At the suggestion of my first supervisor, I’m going to revisit my gaming journals from the past 2 years and write about any key realisations that I discover. I have many roles, among them are digital education specialist (and I had to resist the temptation to put the word specialist in inverted commas there), social scientist, doctoral researcher, student, and gamer. It was noticing the unintended consequences I experienced as a gamer that was the epiphany that started this study, so without me there would be no study. Bloody hell, that sounded arrogant!
As a student who is both deeply and personally embedded in my own research, autoethnography is a research method that I ignore at my peril, and it works well in parallel with grounded theory and discourse analysis. If Constructivist Grounded Theory as the core research methodology used in this study can be represented by visualising a plate of chips, autoethnography and discourse analysis are the salt and vinegar that both complement and complete the study. That’s a clumsy analogy, but it works for me. And I like chips.
Autoethnography is a deeply personal, reflexive research method that, among other things, uses a researcher’s personal experience to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences, and acknowledges and values a researcher’s relationships with others. It is the epitome of the notion of researchers being part of their research, so you can see why it is wholly appropriate for my study, beginning, as I said above, with my very personal experiences of playing Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed Origins and being almost blindsided when I noticed the unintended consequences of playing. Autoethnography is also a method that allows us to reconsider how we think, how we research and maintain relationships, and how we live.
There are criticisms of autoethnography with many seeing it as being self-indulgent – even narcissistic – introspective, and individualised. I'm not good at talking or writing about myself, so I can understand why some may hold that opinion. There are issues with how autoethnography is presented too, with many academics claiming that the natural tendency for auto ethnographers to write in the first person makes it ‘not academic’. Writing about oneself is not rigorous, objective, ‘cold, hard research’, so much of academia insist that it simply does not carry the same weight. With this in mind, it could be risky including autoethnographical content into a doctoral thesis. Maybe I should include anything I write as appendices and not ‘main text’? I’ll figure that out as I write, I guess.
EDIT: Hang on – isn’t this blog post a piece of autoethnographical writing in itself? Is ALL this website just a massive repository of autoethographical data? And why does my head feel as if it’s about to explode?!