Considering play: From method to analysis

Abstract

This paper deals with play as an important methodological issue when studying games as texts, and is intended as a practical methodological guide. After considering text as both the structuring object as well as its plural processual activations, we argue that different methodological considerations can turn the focus towards one of the two (without completely excluding the other). After outlining and synthesizing a broad range of existing research we move beyond the more general advice to be reflective about the type of players that we are, and explore two methodological considerations more concretely. First of all, we discuss the various considerations to have regarding the different choices to make when playing a game. Here we show how different instrumental and free strategies lay bare different parts of the game as object and/or process. Secondly, we consider how different contexts in which the game and the player exist, can function as different reference points for meaning construction and the way they can put limitations on the claims we can make about our object of analysis.

What is Videogame Formalism? Exploring the Pillars of Russian Formalism for the Study of Videogames

“…This comes close to the idea of an implied player, an adaptation of Iser's (1978) implied reader, by Aarseth (2007) and others (e.g. Vella, 2015;Van Vught & Glas, 2018). This player consists of 'a set of expectations that the player must fulfil for the game to "exercise its effect"' (Aarseth, 2007, p. 132).…”

Playing Politics: How Sabarimala Played Out on TikTok

“…Ludo-literacy entails learning the rules of the game by playing it and realizing through experience what is possible and desirable on the platform. Play as a heuristic demands giving more freely into play and trying to go beyond the rules that circumscribe it, thereby identifying how the activity is structured (van Vught & Glas, 2017). As we explore, transgress and give into play, the structural factors that nudge our actions and capabilities in a certain direction will be revealed, affording insight into the cultural, generic, and technological contexts that shape our play.…”

Game Design as an Autonomous Research Subject

“…This is a relevant field-building step but essentially helps the study of games as opposed to the study of how to design them. A summary of how the issue of defining games has been the target of lively academic debate can be found in work by van Vught and Glas [35] (p. 210), who point out the recognized tension between defining games as activities and defining them as systems, before proposing a series of player heuristics for game studies. Stenros and Waern [36] similarly go over the systems and activities debate before proposing a balance between consideration of the system and consideration of the player as the basis for defining games, in that neither the system nor the player can meaningfully define games; rather, a particular game is a particular relationship between system and player.…”