Playing at Religion
or ‘white privilege.’” (Healy, 2017, p. 121) ‘Good theory,’ cites Healy, does not need to “represent or correspond to a distinctive kind of object” (Rosen, 2014, qtd. in Healy, 2017, p. 121), just like Weber described the “conceptual purity” of theoretical, analytical constructs above “not be found empirically anywhere in reality” (Weber, 1904, p. 90), but good theory nonetheless. Good theory is original, productive, and interesting: it explains something in a new way that opens it up to further thinking. What makes a theory good like that is different each time, and according to Healy “depends on whether the insight it expresses is a real one, and that is a matter of discovery” (Healy, 2017, p. 122). What good theory is not has been more clearly described. Healy describes not-good theory as nuanced: as not ‘accounting for,’ ‘addressing’ or ‘dealing with’ nuances that are certainly interesting but are not productive and relevant within the current project. For instance, this dissertation will not (fully) account for game industry working conditions, nor address gender representation in games, nor deal with the role of postcolonialism on Hindu gamers playing Western games – although all of those are relevant to religion in videogames: just not to the research questions I have posed, nor to the way in which I have theorized my answers. Others have also articulated productively what theory is not. Robert Sutton and Barry Staw propose that references, data, variables, diagrams and hypotheses cannot stand in for good theory (1995). Instead, the theories of referenced literature should be reproduced, then built on or problematized. Data should be analysed to produce an argument, not stand for itself as somehow ‘fact.’ Variables do not explain why something is as it appears. Diagrams make claims about how something works but give no account for why it is so. Hypotheses can only be a result of theory (to be deductively tested), saying what should happen, but they are not theory in themselves and do not propose to explain why things happen. 2.3. Approach By contrast, my aim in this dissertation is to formulate a ‘good’ (original, productive, and interesting) and grounded theory as an answer to my research questions. This theory is sensitized by the existing literature on religion and videogames; and structured by an encoding/decoding framework. 53
