Chapter 2. Methodology
minutes; whereas most people would read all three of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books in 26 hours.9 Second: players take active rolls in the fiction, participating through choices and exploration and so on (Aarseth, 1997; Raessens, 2005), best captured by elaborate and anecdotal first-person accounts of playing the game, called “phenomenological” by Brendan Keogh (2013; 2014), or “auto-ethnographical” by Celia Pearce, T.L. Taylor and others (Pearce 2006; Taylor, 2006; cf. Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor, 2012). To this end, I rely primarily in all of my content analyses on formal, unambiguous content in games: their visual, narrative, mechanical (and so on) representations that exist in the same way for everyone playing them; and less on anecdotes, flukes, or bugs that may be interesting but may have only been available to me. I will supplement this where needed by documentation within (e.g., digital encyclopediae, Monster Manuals), around (manuals, walkthroughs, promotional material) and about (player-made wikipediae, reviews) the game. 2.5. Data These methods resulted in the following data. A total of N=78 interviews were used. 23 interviews were with mostly nonanonymized Ubisoft employees and one informant; 35 mostly non-anonymized interviews with independent developers, 100 player discussions online and 20 player interviews selected from those. Interviews averaged 1 hour and 16 minutes (Ubisoft employees), 1h8m (independent developers) and 1h25 (anonymous players) respectively, and the forum discussions span 2315 pages of pdf. Elaborated selection criteria and tables (including religion, parents’ religion, age, and so on) are presented in the empirical chapters where relevant. Anonymity was the default option for players, but developers were offered and often preferred to be non-anonymous. This option was included for two reasons: first, they consider themselves public figures whose personality is a fundamental part of both their religiosity and their art practice as (indie) game developers. Secondly, it made sense, in a market so saturated and huge, to base my analysis and arguments on well-known or even famous names where possible, such as Patrice Désilets, Jean Guesdon, Rami Ismail, Shane Liesegang SJ, and so on. Data are averages, collected June 4th 2019, from 1780 players’ self-reporting on howlongtobeat.com, and calculations on howlongtoreadthis.com (which is based on reading speed and word count), respectively.
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