Gameplay-Elicited Interviews: Exploring Worldness and the Processes of Play

This paper argues that players' own gameplay videos, used as prompts in video-elicited interviews, offer a productive method for phenomenological research into how people play digital games. Drawing on 14 interviews with 13 players aged 22 to 34, the author contends that this microethnographic approach can reveal the internal emotional and evaluative processes behind play that are otherwise difficult to access. The central theoretical frame is "worldness," the degree to which a player engages emotionally with a fictional world, internalises its fiction, and assigns it value, a construct combining story-world experience, play aesthetics, ethics and morality, and central characters.

The study's data collection involved an average of about 14 hours of gameplay video per participant, recorded over three to seven weeks, with only screen activity captured to minimise intrusion. Participants chose their own games, and nine titles were played across the sample, spanning traditional and action role-playing games, a real-time strategy title, and a life-simulation game. Analysis of the recordings identified 220 situations suggestive of valuation and evaluation processes, from which five to nine segments per participant were selected for discussion in the interviews.

The paper's illustrative findings draw on detailed accounts from individual players. One participant recalled a combat-related decision seven weeks after the event, another reconstructed confusion over a game's class system from a brief cursor movement, and a third described hesitating before a rude dialogue choice and linking that restraint to childhood fantasies and adult identity. The author concludes that video elicitation makes visible the interdependencies between player, avatar, and game affordances, and that the method can expose how play and internalisation of worldness develop as mutually dependent processes.