Multiverse Autoethnography: A Qualitative Method for Gaming and Technology Research

Videogame research was at least partly established on autographic methods (e.g. Sudnow 1983; Dibbell 1994) and later made significant breakthroughs via ethnography, and autoethnography in particular (e.g. Boellstorff 2008; Pearce 2011). The persistent and occasionally fair criticism against autoethnographic approaches in the study of play and everything else has always been that one scholar, from their own experiential perspective, is relatively limited when it comes building an understanding of a phenomenon in its often wide-ranging diversity (e.g. Atkinson & Hammersley 1983). The awareness of one’s first-person resources and viewpoints is often enough for an attentive scholar to make good use of any limited method (as all methods are), however, personal approaches like autoethnography – unless mixed with other methods – remain the most suitable for exploratory analysis of selected focus areas. In the research of videogames, including single player games, this is a special limitation due to their “forking paths” that make sure that a playthrough never reveals more than a part of the design (e.g. Miller 2008). To further develop the methodology of autoethnographic technology use, this study introduces multiverse autoethnography: a first-person study of videogames and other playable technology by several scholars at once. With reference to tandem approaches that have been experimented earlier (e.g. Sundén & Sveningsson 2012), a multiverse autoethnography of several scholars concerning a single videogame pursues a comprehensive “front yard” of the garden that, ultimately, helps to understand the rich playable multiverse. As such, this study paves the way for crowdsourced approaches that include the benefits of in-depth autoethnographic understanding without being limited to a single or dual points of view. The study will be carried out with several students in January-March 2021 at University of Jyväskylä. All students carry out a personal autoethnography in Cyberpunk 2077 or Among Us, either by playing them or following related live-streams for a minimum of 30 hours. Personal field notes are coded, combined, and turned into code families that are comparative analyzed to produce a map of the most central themes and their relations in these videogames. The ultimate goal of the study is to develop multiverse autoethnography as a method, i.e. to explore which field note, coding, and analytic techniques are best suited to be collectively applied in future projects.