Today’s Plan:
- Completing Project 2
- Introducing Project 3
- Intellectual Meandering
- Homework
Completing Project 2
As I’ve said a couple of times before: the aim of Project 2 is to teach you how to set up a qualitative research project. The emphasis is on three different facets of methodology:
- Collecting Objects (ensuring that someone else could replicate your method and get a similar collection of objects)
- Analyzing Objects (building off previous research, using recongizable categories and techniques)
- Ensuring Reliability (doing something to defend the integrity of your findings, i.e., making sure two different people review results, conducting “norming” sessions, etc).
Because I’d like to move on to Project 3, we aren’t going to finish this research and write up a formal paper. But I would like everyone to write up a one-page, single-spaced summary of the work you’ve done thus far.
What goes in this Project 2 Summary paper? Let’s look at the 5 parts of a qualitative (or quantitative) research paper:
- Introduction: introduces problem, glosses previous research quickly, states initial hypothesis and summarizes the key findings (often in compare/contrast to the hypothesis)
- Previous Research: reviews all relevant previous research on the subject
- Methodology: covers the three things above–collecting samples/specimens/objects, methods of analysis, methods of ensuring reliability
- Data/Findings: Charts, graphs, tables, survey results, whatever the methods produced
- Discussion: Where the hard thinking happens (more on this later)
- Conclusion: quick summary of the paper (often repeating parts of the introduction), indicating what future research should happen, often a move to explain what should change based on the research
For the final summary paper, I’d like you to take a swing at writing up the methodology section. These are probably harder than they sound: you have to be detailed enough that someone can recreate your research–which is kind of like writing a recipe to teach someone how to bake a cake. It requires more fine detail than you might initially think.
Then, share your data/findings–tell me what your preliminary analysis found (I know each group completed a different amount of research).
Finally, take a swing at discussing those findings. Discussion sections do several different things (often depending on what you found, and whether what you found matched up with what you expected). Here’s a short, modified heuristic that I use in my Writing as a Job class:
- How does it compare to previous research? Similarly: How does it compare to your hypothesis? Did you find what you expected to find?
- Any weird, idiosyncratic results? Like one finding that was a complete surprise?
- If there were any surprises, then speculate as to why?
- Any trouble executing the research methodology? The planned analysis? As you were doing the analysis, did you notice a pattern of tricky objects to analyze?
- What are the implications of this research? Does it tell us something we have to do differently? Think about differently? [NOTE: Sometimes this happens in the conclusion, it kind of depends on what kind of paper you are writing and whether your initial research questions where purely theoretical or connected to real-world problems/practices]
While I realize the research projects were collaborative, I’d like everyone to write up their own one page (or so, it is fine if it stretches beyond a page) research report so that I can provide feedback on organization, logical development, and sentence syntax.
Project 3
Now that we are wrapping up Project 2, it is time to move onto our final Project. Let’s revisit the syllabus for a second:
I will ask you to develop your own research question centered around a particular game or gaming community. This paper will incorporate 100-150 pages of research (whether a book or books chapters and articles) on a game as well as your own contribution. We’ll work on a proposal project in which you identify a game you would like to study, scout out some preliminary perspectives on the game, and hypothesize what you think you’ll find (or something like that, I tend to give a lot of latitude to design your own project here).
Gamers–this is your opportunity to write about that game you love (first surveying what other scholarship is out there on that game). Or to write about that game you hate. Or to write about an awesome player community. Or to write about how player communities are toxic. Or to write about how games can impact the way we act in the real world. Or to write about how games make us terrible people. The controller is in your hands.
Surveying recent projects:
- What the hell is Blaseball? (funky collaborative online story-telling and decision-making)
- Ethical and Pro-Social Decision-Making in Detroit: Become Human (Taking time to apply Sicart to a longer game)
- Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Last of Us II
- Dealing With Toxicity: Looking at the Lack of Prosocial Behavior in EVE Online
- Humans vs. Zombies: The Benefits of Campus Wide Alternate Reality Games (Grows out of Bogost’s work on procedurality)
- Testing the Promise of SuperBetter: Can we gamify our daily lives?
- Exploring the Application of Video Games to the Music Classroom to Increase Good Performance Behaviors in Students
Over the next week we’ll watch some videos about games, read some articles about games, and examine some past student papers about games as you develop both a paper proposal and a reading list (and/or play schedule, depending on the type of project you develop).
I am also open to you continuing your Project 2 research (or collaborating with another team). If you choose this option, then I will ask you to develop a slightly longer lit review (more reading) and/or to extend your research project (say, double the amount of objects analyzed).
I am open to you returning to Project 1, and using Sicart’s ideas on player complicity and wicked problems to analyze another game.
I am open to you telling me what your favorite game is and then doing the legwork to find out what academics are (and aren’t) saying about it.
Intellectual Meandering
Let it begin with one of my favorite video game scholars, Jane McGonigal”
I am probably going to want to talk about SuperBetter.
Homework
Let the intellectual meandering continue. For Wednesday, I’d like you to select one source from the following page and prepare what I call a talking point. A talking point is a prepared sentence, written out and read aloud, that summarizes what you read, highlights a particularly interesting/relevant/controversial fact or idea in it, and concludes with a question for discussion. You can submit your talking point to Canvas and we will review them in Wednesday’s class.
Here is a link to the research behind McGonigal’s SuperBetter program.
