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.