Grounded Theory in Games Research: Making the Case and Exploring the Options

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Salisbury John Cole Tom
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) is a powerful way to develop theories in domains where there are obvious opportunities to contribute in the form of carefully developed descriptive or explanatory conceptual theories. Reasonably nascent areas of academia, such as Game Studies, stand to particularly benefit from the development of new theoretical accounts. Yet, despite its proven utility in a wide range of fields and its history of rigorous methodological debate, many researchers are wary of using GTM. Conversely, many claim use of GTM but do not present an understanding of GTM's rich tradition and how this may impact their results and conclusions. This paper seeks to provide an overview of GTM, its main variants, and how they can be effectively used in research. We examine how GTM has been used in the field of games research and argue that GTM rightly be regarded a highly relevant method here.

 

Contextualizing Flow in Games

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Salisbury John Tomlinson Penda
2014 DiGRA '14 - Proceedings of the 2014 DiGRA International Conference

Flow, the concept developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi over the last forty years or so (see Csikszentmihalyi 1975) has been invoked quite often with respect to the way players engage with digital games (e.g. Baron 2012; Cowley et al. 2008; Sweetser and Wyeth 2005; Brathwaite & Schreiber, 2009; Fullerton, Swain, & Hoffman, 2008; Schell, 2008). However Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi (2002) argue that ‘video games’ are in fact likely to promote undesirable experiences of a kind Csikszentmihalyi refers to as ‘entropy’ or unstructured and unsatisfying life experiences. This presentation explores Csikszentmihalyi’s greater thesis and examines how a broader reading of Flow theory can potentially help us understand Flow like engagements beyond the simple mechanistic view of challenge and reward sometimes encountered in the literature. The main thrust of the argument made here is to explicitly introduce personally expressed cultural values into the conditions of Flow. By doing so we can then provide a value centric analysis and design approach, similar to that of Cockton’s (2004; 2012) proposal to include values into general software design. That is the very nature of challenges and rewards needs to be considered in order to investigate how overcoming or receiving such would be positively or negatively perceived by individuals from particular cultures holding particular values. Thus we hope that we have dealt with the apparent contradiction in using Csikszentmihalyi’s concept in the study of games despite his criticism of such, and have provided some indication of how we can deal with unspecified rewards and the differential perception and engagement with potentially equivalent challenges while still supporting the accepted thesis of Flow.