Public Displays of Play: Studying
Online Games in Physical Settings
Nicholas Taylor,
Jennifer Jenson, Suzanne de Castell, Barry Dilouya
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12054
This paper studies
gamers in a physical setting rather than online surveys that can be
seen as the norm. The authors themselve state that they want to
challenge these quantitative methods that are normally used because
context play a big role in how gamers will identify with the identity
as a gamer and games,
1)
Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper?
Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The participants
in the study were interviewed at locations associated with gaming in
a social setting like LAN-parties, internet cafes and events. What
was discovered was that many of the participants that answered that
they don't take part in a virtual world was in fact MMOG players that
might just be on a hiatus from or in between games, but still had a
strong connection to virtual world avatars. This is something that
wouldn't be seen if the study was conducted purely quantitatively.
The downside of
this method can be seen when the researchers tried to recruit
participants at internet cafes, where the setting was uninviting for
intrusion, and on top of this I imagine it being harder for a
participant to express him or herself as freely as one can in an
anonimous online survey.
Some participants
also agreed to make a travelogue where they answered questions
regarding online/offline activities to see if their adventures in
MMOGs affect their behavior in real life.
2)
What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the
paper?
What
I take away from this paper is not knowledge about a qualitative
method I didn't know existed before, but rather once again emphasize the importance of
using qualitative methods to understand your sample, especially if
you want to conduct data gathering through quantitative means. Other
papers I have read on the subject ignores this, and one could
question the validity of those results and conclusions when
considering how the research was performed. Conclusions can surely be
drawn from the data, but do we truly understand why?
Building Theories from Case Study
Research
Eisenhardt, K. M.
Methods for Game User Research:
Studying Player Behavior to Enhance Game Design
Desurvire, H.,
El-Nasr, M.S.
1) Briefly explain to a first year
university student what a case study is.
A case study is research performed on a
person, organisation, service etc. and its context. The methods used
could be of both quantitative and qualitative nature, and using
knowledge gained during the research to improve methods or research
questions is encouraged, in fact you are not supposed to formulate
your hypotheses until after you have some form of data to analyze.
This will go on in an iterative process until a theoretical
saturation is met or you run out of resources in the form of time or
funds. The goal is to answer the research question and make some sort
of framework answer that could be generalized to similar problems.
2) Use the "Process of Building
Theory from Case Study Research" (Eisenhardt, summarized in
Table 1) to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your selected
paper.
The main problem I had with my paper
was the fact that a lot of details about the process was left out,
presumably due to an NDA enforced by the game developing company the
study was performed on. They do however set out with a goal in mind
to look at the game design process and apply different usability
testing methods to improve user experience.
With the help of qualitative methods
like think-aloud and quantitative data from questionnaires surveying
user satisfaction the game designers were able to solve many of their
problems by developing a tutorial in a way that learned the user how
to play the game properly without making them lose interest in the
game before it started for real. Unfortunately the specifics were not
mentioned but it seems like it was successful and the paper seems to
focus on giving other developers a framework on how to perform user
testing themselves.
What I felt was lacking was the
exploration or at least description of potential problems that could
occur when following the recipe suggested in the paper. Surely there
are advantages and disadvantages with all methods and not giving
these enough consideration at least in writing is a minus in my
opinion.
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