2.3. Approach

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.

By taking a grounded theory approach I mean that I privilege the experiences of people above existing theories or findings in the literature. It is a simple choice with far reaching consequences: grounded theory is inductive and capable of overturning preexisting notions of how academics think the world works. This is important because people are weird: they contradict themselves and each other, and worse yet, they read about themselves. This problem of “double hermeneutics” is crucial to the social sciences (Giddens, 1984). Unlike molecules and other non-sentient things that the physical sciences study; the players and developers in my field read about themselves and reflect on it. Continuously asking people about their experiences is the best way to deal with that (or observing their behaviour, or other methods of finding out what they do and think and feel). That also necessitates a “constant comparison” between what has been written about people, and what I observe in those people, while I find out and try to understand them – their experiences, their feelings, their thoughts, their discourse, their societies, their culture (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1965; 1967).

Nonetheless, grounded theorists in practice do acknowledge previous literature: they use the theory therein as “sensitizing concepts” (Blumer, 1954; Bowen, 2006; Charmaz, 2003): knowing what others have written about religion, games, and related things aids me in understanding the field, and keeps me from repeating what others have shown before – in other words to create original, interesting and productive theory that adds something to the knowledge we have about religion and media in 21st century Western culture. To this end, I have tried to be as much as possible an alien to my participants: to pretend to know or have read nothing about what they do, in order to gain as much knowledge about them without influencing it with my own. (Of course I have read about them, and I am even a person myself. One who grew up a Catholic and playing videogames, no less; but this is only helpful after they get to speak).

However, by using a Encoding/Decoding framework, I do structure this thesis according to Stuart Hall’s model of communication, as described in the literature section above. Doing so means selecting for interview participants who make games, to find out why and in which conditions games are made (encoded) – whether by single game developers or by companies employing hundreds of developers, most of which work on small parts of a game under market-informed management teams and