Abstract
Game Studies is a young research field compared to other media studies disciplines, such as literary theory and film studies. Games research has often struggled to balance the demands of modern constructivist perspectives on knowledge creation (Denzin and Lincoln in Handbook of qualitative research. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1994) against the long-standing traditions of humanities scholarship. Consequentially, games research is one of a new breed of natively interdisciplinary fields, with all of the challenges and opportunities that this entails. While there is much to be said for being able to draw on different methods and perspectives (Creswell in Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2003; Creswell and Clark in Designing and conducting mixed methods research. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2007), this inherent interdisciplinarity forces the games scholar into making a unique balancing act between often contradictory epistemological positions. It is often unclear what the subject of games scholarship is, or should be. Is it the lived experience of play? Is it the design of games for entertainment, learning, persuasion, or expression? Is it the role of games within a particular content domain? Is it the development of simulation techniques for modeling, manipulating, and understanding complex systems? Is it the social and cultural practices that arise around and are mediated by games? In this article I describe the application of the traditions of philosophical hermeneutics and close reading to the study of digital games as texts. This approach deals with the poetics of digital games, and with the scholarly practices of articulating how a game accomplishes its particular experiential outcomes, such that we might be able to derive useful principles for understanding the game as a cultural, aesthetic, and practical (“Practical” in the sense that hermeneutic inquiry often produces knowledge about how the text created its meanings, thus contributing to the development of craft and design knowledge.) artifact.
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25 April 2020
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-020-00108-2
Notes
Hermeneutics was first applied to philosophical and literary texts by Friedrich Shleiermacher in the 18th century, and later expanded into a broader epistemological system for all “manifestations of the human spirit” by Wilhelm Dilthey (Føllesdal 2001).
The horizons of the reader can be understood to arise from a wide range of contextual elements including her intellectual history, her mood at the time of reading, her personal history and situatedness within a broader cultural or historical context. Thus the same reader may approach the same text with radically different horizons in different contexts. Consider, for instance, viewing a film in which a terrorist attack on a New York building features significantly, such as Die Hard (McTiernan 1988), on September 10th, 2001 versus watching it on September 12th 2001, within the emerging context of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre. The horizons of the viewer would be fundamentally altered by the socio-historical context of the viewing.
The appeal of this perspective derives from the perceived hierarchies of epistemology: the natural sciences are often seen as more objective, rigorous, and reliable than the social sciences and humanities, often leading those of us in these “softer” disciplines to attempt and adopt the techniques and stances of quantitative inquiry, hypothesis testing, and controlled experiments.
Wolfreys uses the word “read” as a noun here, representing the viscera of the slaughtered creature from which the act of “reading” derives.
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Tanenbaum, T.J. Hermeneutic Inquiry for Digital Games Research. Comput Game J 4, 59–80 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-015-0005-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-015-0005-9