Thank you to the Gathering!

It's a while ago now (feels like an eternity, here back in the land of mundanity), but I interviewed a very nice group of people at the gathering, 8th of April. Sadly I did not find all I was looking for. Some had not arrived, some were absent each time I came looking for them, and some were in rows where the music was so loud it was impossible to ask people about anything at all! Thanks to all who participated though, and thanks to those I never found, for being willing to be part.

I have just written out the interviews - short, as I just wanted to find out a few things - and now the work starts with sorting pictures. This will be an interesting experience, as The Gathering is such a rich arena for creativity. Luca Rossi from the University of Urbino was there as well, and I will use some of his pictures for this part of the process.

The survey will be available out this month, then I'll start processing the data I have received. So far the most data comes from the survey, which has had a decent amount of respondents, and from pictures at the Gathering. The emailed pictures are rare, as I suspected they would be, and I made a limited amount of interviews. However: the pictures and the interviews have some of the most interesting data!

So thank you all again, to the organisers who let me have access, to the people who wanted to participate, to the ones who did take part, to all who have answered by email or on the survey, and to those who will be doing that in the next few weeks.

Media attention

A short interview in NRK 2, the Norwegian state broadcasting, Thursday 2nd of April. I talk about my research, what and why I am doing. In Norwegian.

Research interviews

I have had a lot of very friendly and generous responses already, particularly from the crowd going to The Gathering. However, I think I need to apologize to some of them, as I may not have been sufficiently clear about what a research interview is.

In research interviews, while the individual and his/her responses are very important, the aim of the interview isn't so much to expose or focus on the individual, as to gain deeper understanding of a topic. This means that while each and every response is very important, as they carry and reveal knowledge about the society, they are not journalistic interviews. Respondents will be anonymized, which means this is not a place for publicity. Also, the final article is a complex piece of work, and it is rarely built heavily on just a few interviews. The responses from interview subjects tend to be put into a much larger context, and between the process of protecting the subjects from unwanted attention through anonymizing and the fact that often only a few comments are used, the research interview isn't where individuals become reknown. Also, academic articles are mostly published in places read by a very select few. Potential targets for my article are the journals Games and Culture and Gamestudies.

I hope this information will encourage those who might feel shy about being part of this research, without discouraging those who might have hoped for a portrait in the newspapers. I need a varied set of interviewees, and to me all are equally important.