2.4. Methods

publishers. It also means selecting for interview participants with different religious backgrounds who play games, to find out how they understand and play (decode) videogames differently from other players; and differently from how their developers intended them. Between those steps, it is meaningful to pay critical attention to what the games themselves offer, but only in addition to the encoding and decoding done by developers and players; from the perspective of one player and analyst who is theoretically informed as someone who studies media and culture.

By using this framework to structure my dissertation it may seem like I took an existing premise into the field from the start, counter to previous paragraph on grounded theory above. This is not entirely true, but it did quickly become apparent through constant comparison that some elements of Stuart Hall’s theory were relevant and helpful to understand the field. Firstly, players (which I researched first) had mutually exclusive readings of games, often based on their own religious and otherwise intersectional positions. Secondly, developers attached different meanings, and different reasons to the inclusion of religion in games. Thirdly, there was a basic mismatch between how players, developers and academics (in their rich, disciplined and well-informed readings of game content) understood the presence and functions of religion within games. This suggests that there is some kind of broader repository or possibility space for meaning in them that each of those groups and those within those groups make their own meanings out of. Fourth, the mismatch between these three stages of mediation contributed to understanding together the separate material, functional and substantial ways in which religion was changed through this particular mediation by videogames, that a focus on just one or two of the three could not have established. I will elaborate on this in the conclusion.

2.4. Methods

To concretely act on these approaches, the predominant method I use is taking semistructured interviews, and some supplementary methods (qualitative content analysis, ethnography).

I used semi-structured interviews to access the personal experiences of theoretically selected individuals: because they worked on a popular game series that

uses religion in a way that is commercially successful (Chapter 3); because they make independent games as religious (or explicitly irreligious) individuals (Chapter 4); and because they played with games differently based on their own religious beliefs (Chapters 7, 8). While I will not pretend that interviews grant access to personal experiences ‘directly,’ I gain access to individuals’ thoughts, life stories and feelings through what they tell me about them, i.e., mediated through language and culture. The assumption here is that while we in the social sciences may never know whether our participants are lying when they talk to us (or fill in surveys, and so on), there is meaning in how they speak about themselves. More radically, social meaning especially through language and similar symbols is the only meaning out there: if meaning is socially constructed in the way that Weber, social constructivists and symbolic interactionists suggest, there is no sense in trying to look beyond (or behind, or below, or wherever) what my participants are putting into language in social settings. What I, they, or you think and feel might not even exist at all until it is communicated in some kind of way – how would I know? Regardless, within the scope of this dissertation there is no way of knowing and no point in writing about such unmediated, uncommunicated knowledge.

I have tried to make this ‘social setting’ of the interview as informal as possible: informed consent was verbal, rather than a ‘contract’ to be signed; and the place of the interview was always as much as possible up to the interviewee. A lot of interviews were done in the participants’ favourite coffee place, on Skype or wherever they were most comfortable. While this is still a less natural setting as, e.g., ethnographies of office spaces or developer conferences, or players’ own discourse among each other on forums (see below), interviews allow for active probing. That is, particularly in a semi-structured interview (where the questions and their sequence are not set in stone), participants can be prompted to elaborate terms, to talk about their feelings; or even to bring up new topics that the researcher did not realize were relevant. Interviews (once transcribed) were coded roughly in three steps: open coding in which expressions by interviewees were inductively labelled according to emic topics, similarities and etic (‘sensitized’) concepts. Axial coding in which those codes were grouped and combined into (sub)categories; and selective coding in which the final analysis is organized in a more deductive fashion – often necessitating some additional interviews for clarification, etc. (Aupers, Schaap & de Wildt, 2018; Flick, 2006; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Throughout this process, data collection was on-going, with constant comparison between existing theory, emerging

theory, existing data and new data.

Content analysis of forums, in the fifth chapter, underwent a similar process of coding and analysis, except that the conversations on those forums were among players themselves. Their conversations in their own ‘natural’ setting provided the basis for not only how they talk about videogames amongst themselves, but also which games they talk about. However, it did prompt a need to contact some of the thousands of players in those conversations in order to ask them further about what they said by interviewing them.

Ethnography in this dissertation served mostly as a background and as a way into the field before proceeding with interviews. Importantly however, it did contribute to a background understanding of how developers talk, act, get together; what they drink (a lot of alcohol, apparently); what they are stressed about (precariousness, mostly); and so on. I consider all of this, and my notes, a valuable contextualization of the interviews. Ethnographical insights will appear throughout, but apart from some conferences and professionally oriented writing elsewhere (de Wildt & Butt, 2018; de Wildt, 2016), my ethnography and participant observation did not find a central way into any of the empirical chapters of my dissertation. The times and places of each ethnography, and what they contributed to the research will be elaborated under the data section.

I also performed content analyses of several videogames. My way of performing this method would in the Humanities be called a “close reading” or a formal analysis of videogames (Leitch, 2009; Culler, 2011). Similar to books, film and other intensively analysed cultural ‘texts,’ this includes a repeated re-reading of the artefact, aided by annotation and supporting research on paratexts (reviews, promotional material) and intertexts (what other texts are referred to). Typically, close readings elaborate on or compare a small few excerpts from the artefact (a stanza of a poem, a scene, a shot) that are shown as indicative for the development of a theme or any internal frictions – much like interview citations are used to stand in for ideal-typical analyses of interviewed participants. In the case of videogames, playing them ‘closely’ becomes a notably different exercise than close-reading a book in two ways. First: they often require a lot more time to play and re-play than it takes to read and re-read a book (e.g., Rettberg, 2008). Popular games such as Final Fantasy 15 take an average of 53 hours and 55