ETHNOGRAPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGY APPLIED TO GAME RESEARCH: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Resumo

Ethnography and Phenomenology are qualitative research methods, frequently adopted in the field of social and human sciences and also in the field of human computer interaction, but not in game research. In order to identify how computer science research uses and adapts phenomenological and ethnographic methods to the context of games, we proceeded a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in papers published between 2015 and 2016 at ACM Digital Library and also at Proceedings of SBGames. There were two search strings: (ethnograph* and game) and (phenomenolog* and game) . The initial search returned 140 scientific articles for phenomenology and 425 for ethnography that, after applying the search filters and the inclu- sion criteria, were reduced to 6 articles related to phenomenology and 17 to ethnography. This SLR process provided information about research goals and reasons for choosing the method, samples size, target public, research duration, procedures applied for data collection and data analysis. We highlight that articles reporting similar research were not found in the literature. Considering the relevance of qualitative research methods for research in which the focus is on the human factor (which includes some studies in the field of games) the results of this work can contribute for the understanding of how the methods of phenomenology and ethnography can be applied. Consequently, game researchers know when they can choose each method to improve the methodological approach, the conduction of data collection of their studies and finally, the reliability of the results of their work.