Jonas Linderoth, Ulrika Bennerstedt, Björn Sjöblom
Time: August 16, 9 – 12 Location: Nordic DiGRA 2010 (http://www.nordic-digra-old-site.local/index.html)
Workshop is included in the Nordic DiGRA 2010 Conference. To attend please join the facebook event at: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=111993022183340
There is a recent trend in fields like sociology, anthropology and educational research to rely on video data when conducting case studies. The analytical method, which is often employed, is Interaction Analysis (IA). IA may be defined as an approach/method for studying how people interact with each other and with the objects they have available in the environment. The aim of interaction analysis is to identify regularities and depict mechanisms in how people interact and conduct their affairs. IA can be an approach on its own as well as a support to ethnographic observations. Ethnographic information then furnishes the background against which video analysis is carried out
Some studies on games have been done in this tradition but there is a need to adapt this methodology to games as a specific analytical object. Games come in many forms and current approaches might not consider all of the complexity which can be found in gaming cultures i.e. players being online connected globally and at the same time engaged in face to face communication with players in the same room. Players have different screen views of the game world and thus different perspectives on events. Hand held devices also poses very special methodological challenges on how to practically collect data. Thus there is reason to produce knowledge on how to collect and analyze video data on gaming.
This workshop will introduce the participants to Interaction Analysis and give them a first hand experience of approaching video data on gaming.