2025 in Review

Introduction 

Looking back at last year’s ‘in review’ blog post, I am happy to report that I have stepped out of my genre-based comfort zone (somewhat) and have played a few action and adventure games such as Ghost of Tsushima and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden this year. Ok, so they could, theoretically, be classed as RPGs, but I’m being kind to myself. Importantly, I’ve become a more well-rounded gamer and have spent a lot of time experimenting with new playstyles, builds and weapon sets. I am also more inclined to play games at ‘normal’ rather than ‘easy’ or ‘story’ level, and my patience and perseverance have improved. I no longer give up / get bored if I have to attempt a level or a boss battle more than twice, and keep playing until I’ve succeeded. Go me!  

Research-wise, if 2024’s word of the year was learning, this year it’s been data. 

Collection and Analysis

From the beginning of January, 2025 was all about data generation, collection, and analysis. I realise now that I sort of hit the ground running by scheduling and carrying out 25 interviews after receiving almost 100 responses to the call for participants survey link I posted to social media, all of which had to be meticulously read through and analysed to gauge whether the respondents were suitable for interview. 

After picking 25 participants whose responses were of enough depth to sense they had something interesting to talk about, I wrote 25 sets of semi structured interview questions, tailored to each participant's survey responses. Each interview was carried out locally, and in situ with a Dictaphone, or for participants further afield, via Zoom.  

By the start of March I had carried out and recorded all 25 interviews, and by the end of April had collected an additional 10 participant journals recording gaming experiences. I should also mention that throughout each interview and each transcription, I was continuously making and recording memos; a process that, in itself, was very insightful.

Then came the next stage of preparation for coding, and a task that was both arduous and weirdly interesting: transcription. Thankfully the majority of interviews had been recorded via Zoom (and having video files as well as audio is really useful from a discourse analysis perspective), so transcriptions were automatically generated, but had to be read through word for word while listening back to audio for accuracy-tweaks. The participants I'd held face to face interviews with had their resulting audio files transcribed using TurboScribe, which saved me loads of time and cost nothing (though a free account limits file sizes and the number of free transcriptions allowed per day making this a longer process than I hoped for). Transcribing 35 participants' contributions took weeks, and before any coding could begin I still had two years' of my own daily gaming journals to transcribe and memo. This was a very long, emotional, and eye-opening process, and you can read about it here. 

Coding

At the time of writing this, I have completed the initial, first stage of coding, looking for units of meaning across every transcript. I made a failed attempt at this initially; such was my impatience at making a start, I coded EVERYTHING individually, repeating many codes over and over again rather than grouping these together as I worked, and NVivo crashed under the weight of 600+ codes after working through just half a dozen transcripts. I took a little time away to get some perspective, and decided to start again from scratch, this time aggregating units of meaning to pre-existing codes to start building a pattern, and ensuring I had an eye on *any unintended consequences that may be appearing. 

*I'm seeing two possible unintended consequences, each of which contain a load of 'mini-unintended consequences' - like child and parent-type things? Not sure, but some green shoots of something are appearing, and it's quite exciting!