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<\/em> approach rather than assuming or entertaining the thought of an objective, value-free<\/em> approach. Cultural experience and personal experience are put in conversation with one another, allowing for the disruption of \u201ccanonical\u201d 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<\/strong>, meaning-making<\/strong>, and power<\/strong>; research methods are the toolkit we use to carry out the work of untangling these concepts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cwhy we play games and why they matter\u201d. She also states her two primary claims: \u201cbodies are not machines and that affect is not virtual\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contemporary game design has given rise to a significant number of games that \u201ctackle\u201d marginalized experiences, made by and for marginalized audiences. Bo Ruberg investigates how these games, termed \u201cempathy games\u201d, are paratextually<\/em> 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 \u201cteach\u201d 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 \u201cdefault\u201d player. As you read, think about your own positionality as a player and researcher in relation to the games you play; who is implicated<\/strong> in the feelings that playing brings out in you? What does it mean for an audience to interpret a game\u2019s meaning<\/strong> in ways that are unintended by its creator(s)? As Ruberg talks about a \u201chegemony of feeling\u201d and \u201csocial hierarchies\u201d within games, what power imbalances<\/strong> do you think are at work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chapter 4, The Many Streams of Game Journalism, and Chapter 5, What It\u2019s 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 \u201cgame capital\u201d 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 \u201cprecarity\u201d of game journalism, the authors\u2019 suggestion that mainstreaming perhaps shouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This chapter discusses the complexities of the construction of identity and what it means to be a \u201cgamer.\u201d Shaw takes the approach that focuses on how people identify as gamers, and how that identity can change in response to individuals\u2019 own practice of play and how that intersects with broader communities. They discuss identity with reference to Judith Butler\u2019s notions of performance\u2014how the performance of identity is itself what constitutes that identity\u2014and precarity\u2014how 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 \u201cgamer\u201d holds can inspire both positive and negative associations with the identity, depending on how this interplays with one\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a book from 2012, Sundstedt\u2019s 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\u2019s a lot here, and some of it may seem irrelevant; as you read, try and map the game or games you\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. 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Week 2: Anable (2018) Playing with feelings<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Week 3: Ruberg (2020) Empathy and its Alternatives<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Week 4: Nieborg & Foxman (2023) Mainstreaming and Game Journalism<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Week 5: Shaw (2013). On Not Becoming Gamers: Moving Beyond the Constructed Audience<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\nWeek 6: Keogh (2023). The Video Game Industry Does Not Exist<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Week 7: Stockton (2017) If queer children were a video game<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Week 8: Sangin (2018). Observing the player experience: The art and craft of observing and documenting Games User Research<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Week 9: Friese et al. (2018): Carrying out a computer-aided thematic content analysis with Atlas.Ti<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Week 11: Poels et al. (2017): It is always a lot of fun!\u201d Exploring Dimensions of Digital Game Experience using Focus Group Methodology<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Week 12: Bruhlmann & Mekler (2018): Surveys in Games User Research<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Week 13: Eye Tracking<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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