I am going to stall our discussion of race and the readings I assigned Tuesday until next week, because I want to spend today’s class forming groups and identifying methodologies.
To do this, I want to watch two short videos that deal with race, both produced by the series Extra Credit. We are watching these to compare different methodologies for analyzing race in games:
And a second video:
I am interested in the first video, because it suggests that we can look at games that address race and racial issues even if they have white protagonists.
But I also, thinking of the reading, want to suggest that there are ways of developing studies that focus solely on character creation, and looking at the options games provide players. Here’s some questions to get you thinking:
- In your project, would you rather look at the character creation process for 10 games? Or would you rather spend time playing a game an analyzing (counting, archiving, etc) the different races of the characters you meet?
- Is your study more quantitative (again, counting) or qualitative (arguing, interpreting)
- Are you more interested in looking at race? Or gender? Or, assuming you plan to play through a smaller number of games, both?
- What genre of games will you play? RPG? MMO? MOBA? FPS? RTS? Sports*?
- Instead of designing a project around genre, can you think of another way of identifying your research material? Perhaps the top 10 games on metacritic? Perhaps the top games in 2014 according to Steam? Perhaps comparing the top 10 indie games (based on awards?) to the top 10 AAA games?
I have set up a discussion thread on Canvas to get the conversation started. If you already have an idea, then go there and write something. If you don’t really have an idea, then wait 5 minutes and then comment on someone’s post. In 20 minutes, I’ll ask groups to form up.
I want to get this conversation started now because by next Thursday I want every group to have developed a project proposal, which will be shared with me via Google Docs. Here’s my expectations for the proposal:
- Group Names
- Project Description: a 2-3 sentence summation of your aims. What is your research question (and, if you can’t frame your goals in terms of an open-ended question, then we might have a problem).
- Methodology for selecting games to be included in your study. You should point to the methodologies of another study if possible–think of the academic articles we read for today. Also, you should look for other academic studies as you prepare the proposal (I can help with this on Tuesday)
- A tentative list of games that this methodology has produced.
- Methodology for analyzing games. Give me a description of what you will look at/for, whether you will play the games, how you will collate your data. Your methodological discussion should point to other articles/studies. At this time, you should include a list of things you have read or will read to help validate your findings. In the final project, I will ask for you to justify why you looked for what you looked for–are your results valid?
- A hypothesis: what are you expecting to find?
- A project time chart, outlining goals, due dates, etc. I will ask each group member to keep a log that charts the hours they have invested on the project in this document starting today until you turn it in. The log should be the last section of the document. I have attached a sample proposal and log that you can copy/paste.
