After falling quite far behind with the blog posts, i thought it was high time to give a bit of a lo-down on the research project. So what we've done so far is questionnaires, which i talked a bit about here.
They were useful to a degree. The demographic was well balanced: they
were administered to a range of ages (13-19), passion and gender and so they
enabled us to figure out what games were played by who, who with, and
how often they were played. The downside of questionnaires is mainly
due to the inability to prompt and probe in order to obtain richer answers. We've also been busy with vox pops and have begun conducting some depth interviews with small friendship groups of gamers.
Here's a list of some of the findings from the questionnaire. There aren't too many surprises and they are pretty much in line with some of our pre-conceptions about gaming behaviour mentioned here.
- Boys play more games, more often than girls.
- Boys play a wide range of games with first person shooter type games being most popular (such as Halo, Tom Clancy, Call of Duty)
- Almost everyone, even if they didn't own one, had access to a wide range of different consoles and games machines.
- Nobody played MMORPGS, though one or two had attempted to play them (such as the trial version of World of Warcraft)
- Flash-based games sites (such as miniclip and dragongamez) were the source of lots of game play
- Shared gaming for boys mainly took the form of the various titles on the Wii and multiplayer shoot-em or football games.
- For girls, shared gaming was a less common activity. Most games played were on the Wii and SingStar on the PS2 was fairly popular.
Concurrently we conducted some Vox Pops here in Sheffield. They had a similar purpose to the questionnaires (short, snappy general questions) but also provided useful visual material for the blog and for presentations. They also enabled us to research a different demographic (University students). We wanted to examine the changes that age would bring to shared gaming. University students are a bit older, have more time and independence and we thought that the freedom to game would be greatly increased.
We decided to use the questionnaire and vox pops as a filter to decide who would be most appropriate to talk to for the next stage of the process.
We decided that the next course of action would be mini focus group type interviews with friendship groups. Why did we do that?
1. From our experience, it's the best method of getting information out of teenagers. One on one can be quite a daunting experience, but when they have the buffer of their friends around them, the atmosphere becomes a lot more relaxed and they feel that they can reveal more about themselves.
2. To help us to understand the dynamics and behaviours of how groups of friends play games together.
So far we've done two groups, and we're looking to do a few more to ensure that we can speak authoritatively about all ages and genders as well as different types of games: from the Wii to WoW.
Limitations
One of the tenets of social research is viewing the events in the social world through the eyes of the people that are being studied, but gaining first-hand insight into actual group gaming behaviours is the most difficult part. Only by observing hours and hours of gameplay can one begin to understand the dynamics of shared gaming experiences, however this is not really plausible. Firstly for issues of time. Secondly, for a common hurdle of overt participant observation that has been described by social research academics as the 'Reactive effect'; that is, a change in the behaviour of the participants due to the known presence of a researcher. The fact that shared gaming essentially takes part within fairly tight-nit friendship groups makes it difficult to gain access to a space that by its very nature tends to be quite exclusive in its membership.
Solution?
As a result, we are considering two approaches to gather more in-depth insight to gaming behaviours. This week we are piloting an idea which is to conduct short-length interviews across a few days with one gamer over instant messenger. The idea is to be able to have one on one discussion with an individual where gaming activity can be explored in more detail. Doing this over a few days also creates the opprurtunity for a more longitudinal study where the way that gaming varies and develops from day to day can be explored.
I'll post up the results of how the research goes in the next few days.
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