Games and Online Research Methods

In this chapter we have introduced research in, on, and using games to non-game researchers. Gaming is very much a social activity, or as Huizinga (1938/1955) would call it, the essence of being human. Computer gaming is part of that. It is part of social life and may form or reinforce existing ties. It also can be used to study social life – interaction patterns, economic behavior, the forming of organizational structures, the origin of systems of norms, etc. The availability of data on many of these processes is higher in the digital world than in the non-digital world, and in the case of gaming we can even build games to produce data on the processes we are interested in, replacing lab studies. The ubiquity of games and their social side effects also means that research on non-digital social life needs to pose the question of whether gaming interaction is to be considered part of the explanans or explanandum of what is being studied