Beyond Play: Towards a Non-Gaming-Centric Gaming Research

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
The report argues game research has been too narrowly focused on gameplay (Let's Play and livestreaming), and that game-related YouTube videos extend far beyond these formats, which it demonstrates through a new adaptable category system.
02
The category system is organized around three dimensions: formal features of the video, semantic content, and the values or motives shaping the work, and was refined iteratively over roughly a year under principles of non-specificity, accessibility, and clarity.
03
The study coded 2,970 unique Street Fighter 6 videos and 1,956 unique The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom videos sampled monthly from Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English-language content, though coverage was uneven across languages.
04
Zelda: TotK content leaned toward experiments, creative work, and walkthroughs, while SF6 content featured more tournaments, reactions, and promotional material; Chinese-language datasets were judged especially informative, and Japanese and Korean material showed strong community-building intent.
05
Intercoder reliability varied considerably: Japanese coders reached substantial to near-perfect agreement on most categories, while Korean coders showed weak agreement on content focus and type, leading the authors to recommend that any dataset be coded by at least two coders.
06
The authors conclude that game-related videos should be treated as hybrid media practices that appropriate and subvert platform affordances, not merely as paratexts surrounding games.
07
Acknowledged limitations include coder subjectivity, YouTube content volatility that complicates verification, reduced applicability to some titles, and undifferentiated treatment of video producers; testing on a more diverse range of games is proposed as the next step.

Summary

"Beyond Play" argues that game research has been too narrowly focused on gameplay, and that game-related video practices on YouTube extend far beyond the Let's Play and livestreaming formats that dominate existing scholarship. To demonstrate this, the authors develop an adaptable category system for coding such videos, with the goal of serving both as a content discovery tool and as a foundation for cross-game and cross-language comparison. The work is grounded in several hundred popular videos about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Street Fighter 6, sampled monthly and drawn from Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English-language content.

The category system is organized around three dimensions: formal features of the video, semantic content, and the values or motives that appear to shape the work. Its development proceeded iteratively over roughly a year, guided by principles of non-specificity, accessibility, and clarity. The final coded dataset comprised 2,970 unique SF6 videos and 1,956 unique Zelda: TotK videos, though coverage was uneven across languages, a imbalance the authors partly attribute to differences in viewing practices and to incomplete processing.

Coding revealed meaningful patterns. Zelda: TotK content leaned toward experiments, creative work, and walkthroughs, while SF6 content featured more tournaments, reactions, and promotional material. Chinese-language datasets were judged especially informative, while Japanese and Korean material showed strong community-building intent. Intercoder reliability varied considerably by tag and language: Japanese coders reached substantial to near-perfect agreement on most categories, whereas Korean coders showed weak agreement on content focus and type, leading the authors to recommend that any dataset be coded by at least two coders.

The authors conclude that game-related videos should not be treated merely as paratexts surrounding games but as hybrid media practices that appropriate and subvert platform affordances. They candidly acknowledge limitations, including coder subjectivity, the volatility of YouTube content that complicates verification, reduced applicability to some titles, and an undifferentiated treatment of the actors producing these videos. Refinement through testing on a more diverse range of games is proposed as the next step.