginalized audiences. Bo Ruberg investigates how these games, termed “empathy games”, are paratextually marketed as being made for the purpose of making players feel good about the world and themselves. By misattributing the target audiences of these games, these rhetorics of empathy contribute to the idea that the goal of these games is to “teach” players about an experience that they are unfamiliar with, and in doing so allow players to feel pity for people undergoing that experience. This flattens marginalized experiences into digestible, palatable chunks, intended for consumption by an assumed “default” player. As you read, think about your own positionality as a player and researcher in relation to the games you play; who is implicated in the feelings that playing brings out in you? What does it mean for an audience to interpret a game’s meaning in ways that are unintended by its creator(s)? As Ruberg talks about a “hegemony of feeling” and “social hierarchies” within games, what power imbalances do you think are at work?

How do you think the term “rhetoric of empathy” applies to Life is Strange?
What are the alternatives for empathy that Ruberg identifies? What do they mean?

Week 4: Nieborg & Foxman (2023) Mainstreaming and Game Journalism

Chapter 4, The Many Streams of Game Journalism, and Chapter 5, What It’s Actually About, focus on the categorization and classification of problems around contemporary game journalism. Nieborg & Foxman identify four streams of game journalist occupation: entertainers, enthusiast critics, game beat reporters, and institutional journalists. In specifying these divisions, the authors illustrate the varying audiences, expectations, and “game capital” negotiated by the people in these categories. They also introduce and explain three seemingly immovable obstacles to game journalism becoming mainstream; these have particular relevance for our discussion pillars. As you read, think about the “precarity” of game journalism, the authors’ suggestion that mainstreaming perhaps shouldn’t be the goal, and the gap between writer and audience. As with Ruberg, this is a text about paratexts; it deals with how we, societally, talk about games. Make sure to reflect your position in the network of gamers, reviewers, consumers, scholars, and gaming capital.

The authors briefly discuss the role of US academia in shaping the film canon and legitimizing media criticism, and the potential for game scholarship to do the same. How do you think game scholars can take on the role of “virtual emissaries” for a broader audience?
How do these chapters make you feel about your engagement with (or avoidance of) game journalism? Do you agree with the classification of reviewers as sources of “taste formation and legitimation”, and streamers as sources of entertainment?

Week 5: Shaw (2013). On Not Becoming Gamers: Moving Beyond the Constructed Audience

This chapter discusses the complexities of the construction of identity and what it means to be a “gamer.” Shaw takes the approach that focuses on how people identify as gamers, and how that identity can change in response to individuals’ own practice of play and how that intersects with broader communities. They discuss identity with reference to Judith Butler’s notions of performance—how the performance of identity is itself what constitutes that identity—and precarity—how this performance must be intelligible to others to be recognized, with the implication that there are consequences for the failure of this recognition. The social weight that the identity of “gamer” holds can inspire both positive and negative associations with the identity, depending on how this interplays with one’s own navigation of social status. Because the gamer identity is one centered around consumption, the understanding of what constitutes a gamer impacts how companies produce and market games. This then has been met with mixed degrees of responses as underrepresented groups have asserted their presence within the community of gamers and companies attempt to respond to these perceived emerging markets.

What do you think are some of the most important ways that performance and precarity have shaped who is/has been considered to be a “gamer”? Is there value to the term?
What are some of the ways that you have engaged with the gamer identity? Has this changed through time, does it work for you in different social contexts? Did some of the testimonies presented here resonate with your experience?
Are there ways to achieve the goal of the paper: “greater representation in games in a way that works outside the market logic of the term itself?” What do alternatives look like?

Week 6: Keogh (2023). The Video Game Industry Does Not Exist

In this Chapter, Keogh demonstrates how dominant positions held by big game studios, obscure the rest of the videogame field, while simultaneously relying on the positions they obscure for their dominance. He poses that the alternative and noncommercial modes of videogame production are the foundation of the industry, which consists of marginal, poor, self-reliant creators, producing symbolic capital value with their unpaid labor. The dominant videogame companies use aggressive methods of surveillance to sustain dominance and are the ones who can convert symbolic capital into economic capital. Video game makers are also active participants in their own heightened exploitation as they take on risks as entrepreneurs with an ambiguous and informal relationship with the platforms distributing games. Furthermore, the transition from a period of aggressive formalization to one of intense informalization allowed for a wider range of creators, games and audiences. In conclusion, Keogh argues that broader social changes are needed, in terms of income and job security, labor unions and the regulation of platform business models.

What are some of the broader societal factors that led to the transition from formalization to informalization and in which ways is the transition perceptible in video games themselves?
What do you think are the similarities and differences between the creation, marketing and products of video games and other arts?
What prompts Keogh to conclude ‘The video game industry does not exist?’

Week 7: Stockton (2017) If queer children were a video game

Week 8: Sangin (2018). Observing the player experience: The art and craft of observing and documenting Games User Research

As we move into the methodological portion of the course, we look at the work of Mirweis Sangin, who works for Sony Playstation and has published quite a bit on how to effectively conduct Games User Research (GUR). This chapter is a brief summary of some of the best practices of how to conduct research as you are testing a product’s playability and the responses that test users have while playing. He introduces quite a few different issues that researchers have to negotiate and take into account as they are conducting research, not only to gather the data as efficiently as possible, but also to recognize the role that the research design and the manner in which it is conducted can have profound influences on the data as well. As you read through this, keep in mind that you will be writing a research proposal for the second project for this class, and begin to think about the choices you might make in your research design with regard to the ways that observation of participants in your research will affect the data you collect. Some things to think about as you read:

How does the setting in which the observation takes place affect the ways that data can be collected?
How can researchers deal with the tension between gathering data from players and creating the most natural space for gameplay?
Do you think there are any other methods that are not covered in the article?

Week 9: Friese et al. (2018): Carrying out a computer-aided thematic content analysis with Atlas.Ti

This article describes how Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) can be implemented using Atlas.Ti as software, and aims to give the reader methodical descriptions. In thematic content analysis, researchers are identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns within data. Software such as Atlas.Ti helps researchers organize, structure and retrieve their data, which is usually a too big corpus for manual research. Friese et al. lay out a seven-phase framework for analysis; becoming familiar with the data, generating codes and building a coding frame, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and creating a report. Next to an overview of Atlas.Ti basics, the authors also point to some issues and limitations of the methodology and pose potential approaches to deal with them. Some things to think about as you read:

What kind of data would you use for research of video games within Atlas.Ti and would that require a reconfiguration of the proposed phases?
What are some limitations or drawbacks of this method that Friese et al. do not go into in this article?

Week 11: Poels et al. (2017): It is always a lot of fun!” Exploring Dimensions of Digital Game Experience using Focus Group Methodology

While Sangin highlighted the need to aggregate data through observation, Poels et al. discuss how they used a focus group to explore experiences in game play. They describe the methodology and research questions they were exploring, and discuss the results, using this data to construct a categorization scheme for describing player experience. As you read through the description of this research and its results, you should think about the nature of what this methodology is producing and how the method is applied to this particular research question.

What is the difference in the kind of data generated through focus groups rather than direct observation?
Under what circumstances is this method appropriate? When is it not appropriate?
What are the drawbacks, or caveats, of making conclusions based on this data?
How can the participants of focus groups change the way that data is generated?

Week 12: Bruhlmann & Mekler (2018): Surveys in Games User Research

The authors position surveys as a useful tool for evaluating player attitudes, motives, and characteristics, and compare these across large groups of player-participants with relatively little effort (i.e. contrasted to carrying out interviews, focus groups, or participant observation at larger scales). As an instructional article, this piece holds a lot of potential insights into the practices of game analysis and research design, broadly. Pay attention to the goals and considerations they highlight in formulating questions, deciding on sampling and distribution, and data analysis. Think about the lines of investigation you would want to use surveying for, and how (as the authors mention) combining it with other methodologies (which ones?) can enhance and supplement your dataset.

“Data analysis and interpretation should be as objective as possible.” What are some measures you can take as a researcher in pursuit of this?
Of the established questionnaires cited in the article, which would you adapt and/or implement in your own research? Why?
What do you think is the biggest drawback of surveying as a method?

Week 13: Eye Tracking

As a book from 2012, Sundstedt’s work is not the most up-to-date assessment of the state of the art, but still demonstrates established work in the field of eye tracking as an application for video game analysis. This chapter provides an overview of what eye tracking is, how to implement it in various research designs and applications, and what mapping the results of these experiments can look like. There’s a lot here, and some of it may seem irrelevant; as you read, try and map the game or games you’re considering for your case study onto eye-tracking as a method. What sorts of variables would you take into account? What kind of game is best suited for this method? At a more meta-level, this chapter is a great example of an extensive literature review whose structure you could reference for your research proposal.

How can fixation and attention be assessed through eye-tracking? What are some confounding variables in investigating this?
Why is piloting helpful for this method in particular?