I’ve talked about this topic at length before, but I realized the other night that I haven’t written about it here, at least not as a primary post. Today I want to talk a bit about the stigma behind people who research games being considered to “play” all the time and to be just “having fun.”
It should be kind-of fun if you research a video game. Don’t get me wrong. Just like you shouldn’t research something else that you feel is torture, you shouldn’t research a game if you hate it. It shouldn’t be torture.
But at the same time, I want to speak to some people’s impressions.
First of all– I did once really enjoy playing World of Warcraft. I won’t ever deny that. But I’ve been asked numerous times when giving presentations if I was ever “addicted” to WoW or if I felt like any of my participants were. And straight up– the answer is no to both of those questions. Part of that is understanding what people mean, though, as by the technical definition of the word, end-game raiders in any game are addicted, just as I’m addicted to this blog and most of us are addicted to coffee in the morning. I always assume that people mean the bad form of addiction based on context. And no one I’ve studied– and certainly not me, personally– has shown any indication of destructive game addiction.
That said, there’s a line for me. During a work-day, where I do my day job of teaching and working with students and service and all that jazz, more than a few hours of gaming is too much. It starts to get taxing.
I could never play WoW for fun in the way I played to research it. It was still fun, in its ways, but the truth is it was work. Let me explain just how much work:
- I had to spend days– I don’t mean days of playing 3 or 4 hours, I mean literal DAYS as in sets of 24 hours– playing characters just to get them to the level to be able to do the research. I had to do this while taking courses and teaching a 2-2 load.
- Once I started raiding with the group I was observing, I had to tank for them 3-4 hours a night three nights a week, sometimes four if we were pushing progression. All of those days but the potential fourth were days where I had to get up and go to work/class in the morning, and we usually ended a raid around 3 am.
- As part of my reciprocity to my research participants, I had to gather items and grind for gold, so I was spending about two hours a day, seven days a week, doing that.
- If you’re adding it up, that’s anywhere from 14-28 hours a week of just playing WoW.
- But there’s more to it than that. I also had to take field notes, and do post-play interviews. And I had to code data while it was fresh so I wasn’t stuck going into a week’s worth of recorded videos to remember what happened.
- I also had to, as the kids now say, “get gud.” I was studying a hardcore progression guild, and I wasn’t, when I met them, anywhere near good enough to help them progress. I had to find the time to get good enough to not impede them. That meant hours of study in addition to all the other playing.
- I couldn’t have a bad night, really. I mean I could play poorly, but I had to be on-point, keeping track of all my data points, or my research would get messed up. But I also couldn’t be the reason things went wrong very often, otherwise I would end up tainting the data.
So no, the year I spent studying WoW wasn’t just me having fun. It was intensely stressful play that had some really awesome rewarding moments but also was filled with tedium, duty, and stress.
So you might ask “why do it?” The reasoning behind that was simple– I have a chunk of data that no one else has (Danger Chen has a similar data set, but we came at things from radically different perspectives) and it has informed my scholarship in numerous ways. It’s one of the biggest reasons why I understand and am able to contribute to the success of the Varsity Esports Program I helped create. And while as a scholar I’m still one of the lower-level mini-bosses, I know stuff that really few people in the world know. I can talk about a massive span of lived research experience.
It was completely worth it, but it wasn’t me “just playing games,” just as my students aren’t just playing games. When I finish this post, I’m going to play a game of Madden football. Because I want to. That is playing for enjoyment.
But just as a scholar might read Stephen King for fun and Chaucer as work, we don’t speak down to people who, for example, devote their lives to studying films and hence sit around watching movies all the time. I wrote a graduate school project about my favorite movie, Clerks, and I watched that movie in ways I never had before and poured over the nuances of that film in ways that a fan never would. Even an obsessed fan.
So I guess what I’m trying to say, if you want a tl;dr is that studying games isn’t any less rigorous than any other discipline (and in fact might have more rigor than your average bear). We are slowly moving to a place where more and more people know that, but to those who aren’t in the know, I forgive your ignorance, but once I’ve explained it, I won’t tolerate your prejudice. It’s not fair the students I watch busting their asses, to the colleagues I know giving their all to make knowledge and build things and educate another generation.
Understand or do better research. You owe it to yourself, but more than that, you owe it to my students.