I have selected a paper from “Journal
of Computer-Mediated Communication”. The journal is an open access
online journal with its first publication dating back to June 1995.
The journal is interdisciplinary and publish papers focused on
“social science research on communicating with computer-based media
technologies”.
How to be a gamer! Exploring personal
and social indicators of gamer identity
by Frederik De Grove, Cédric Courtois,
Jan Van Looy
The paper covers a study performed on
100 high school students who all play digital games in some form. The
aim is to find personal and social factors that hold significance when
identifying one self or others as gamers. The age group was selected
because the authors conclude that “proportionally
they represent the group of people who play the most digital games”.
The method used in the study is an online survey followed up with two
segments of face-to-face interviews where the student answer
questions related to indicators such as age, play frequency, gender
etc. The result is presented numerically with a mean value. The
authors conclude that their study using indicators partly gathered
from previous research could be the first to show the relative impact
of said indicators and how
important they are related to a gamer identity.
I
believe the aim of the paper is a good one and very relevant to media
technology since understanding the user is one of the important
factors in creating something successful, and the gaming industry
with games, hardware and social media is growing rapidly.
I do
however have some objections to the choice of only focusing on high
school students. The first of two reasons the authors give for
choosing this group is that the statistics in their references state
that “Incidence of gaming by age and gender” in average in Europe
shows a peak in the youngest age group and a downward slope can be
seen from there. The authors second reason for choosing the younger
group is the difference between early and late adolecence that can be
found within it. While I agree that this aspect is interesting, I
believe the study could benefit a lot from including a group of older
subjects to compare the importance of the indicators between age
groups. Worth to note is that the average gamer of today is in his
(yes statistically he is a male) early thirties, and 49% of all
gamers in Europe covered in the study they reference is over 35 years
old. With this in mind, the youngest group could in fact be an
outlier that identifies more with the gamer identity, and after a
certain age when the individual has matured the result could
normalize. We don't get to know this from the paper but I instead got
the impression that it gradually decrease over time.
While
this paper could be a good reference for future studies to follow, I
think it's dangerous to draw too many conclusions from the age group
used alone, since it's not representative of the population as a
whole.
1.
Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is,
and what theory is not.
I
would say first and foremost theory is not the same as a hypothesis,
which is something I know that many, including myself have gotten
wrong many times. The latter is just a statement that is a proposed
explanation of a problem that you can test with experiments. Theory
is neither data that could be the result of the earlier mentioned
experiment. But with your hypothesis that you test with experiments,
you can get data that you analyze and can use as a foundation for
logical reasoning. From that you can form a theory that could be a
general explanation or prediction of a phenomenon.
The
theory of a paper is not to be confused with referencing theories of
other older papers since yours has to progress the knowledge of the
field, or you would simply be redoing someone elses work.
2. Describe the major theory or
theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see
Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?
I had
a hard time identifying the papers theory, since most of the preface
is citations of other researchers theories. I do however believe that
the main theory of my selected paper can be formulated as: Social
context and personal consumption of the medium are linked to
self-cathegorized gamer identity.
The
theory is in my opinion identified as predictive. The authors do
predict that different indicators might hold different significance
since they chose to present their data in in a way that could easilly
be meassured with eachother. They do however not dig deeper into
explaining these differences and because of this I believe prediction
is the best fit.
3.
Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory
or theories?
The
benefit of the papers theory is that it manages to apply theories
from other fields to gamer identity that so far is a relatively
unresearched area, and might be used for further research.
Unfortunately, the lack of explanation to why the indicators have
different significance is not covered in the study and left me
feeling like something was missing.
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