Theme 3: Research and Theory

The article More Than Stories With Buttons: Narrative, Mechanics, and Context as Determinants of Player Experience in Digital Games by Malte Elson et al. appeared in 64th edition of the Journal of Communication, published in 2014 by the International Communication Association.

The paper attempts to dissect the processes of meaning creation in video games, specifically (and, from the title, unsurprisingly) how player experience is determined by the tree factors narrative, mechanics and context.

Although, like many others in the field, it heavily relies on theories by previous academics, it always elaborately quotes and/or explains their claims within the text, thus doing away with the need to read third hand articles except for further research beyond the scope of their own. Elson et al. form a new theory around player experience as created in video games, by combining the theoretical foundations of the three separate factors and their respective academic traditions. The relationships between the at first seemingly unrelated fields of study are clearly explained, as are the conclusions that can be drawn in the process of applying them to one another.

A theory uses reasoning and scientific method to propose a set of rules with which something can be defined, which unlike a hypothesis does not rely on the observation of singular instances. The aforementioned article's narratological theory (as opposed to ludologist; an important debate within the field) states that while narrative is by far the most visible of the three factors, it is heavily informed by in-game mechanics and external context. According to Gregor's table, it would be categorized as an explanation.

The benefit to using narratology to analyse videogames is that it most accurrately represents the players' experience, seeing as the unfolding story is what they are presented with as they play a game. However, this also means that, due to the interactive nature of the medium, the object of research is always a single playthrough instance, thus making it significantly harder to generalize it to the videogame itself.