A Tale of Two Theories: Reading Play as Narrative Placemaking Through Microethnographic and More-Than-Representational Video Methods

• In Event: Reanimating Relationships Between Movement, Meaning, and the Image: Shifting Understandings About Video Data in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Objectives
Taking MacDougall’s (2006) central thesis–image-making and video-production should be considered more than ‘surrogate seeing’–as impetus for inquiry, this paper uses first-person perspective video data to read play as narrative placemaking in immersive game design. Moving “beyond the board” (Garcia, 2019) and away from the screen, it utilizes two theoretical apparatuses across a common data set (video recordings of five adult players ‘learning to escape’ across a series of escape rooms) to ask: How, when analyzed through two divergent analytic methods, is game play understood as narrative placemaking?

Theoretical Perspectives
Viewing gaming as a “social technology” (Flanagan, 2013) that is emergent and unfolding, this paper uses the theoretical resources of non-representational theory (Thrift, 2008) and micro-ethnography (Bloome et al., 2010) to “re-animate” (MacLure et al., 2010) the axiological dimension of inquiry in video research. In doing so, it advances a vision of seeing immersive game play as an intra-active project of narrative placemaking (see, for example, Jenkins, 2004). That is, play–as refracted through video–is not only a condition of the design interface but of the affective and more-than-representational.

Methods & Modes of Inquiry
Drawn from a larger study examining how adults ‘learn’ to escape in immersive game-based environments, sources of data for this presentation include: observational notes, 1:1 participant interviews, GoPro recordings of in-game interactions, and audio recordings of group talk. Data analysis was an iterative process of both examining participants embodied interaction during the escape process as well as interrogating elements of narrative game design (e.g., ergodicity, ludology) on its own accord. To understand the relationships among mode, bodies,
environments, and materials (interaction-affect-design-interface), the author followed Erickson’s (2006) whole to-part analytic procedure. The researcher watched the video all the way through, using field notes to mark time, and noted verbal and nonverbal phenomena. Then, the author found significant episodes, or what Jordan & Henderson (1995) referred to as shapes of events in video. Using the two theoretical perspectives outlined above, the researcher analyzed these events to understand how play can be read as both a more-than-representational assemblage as well as a micro-ethnographic event.

Findings & Significance
Rejecting previous analyses (see, for example, Consalvo & Dutton, 2006) that rely on video analyses for representational means (e.g., qualitative toolkits and protocols that utilize video solely to create an object inventory), results from this polyphonic rendering look beyond the elements of the gaming interface. Presented as distorted video, findings illustrate how these dual perspectives highlight seen and unseen practices of narrative placemaking and play. Not simply noting how video facilitates the understanding of how immersive game design mediates player interactions in these spaces, the presentation concludes by forwarding new divergent theoretical apparatuses to render play (and escape) as entangled, felt, and affectively charged.

Author

• Jon Michael Wargo, Boston College