Solitary play and how to access it- Gameplay Elicitation and Player Experience - A talk by Mike Hyslop Graham

Abstract

The talk is about how players activate their own life-experience in interpreting and understanding digital single-player roleplaying games, and what that can teach us about games and play as an existential part of our habitual lifeworlds. No less important, the talk is about how we as researchers can gain access to such sensitive and intricate processes, without obstructing them. Drawing on experiences from fourteen video-elicited interviews I present methodological considerations and my findings on player experiences in playing single-player digital games. Getting access to such experiences which usually take place in a solitary setting is central to the research, and as such the qualitative methods used to access these experiences must always be considered carefully. The qualitative data (and the results) are based on the development of a method (the DisPlay method), which makes use of video analysis as a form of asynchronous observation and the before mentioned video-elicited interviews to access the otherwise solitary context of single-player play. The presentation will centre on this interplay between the players’ internal negotiations in the activity of play and the method’s ability to capture moments of significance and salience in the playful engagement.