Disney Dreamlight Valley

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.

• Players' own gameplay videos used as prompts in video-elicited interviews offer a productive phenomenological method for studying how people play digital games, revealing internal emotional and evaluative processes that are otherwise hard to access.
• The paper's central theoretical construct is "worldness," defined as the degree to which a player emotionally engages with a fictional world, internalises its fiction, and assigns it value, combining story-world experience, play aesthetics, ethics and morality, and central characters.
• The study drew on 14 interviews with 13 players aged 22 to 34, with each participant contributing about 14 hours of screen-only gameplay video recorded over three to seven weeks.