I’m only a few transcripts in, but I’m already beginning to wonder whether it’s easy to lose oneself in coding. Being in the ‘same space’ as my participants (metaphorically) is a privilege and I really do understand where they’re coming from as fellow students and as gamers. As I discover their habits, their rules of gaming engagement and their drivers, and their discoveries about games and about themselves as people and as avatars, I learn more about myself as a researcher, as a gamer, and as a person.
I'm learning that it’s not just using linguistic skills and contextual clues to apply units of meaning to words, sentences and paragraphs. It’s using my knowledge as a gamer too, and I'm noticing I'm using my ‘Spidey Sense’ to attribute meaning and create codes. By that, I mean that using and trusting my instincts and intuition to find meaning is a 'thing'.
It’s easy to get lost in thinking beyond these codes too. Not just methodologically, in terms of creating memos and field notes as I code, but thinking about participants' lives, their differences and their commonalities. I guess I could call this 'Big Picture Thinking' - noticing that, for example, many of my interviewees are on the ADHD / Autism spectrum and how this has a profound impact on the way they view and the way they play video games.
I’m also starting to realise that my initial approach to finding unintended consequences was too restrictive and not really what grounded theory is about. I thought I could put codes into pre-named categories like problem solving and wellbeing and learning but it’s more complicated and far richer than that. That's not to say that concepts are already emerging that clearly fit these categories, but there are other green shoots appearing that I can’t neatly identify or compartmentalise yet, but can sense have importance.
It makes me look at my research plan and want to laugh. It’s so basic and infantile, and is a glowing beacon of just how much I didn't know at the start of my studies. How the School of Biosciences thought this was good enough to allow me to study for a PhD is, frankly, ridiculous! Maybe they needed to increase student numbers so took me on out of necessity? Maybe they just wanted a good laugh?
But it’s also brilliant. It’s brilliant because the data that has been generated by my participants to date is promising to be so much richer and messier than I'd envisioned, and it's actually quite heartening to see how simplistic and naïve my research plan was 2 years ago compared to how it is now. I must have developed as a scholar and researcher over the past 2 years, and surely that's the point?
The 'neurodiversity stuff' coming through is interesting. I wonder if neurodiverse gamers are more drawn to open world games because there is freedom to be one's authentic self and to be in control of the story?
Accidental learning as an unintended consequence of playing open world RPGs is 'bigger' and certainly more common than I thought it would be. I knew that 'unintentional' learning through gaming was a thing - indeed, it was through recognising my own experiences of learning about Ancient History from playing a range of Assassin's Creed games that pushed me to do a PhD in the first place. I sensed the emerging importance of learning through playing OWRPGs when I was preparing my interview transcripts, but now I'm analysing these in detail through line by line coding, the number of examples of incidental learning is pretty big. I'm also noticing many examples of participants who have learned something from playing an open world game that has captured their interest who have gone on to carry out self-directed learning further to and outside the game. Isn't the ability to self-direct one's own learning a skill Higher Education students need to develop? And are they developing this...by accident?
Many participants see games as an elevated form of art that go beyond attractive visuals or a well-written story. Games have more meaning because they are a form of art that one controls actively rather than looks at passively. For several participants, this has led to a developing love of the arts as an unintended consequence.