Exploring Geographies of Video Games: Placing Virtual Worlds

Cottonwood tree from Firewatch

 

In the last 35 years or so, digital technology has become an ever more prominent feature of everyday life in developed societies. The spaces in which we take part in activities for leisure, work and social relationships are increasingly virtual: interactive environments that we can navigate, manipulate and experience through screens, keyboards and other interfaces. Virtual spaces are not only technologically significant but also culturally significant, affecting the way we make sense of the world. 

In an industry growing at 8.5% per year and now worth $99.6 billion in global revenue (more than books, cinema and audio entertainment), video gaming exemplifies the rising cultural importance of virtual worlds. The industry’s growth is coupled with improvements in computer processing power and 3D graphics technology, which game developers are using to craft increasingly detailed and complex virtual environments for stimulating play experiences.

Traditionally, the environments of video games have mostly provided a backdrop for the mechanical interactions that the game asks you to perform - such as the precise movement of buttons and control pads in racing and first-person shooter games. Yet for the emerging genre of ‘walking simulator’ games, it is the active exploration of immersive virtual worlds that is at the heart of the play experience. Developers design environments filled with intriguing and emotionally powerful details to discover, which tell stories as you walk through them.

The development of walking simulators therefore represents an important moment not only in the evolution of video games, but more widely for how virtual spaces are used and what they mean. Because rather than serving as a platform for some other purpose, the game environments themselves are the purpose: to provide tangible worlds with a deep sense of place that players can imagine themselves into.

 

Virtual Places

Places, in geographical terms, are spaces that we know through the meanings that we associate with them; those with which we have some kind of subjective attachment based on our experiences. While spaces are basic areas or volumes with geometrical properties, spaces become places when they are filled with cultural and social reference points. In short, they are meaningful locations.

Traditionally in geography, the idea of place is universal; something that we all experience as human beings. To be conscious is to form some kind of awareness or understanding about the world – to attach meaning to it. And as we live our lives, we develop a series of relatively settled social and emotional bonds with spaces through our everyday experiences in them. By studying culture and art, it is possible to get insights into how this process of meaning-making works, and ultimately gain a deeper understanding of places based on real, lived experience.            

Although many traditional games fail to offer much opportunity for this kind of deeper emotional investment in their virtual environments, what intrigued me about walking simulators was how their explorative gameplay seemed to invite players to immerse themselves in the spirit of the game world, treading their own path through the (hi)stories, events and landscapes that make the world meaningful and emotionally powerful.

Yet in geography, places are usually understood to be physical locations – not digital media made from computer code. This follows a tradition in the humanities and social sciences where virtual reality and physical reality are often separated from one other. The virtual is then either celebrated as a sublime realm of innovation, creativity and communication, or vilified as a dangerous world that is disconnected from the social norms of ‘real life’.

So the main question I had going into my research was this: to what extent can the virtual worlds of walking simulator games be considered ‘places’?

What excited me about this question was how the answer would have consequences that reach much further than my individual study. It was important not only for understanding the worlds of video games, but perhaps more profoundly for the concept of ‘place’ itself: what a place is, and how we can experience the feeling of being in a place.

To address these issues as fully as possible, my research focused on a wide range of meaningful elements of walking simulator worlds: from the structural, systemic aspects of gameplay (how the player can/can’t interact with the game world) to the more interpretative aspects (player’s individual emotional reactions to the world).

 

Agency and Interactivity

Because video game worlds are virtual, players are limited in the actions they are able to perform – their agency – compared to what they can do in the physical world. However, these limited activities ultimately define the kind of experience the player has. The ways you interact with worlds determine your relationship to them, and for video games it is their developers who have the greatest say on what you can and can’t do, and how the game world reacts.

In walking simulators, developers actively avoid the numerous and complex controls of many traditional games, apart from the basic functions of moving and looking around. There are no scoring systems and typically no objectives for measuring your success or progress in the game. Indeed, the ‘walking simulator’ term started as a negative label given by some gamers, who argued that all you do is walk in the game world – there is no challenge to tackle; no skill involved in playing. Some have questioned whether such experiences can even be called ‘games’ at all.

But these arguments display a narrow understanding of the kinds of interaction that games can involve. Avoiding traditional game mechanics is a deliberate technique that designers use to encourage players to engage thoughtfully with the game world, freeing players’ attention from the immediate challenges of precise button pressing, winning and losing. Instead, developers craft powerful experiences whose stories are guided by the player’s decisions, interpretations and emotions.

Of course, developers often still have a particular story or emotion that they want players to experience, which they can convey through careful design. They can control which areas of the game world players can access at any given time (‘gating’). They can use lighting and sound to draw players’ attention towards certain details in the environment (‘signposting’). And most importantly, they dictate how information and objects are placed in the game world. Like in the physical world, then, forces of power shape the meanings that people associate with particular locations.

The uniqueness of walking simulator games is that this power relationship is a liberal one, based on a continued conversation between the designer – speaking through the environment they build – and the player as they attempt to understand the world. There is no official nor accepted version of events because everyone’s experiences will be different depending on how they played and interpreted the game. We each form our own personal bonds with locations in the game world according to our individual experiences of them, in the same way we relate to physical places.

 

Immersion and Believability

In video game worlds, such experiences always take place through an avatar – a virtual figure with characteristics that determine where a player can look, how they can move, and what actions they can perform.

What is distinct about walking simulators, though, is that all of these attributes are designed to immerse the player as fully as possible in the experiential space of the world and its characters. Nearly all walking simulators are played in first-person, as though the screen is the avatar’s eyes and the speakers their ears; the world enveloping around you as you play. The typically slow movement of walking helps players to pay attention to detail, and take in the atmosphere of the environment. And any actions you can perform tell the player about their ability to affect the world, and the roles and responsibilities that go with this. For example, interacting with urban infrastructure in INFRA gives a very visceral sense of the huge scale and importance of such systems, as well as the enormity of the task of managing them.

Vast industrial environment in INFRA

 

Yet what I discovered from my research was that these qualities of perspective, movement and action aren’t enough by themselves to create powerful immersive relationships between players and game worlds. Rather, it is their authenticity and consistency that maintains the player’s sense of presence – of being in a real world.

Authenticity refers to what belongs in the world, according to its fictional logic. If you’re setting a game in 1980s rural England, like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the objects in the world need to be from that cultural context if all players are going to believe in it, even if this requires some research. Whereas consistency is about maintaining the aesthetics and physics of the designed world throughout the game, otherwise players will struggle to feel like they can know the world and become attuned to its characteristics as a place.



The characteristically rural English landscape of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

  

In the end, both authenticity and consistency are about the mental pictures of the world that players form in their heads. Game worlds don’t have to be realistic for players to have meaningful experiences in them – they just need to be coherent and believable; as though the world could exist.

Unfortunately, during play there are plenty of things that can disrupt the mental image of the world that players form. Technical glitches can affect the appearance of the environment, or prevent players from interacting with it altogether. Other times players may simply struggle to believe in the story they are being told.

In many cases, problems can be fixed before and after the game is published, based on testing and player feedback. It is an ongoing process of fine-tuning the game world that balances the capabilities of the technology and our perception of virtual worlds as human beings.

But ultimately what video games demonstrate is that immersion and believability in virtual worlds are uncertain, fragile achievements that rely on a number of human and technical factors that are both prone to error. During play, video games worlds can easily feel like believable places one moment and malfunctioning technology the next.

 

Navigation and Narrative

Of course, video games are often engaging not just because you feel like you’re inside a believable world, but for the powerful experiences you have in that world during play. In walking simulators, where play is based on exploration, game developers aim to create worlds that are interesting for precisely that purpose: with emotionally powerful and thought-provoking features to discover throughout.

How developers arrange their virtual environments is therefore an important factor in the relationships players form with game worlds. Developers of walking simulators typically aim to heighten the wonder of exploring by crafting deep worlds that are rich with the subtle and intimate details of a story, strategically placed throughout the world for players to encounter at specific locations.

In game design this principle is called environmental storytelling. With each new narrative detail that players uncover and piece together, they become emotionally invested in the fate of the game world and its characters, encouraging them to investigate further.

Gone Home is one of the clearest and most celebrated examples of this technique. In this game, the player plays a character who returns to their family home to find it mysteriously empty. To understand what happened, they must untangle an intricate web of family dramas by finding notes, objects and tape recordings left throughout the house.

Some of the objects to be discovered in Gone Home

         

The unique power of video games for this kind of storytelling is that players can have a stake in the story themselves, because the way they navigate the world determines what information they discover and how they interpret the experience. The story is interactive, as players bring their own ideas, memories and meanings to the world to make sense of what they find.

The result is that a more intimate and personal relationship develops between the player and the fictional world than if the story was told to the player directly. The job of the developer here is actually more about leaving room for players to fill with their own imagination. Developers provide the stimuli in the form of interesting landmarks, symbols, events or artefacts, and players are left make their own path through the material according to what resonates with them.

As my friend Rosa Carbó-Mascarell has argued, playing walking simulators is a psychogeographical act, where the player’s thoughts and ideas intertwine with the world as they play. Game worlds here are performative – not fixed or settled, but diverse and continually remade as players write their own stories through exploration.

 

Emotion and Identity

To encourage people to invest themselves so deeply in game worlds, developers need to create environments that players feel are worth exploring in the first place. Game design for walking simulators becomes a question of how to make players care about the world.

For this reason, developers tend to base the design of their worlds around a core emotional experience that they want to evoke in players, which becomes the framework for the game’s design. The world is populated by intriguing, relatable characters, and arranged to set the stage for dramatic or thought-provoking story events. Perhaps the most important (yet underappreciated) technique for tugging at the heartstrings of the player is sound. Sound has the quality of being able to convey the mood and atmosphere of story events very effectively, whether this is through the tone of a character’s voice, or evocative music in games like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

Layered with sound and story, game environments become both internal and external – visible worlds that you can navigate, but also shaped more subtly by contours of thoughts and emotions.

Unlike any other storytelling medium, however, in video games we do not just passively watch characters go through the trials and tribulations that their world presents them with. The interactivity of video games allows us to somehow take part in the story’s events. We might be asked to take on a character’s role, controlling their actions and witnessing their consequences for the world. Or our role could simply involve interpreting the narrative information we encounter as we walk through the world. In both cases, we are asked to identify with the situations represented on-screen and participate in the storytelling ourselves.

Here, we care more about the world because we are actively involved in producing it.

The situations players confront in the story are often particularly emotionally powerful because the developers have based them on real people, places or experiences from their own lives. It is the authentic feeling behind these events that players connect with through empathy.

However, players as individuals will differ in their own personal interests, experiences and desires. I occasionally found it difficult to emotionally engage with the sci-fi horror world of SOMA, where the presence of monsters prevented me from exploring the intriguing story of an underwater research facility as deeply as I wanted.

An abandoned area of SOMA's underwater research facility

 

What all these observations show is that walking simulators are particularly reliant on the player to make sense of the experience, at least as much as the developers. While many traditional games have score counters and objectives for players to measure how pleased they should feel with their experience at any given time, in walking simulators this reward system is mostly moved inside the player. You explore an area of the world if you think it would be rewarding to do so. It is your interpretation of the story that matters most for the emotional connection you develop with the game world.

The realms of walking simulator games are not fixed places. There is no universally understood version of the world and play events that shape it. Rather, in the words of one of my interviewees, they are “emotionally myriad”, blurring together the identity of the individual player and the spaces of the game world during play. In walking simulators, you explore the cracks and crevices of the self as much as the environment represented on-screen.

Conclusions

A lot of what I found during my research complicates the traditional perspective of ‘place’ in geography, where place is something universal and stable in how humans live their lives. If places exist in video games, then they are inconsistent and fragile, depending on a careful balance of intricate design and player imagination; working technology and believable aesthetics. When any one of these factors breaks down, the vision is easily disrupted. 

Despite this complexity and inconsistency, the relationships players form with video game worlds are still meaningful. The play experience is often moving and creative, as players draw on both the emotive stimuli already in the environment and their own imagination and interpretations, creating their own stories and memories of the world.

Video games therefore do not detract from, nor attempt to recreate, our relationships with the physical world. Their virtual worlds are meaningful in themselves.

Although video games have distinctive qualities, they aren’t the only medium this can apply to. Think about the times when you seem to lose yourself in the world of a novel, or transported to another place by a piece of music. You can still feel a powerful sense of place even if you are not physically there.

Because of these observations, I don’t think that it is useful to focus on how the sense of place we experience in virtual worlds is different from that in the physical world. Given that virtual spaces are becoming an increasingly regular feature of our everyday lives, I think the whole idea of ‘place’ needs to evolve in line with the diverse ways that people form attachments with spaces of all types, wherever they lie on the line between physical and imagined.

I’m proposing that ‘place’ should be seen less as a universal experience confined to the ‘real’ world, and more as an event in which diverse human practices and material technologies come together to generate meaning in a world, whether virtual or corporeal.

The attachments we form with locations are deeply significant in our lives, giving rise to cultures, inspiring countless artists, and affecting how we make sense of the world. The importance of these research findings is that they allow us to appreciate the role that cultural products and their virtual environments – such as video games, literature, music, and more – have in this process.

By showing how these geographical relationships can occur in video games specifically, I hope that people can not only appreciate what this fascinating medium has to offer for human experience, but also recognise the value of understanding and studying the diverse cultural practices through which we find a place in the world.



Paper boats from the iconic ending of Dear Esther

 

Analysing Video Game Research: Making a Path

Coding my dissertation data

Way back in the middle of July, I finally completed the fieldwork for my dissertation exploring the environments of walking simulator video games. Armed with data gathered from interviewing 11 game developers, playing 12 games, and a wealth of secondary sources, I somehow had to make a path towards fulfilling my research aim. This was to understand the extent to which virtual video game environments can be experienced as places – spaces we come to know through the human meanings and feelings we associate with them.

I had a great deal of data to work with, but unfortunately not a lot of time. My fieldwork finished later than originally planned, due mainly to a couple of game developers having to postpone interviews because of their own commitments. Although this couldn’t be avoided, I knew I would have to make up the time by being efficient with my analysis. After all, the final deadline for submitting my dissertation wasn’t moving, and soon enough I would need to get words on paper.

I had already transcribed all of the recordings from my interviews and typed up my handwritten research diary to make the data as accessible as possible. To make it valuable for my research, though, I needed to somehow translate these texts into key themes and points that have something interesting to say for the questions I’m asking as a researcher. In qualitative research, this process is known as coding.

The only way to get started is to dive straight into the data. I started off by reading everything as closely as possible, noting down details that came across as significant in the context of my research aims, the rest of the data set, and prior reading on the subject. Creating a list of these topics as they were encountered, I’d then underline each one once for each new instance of that topic in the transcripts and research diary entries I read. By the time I’d read through the ~200 pages of data, I was left with 5 sides of topics, underlined to different degrees, with lines between them to show their connection to other topics.

So what do we learn from this early stage of coding? Well, already we can begin to see which observations were more or less prevalent during the research, simply by looking at the number of lines underneath each topic. We can also start to assess how different topics fit together by looking at the network of lines going between them on the list. It was a messy document, but within it were the foundations for the series of points I would go on to make in my dissertation.

To make a coherent argument in a piece of academic work, though, you can’t simply reel off a list of points. These points need to be placed within a framework that guides the reader towards understanding how they contribute to a wider discussion of the subject matter. In dissertations, each chapter usually provides a pivot for the discussion, so the path you make through the material often becomes a question of how you organise this chapter structure.

For subjects with lots of interconnecting factors, as are typical in human geography, themes are normally the best way to approach the research subject, which have distinct characteristics but also fluid boundaries that are able to flow into each other freely. This is the approach I took to the complex array of topics that my dissertation presented, condensing my various data into groups of ideas that provided the basis for my dissertation chapters.

I can’t claim to have any particular words of wisdom for identifying themes, especially for this project. It’s like alchemy. You collect together your thoughts and magically new patterns begin to emerge, and everything starts making sense. It’s as if your subconscious has been slowly weaving and winding the different bits of information throughout the research, and only by thinking deeply can you access this strange fabric that connects everything together. Like Sherlock’s ‘mind palace’ that he uses to thread evidence together until he reaches a moment of insight.

It started at the tired end of a busy day when I was considering getting an early night. I started to look through the list of topics I’d made, when suddenly things started to click. I picked out one key theme, then another appeared, and eventually two more to form a group of four themes that each nicely divided the range of points I’d identified during the initial coding stage. These themes stayed effectively the same right the way through the analysis and writing stages, and were as follows:

Agency and interactivity: relating to lack of mechanical interactions in walking simulator games (i.e. button pressing, complex and precise controls), and instead the loose interactive framework that designers use to encourage players to explore the game world mindfully.

Immersion and believability: how the game worlds feel authentic and visceral, as if you are really experiencing them – but also how they fail to do this.

Navigation and narrative: how game developers design powerful experiences in worlds, and the ways players navigate these to form stories as they explore.

Emotion and subjectivity: how game worlds are designed to make players connect emotionally with them, and how players’ own identities become part of the world itself through this process.

Once these four themes were solidified, it was time for the highlighter pens – probably the most important tool for coding analysis. Using four different colours, I turned back to my list of topics and highlighted each one according to the theme(s) they were associated with. By the time I was finished, I was left with a document that not only told me the most prevalent topics and how they joined together, but also where they would ultimately fit into the chapters of my dissertation text.

My dissertation was taking shape.

The final stage of my analysis was one I’d never properly done before in any research project, but turned out to be the best course of action I could have taken. I was lucky enough to have a fantastic, enthusiastic supervisor for my dissertation, and he gave me a gold nugget of advice for the final phase before writing. He suggested writing abstracts for each chapter – short summaries of around 200 words or less – that clearly set out exactly what I was arguing for each one. This helps you to tie together all the points in each theme to make a coherent argument for the chapter; taking the reader on a determined, purposeful journey towards conclusion, rather than a sprawled collection of ideas that prevent clear understanding. Furthermore, by knowing exactly what you want to say in each chapter, it helps you to decide how you’ll order them so that the reader’s journey is logical, flowing from one argument to the next.

For my abstracts, I went deeper and further than my supervisor suggested. For each chapter, I also wrote down three key pivots of the argument, which formed the chapter’s subsections. This then helped me to categorise the different pieces of data I’d gathered more precisely to save time. At the larger scale, I also decided to write a rough abstract for the whole dissertation. In the end, a dissertation is marked as a single text, and therefore it has to read well as such. It’s by having a consistent line of reasoning flowing through the chapters that the reader will get a strong impression of your research findings, and their place and impact within the field.

There needs to be a clear take-home message, otherwise the research will be wasted no matter how well it was completed.

Like the winding paths of the walking simulator games I played, my analysis was also about treading a path through a world of ideas, objects and feelings, and threading them together to make a story – a series of events that the reader must encounter to eventually reach conclusion. Hopefully this post has revealed how you can transform a big bunch of wordy data into a story, but also how this can be done concisely, wasting as little time as possible.

If writing an academic text is about taking the reader on a journey, then good analysis gives you efficient tools to break through the unknown and make a path towards understanding.

In the Virtual 'Field': Playing Video Games for Research

To understand how the environments of video games work, you need immerse yourself and play in them – that is their purpose. However, you might be wondering how something seemingly so indulgent as playing a video game could ever be considered ‘research’.

Yet immersing oneself in a different culture to learn about how it works habitually, at the level of practice and individual action, has been a valid research technique for a long time. It’s called ethnography, and is perhaps most famous for being used by social scientists of the past, who spent years living amongst tribal communities in the Global South. The principle is the same – you need to be immersed, and to some extent participating, in a culture and its practices to effectively understand them.

In this case, though, rather than observing other people/cultures, I’m observing myself – my actions, what I observe, hear, feel and think – as I play video games that I own. This is called autoethnography.

Ultimately, this method had to produce data that I can analyse and use to form an understanding and argument about how video game environments create a sense of place. I needed ways of capturing my actions, observations, thoughts and feelings accurately and in a usable format.

There were three main techniques I used to do this.

Firstly, there’s my research diary. After a gaming session, I take time to reflect upon my experiences and gather my thoughts. Then, usually later in the day, I write down detailed notes in my research diary based on my collected thoughts. As this is a reflective process, I can take time to consider both the game as a whole, as well as individual moments within it, in relation to the questions guiding my research.

Pages from my research diary

However, only writing about my experiences after playing the game might not capture the more instantaneous feelings I have during play, which are important for understanding how the game environments are affecting me. These experiences are often difficult to convey through writing, because when you write your brain is heavily processing and manipulating the bodily information it receives. Although you can certainly argue that it is impossible to ever comprehend basic feelings without manipulating them in some way, I’ve attempted to get closer to the ‘raw’ experience by using voice recording.

Using the arrangement pictured below, I set up a condenser microphone and voice recording software to record myself as I play the games. The advantage of this approach is that I capture my immediate reactions to all the small, incidental events within the game that might be forgotten later on when I write the research diary. This often includes sudden, pre-cognitive responses to the environment, such as wonder, fear and surprise, which are potentially as important to the experience as my longer-term impressions of the game.

My voice recording setup when playing games for research

The last main technique I use to record experiences is taking screenshots while playing the game. Visual evidence is excellent to have, not only as reminder to myself of the things I have witnessed, but for the dissertation itself, so I can point towards concrete examples of different design techniques and things I’ve encountered in the game environments. Images are also potentially better at capturing things like ambience, mood and symbolism than I could express in writing or through voice recording. I can then consider these factors in the analysis, alongside the diary and recording data.

Symbolism from the cave in Dear Esther

Visual evidence from The Stanley Parable

A cache box in Firewatch

Hand-written postcard in Gone Home

These methods aren’t flawless, and this is something I’ll be talking about in my dissertation.

Screenshots can’t be categorised and analysed as easily as text, because you can’t just do a key word search to find evidence related to a specific theme.

Constantly speaking and taking screenshots while playing can be a distraction from what is actually happening in the game, therefore altering the experience you have of the environment.

The voice recordings are lengthy, so will take a long time to analyse.

And all of these different data – especially gameplay recordings and screenshots – require large amounts of storage space on a PC, and therefore also take longer to back up to the cloud or an external storage device.

Nonetheless, I’ve been gathering a comprehensive and mixed set of data that will be valuable and interesting to analyse. They also complement each other very well for my research aims, as I’ll be able to compare and contrast what I observe in the screenshots/diary/recordings with the data from the interviews/talks with game developers.

I therefore hope that this original combination of research methods can potentially advance the field to improve future research in cultural geography, and on the subject of video games in particular.

The research I’ve done so far has been incredibly insightful, and although the analysis and eventual write-up is going to be hard work, I’m looking forward to seeing what can be learnt from this very unique body of work.

I’ll write again about the analysis stage in a month’s time.

In the Virtual 'Field': Interviewing

My decision to do interviews – alongside playing video games themselves – was a very specific one. Through these methods, I’m aiming to get insight both into how the game environments are conceived and designed (through talking to their designers), but also how they are experienced when played (through playing them myself), and how the two inter-relate.

As such, my research isn’t as solely focused on the interviews as my undergraduate dissertation, when I did 31. This time I’m only doing around 10. But they still need to be rigorous, to get the most useful information as concisely as possible. The interviews are also my main way of communicating with people in the games industry, so I want to try and build good relationships with the developers to raise the status of my research. If done right, research can be as influential for industry as industry is for research.

Thanks to my extensive experience in conducting interviews, I’ve developed an effective process for preparing and carrying out interviews. I’ll talk through some elements of this now.

Preparation and interview schedules

Preparation is crucial, because to get valuable responses you need to ask good questions, and also create a strong rapport with the interviewee. The key element is the interview schedule, a document which sets out a plan for how the interview will be structured.

This isn’t meant to be rulebook, though. I’m doing semi-structured interviews, which means that although I’m guiding the conversation, I’m leaving plenty of room for the interviewee to talk about what matters to them. After all, because I’m not a game designer myself and do not know all the ins and outs of making a game environment, I’d probably miss out on a great deal of important information by simply going through a set list of questions directed by me, with little room for elaboration.

Instead, my interview schedules are thematic. I don’t want the interview to be a completely unstructured conversation, otherwise there’s a greater risk that I won’t get any answers to my research questions. So instead I write down some themes that I want to cover, with ideas of questions I could ask based on my research questions and prior knowledge of the topic. Then, as the conversation flows, I can choose appropriate moments to respond and dig deeper into what the interviewee is saying specifically, or ask a question from a relevant theme in my schedule to guide the conversation a little more towards my research purposes.

It’s a bit of give and take – a conversation with a purpose. 

Like the emails I initially send to contacts, the schedule themes/questions are tailored to the individual interviewee, based on prior knowledge about their specific game(s), any previous talks/articles/interviews they’ve done on the topic, and anything we’ve talked about before the interview in person or via email. Sometimes I might want to dig deeper into something they’ve mentioned before; other times I might identify something relevant that they haven’t talked about. Some of the questions I’ve asked to other interviewees are repeated, if they’re appropriate, and worked well before. Overall, as you learn more with each interview, and encounter different people, the interview schedule is also adapted.

Skype interviews

Let’s talk about the interviews themselves. As all of my interviewees live far away from Kent, and are all busy with upcoming projects, every interview has so far been on Skype. Skype interviews actually have a lot of advantages over face-to-face interviews. They’re easy to record at high quality, using free call recording software from the internet (check out Amolto Call Recorder), which removes a lot of the worries of hurriedly noting down everything. The recordings also tend to be clearer because they usually take place in quiet surroundings with both speakers close to the microphone, unlike face-to-face interviews which often take place in more public spaces, with background noise and awkward seating arrangements.

You can also choose whether to use video or not. Video allows you to see and interpret the body language of the interviewee, and communicate more directly. Audio-only, however, means that you can concentrate more on what the interviewee is saying, less conscious of your own body language and surroundings.

The day of the interview

On the day of the interview, a sensible routine is good practice. If it’s early, I make sure I set plenty of alarms and give myself comfortably enough time to get ready in the morning. I have a sort of mental checklist of things I do – make sure the interview schedule is printed off and laid out in front of me; make sure I have paper and a pen ready; make sure I’m online on Skype at least 5 minutes before the start time, with the call recording software running; make sure I have a drink nearby and have eaten; put up post-it notes of anything specific that I want to remember; and ensure that my laptop is in a good position for the webcam and microphone.

My standard Skype interview setup

It can sometimes be a bit nerve-wracking before interviews, particularly when you are talking to people with any kind of status. My first interview for this project was with one of my absolute heroes of game design who knows a lot about the topic, and having also not interviewed for quite a long time, I was somewhat nervous. Once you get into a rhythm, though, it’s fine. It’s all about easing yourself and the interviewee into the conversation.

The interviews themselves have gone really well so far. I can already sense how much my interview technique has improved since my undergraduate research.

I’m better at picking up on details of what the interviewee is saying, and then using them in subsequent questions to dig deeper and find out more about what they’re thinking.

I’m generally better at framing my questions in a way that gets the interviewee to talk at length about what they feel is relevant – using question structures such as ‘Tell me about…’, ‘What do you think about..’, etc.

I’ve also improved how I manage the flow of the conversations, starting with simple and broader questions, and then following the different trains of thought to reach the important, useful details.

And lastly, I have a much better sense of when the interview should stop. In the past, I’ve asked more questions than I needed to, simply because I assumed I would get more relevant information. But longer interviews take more time to transcribe, and answers aren’t always as informative when you and the interviewee lose momentum.

Transcription

Transcription is the final step before analysis. This is the often painstaking process of typing up each interview word for word, so that what was said can be analysed easier. It can be very lengthy, depending on the speed you type, the quality of the recording, and how fast the interviewee speaks. 1 hour of recording will typically take 5 - 7 hours to transcribe. 

However, you also don't always need to copy every single word that is said. For example, the initial greetings and small talk you make with the interviewee, or if the interviewee decides to go off on a tangent that is definitely not relevant to what you're talking about. It can happen.

For this project, I’ve learnt from past mistakes and made sure to transcribe my interviews as soon as possible after doing them. Doing this means that what was said is still fresh in your mind, and ultimately allows you to analyse the interview sooner.

There are other benefits to thorough transcription, though. As well as giving you greater familiarity with your data, which helps with analysis, it can also help you improve your interview technique. Every now and then I’ll listen to something I’ve said during an interview and cringe, realising how I could have phrased it much better, or notice a detail that I should have asked more about. I can then learn from these errors in the next interview.

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All in all, I’ve immensely enjoyed the interviews so far. I’ve always loved this part of researching, because it is such a pleasure and a privilege to meet new and interesting people, and learn from their unique viewpoints on topics that I also find interesting. I’m very grateful to all the game developers I’ve spoken to so far, and thank them for their time.

In the Virtual 'Field': Laying the Groundwork

For any long-term research project like a dissertation, it can be difficult to know precisely when the fieldwork starts. Because even when you’ve planned a discrete period of time for gathering data, there are important steps you need to take beforehand that allow you to make the most of your time in the field. This can include background reading on the topic and methods, getting equipment, finding secondary sources to put your research in context, contacting people, and more.

For me, the last two in this list were crucial.

The work began straight after a couple of big coursework deadlines around March/April. As part of the London Games Festival in April, there were two big events that caught my eye. One was a talk at the BFI in London on The Art of Video Games by the two creative heads of The Chinese Room, an indie games company renowned for developing walking simulator games. The other was the Eurogamer Expo (EGX) Rezzed event, also in London, where there were multiple talks by relevant designers of this genre of games, as well as the opportunity to network with more people in the industry and find up-and-coming games suited to my research.

Tobacco Dock, the stage for EGX Rezzed 2016

Playing games for GamesAid at EGX

I can’t emphasise highly enough how much it helps to make these connections early. Making contact with as many relevant people as you can, and getting as much background information as possible, is a great way to avoid wasting time during your planned fieldwork dates. To be honest, adding more workload to my schedule was the last thing I wanted to do in April, with two big coursework deadlines looming at the beginning of May. But by taking initiative and putting in that extra work, I’ve been reaping the rewards by being able to jump quickly into the fieldwork proper from late May onwards.

After my coursework deadlines in May, I got straight on with contacting game developers for interviews, many off the back of the prior contact I’d made. So far, I’ve had a response rate of roughly 50%, which is much higher than you’ll hear quoted as the expected rate in any text on soliciting interviewees (~10%). This is how.

I’m fortunate that my undergraduate dissertation gave me some fantastic experience in this regard, for which I did 31 interviews. All of these required prior contact. So over time, I’ve developed a successful technique for emailing potential interviewees and getting them to respond.

Firstly, creating a good interview briefing sheet is a must. This sheet must give a neat, clear summary of what your research is about, why you are contacting the person, and what they can expect from the interview process. The next stage is adding the logo of the university/institution you are representing, alongside contact information, which gives you a sense of credibility and trustworthiness. The last parts are mainly stylistic. I like to add a photo of myself – the same as that which is on most of my internet accounts – so that they know everything’s legit. You also tailor the text to the particular audience. In this case I’ve been contacting video game developers, who are typically fun-loving, easy-going, informal, and not necessarily knowledgeable about academia. Therefore, the tone I’ve adopted gives the impression that I’m mainly just a nice guy who wants to have a fun, interesting chat about video games.

Secondly, you need to write good personalised emails to send along with the briefing sheets, which are a bit like what a cover letter is to a CV. This is where you address the particular person you are contacting, asking if they would be willing to be interviewed. The most essential thing here is research and background information, so that you can appeal to that person’s unique character, interests and knowledge. Google searches and following people on social media are great, and for me it was also important to demonstrate my knowledge of their games/other work too. This is also the right time to mention any personal connections or recommendations – for example, if you’ve spoken to the person before (as I had with some developers at games events), or if other people had recommended speaking to them. All in all, this should give the person the impression that you know your stuff, are enthusiastic about the subject and are committed to your research, which all increase the likelihood of replies.

You may be wondering how I managed to get the contact information for the interviewees in the first place. Fortunately, because game developers are artists making a product for public sale, they nearly always have websites with email addresses that are publicly available for people to contact. Occasionally the email addresses are for the whole development team, which can be annoying if you’re looking to contact a specific person. In this case, I found their email addresses elsewhere on the internet, including at the end of public talks that could be watched online. Also, if you know the format of the company’s email addresses, you can make an educated guess. Typically it’s [first name]@[company name].com.

Overall, the lesson here is that putting more effort at the stages before fieldwork will be beneficial in the long run. Taking the time to do your homework and think carefully about how you approach people is always better than a scattergun approach, where you simply spam every relevant person you can find with a generic email, because the latter gives the impression that you don’t care as much. People actually really enjoy talking about themselves and topics that they find interesting – all you have to do is cultivate that interest and enthusiasm by showing your own.