Ex 4: Article Analysis
This exercise is a quick check to make sure you have the research skills that will be necessary to do well on your term paper. If you've taken STW, then this will be a simple review.
A habit you may have learned in high school is to write a full draft of a paper that supports the point that you want to make, and then "finding quotes" from scholarly sources that agree with your position. But that defeats the purpose of writing a research paper... you're supposed to learn as you research... maybe you'll even change your mind, based on the information and argument you encounter. So, before I ask you to come up with a thesis for your research paper, I'm going to ask you to show me that you know how to find and read academic articles.
A habit you may have learned in high school is to write a full draft of a paper that supports the point that you want to make, and then "finding quotes" from scholarly sources that agree with your position. But that defeats the purpose of writing a research paper... you're supposed to learn as you research... maybe you'll even change your mind, based on the information and argument you encounter. So, before I ask you to come up with a thesis for your research paper, I'm going to ask you to show me that you know how to find and read academic articles.
- Find a peer-reviewed academic article on a topic of video game studies that closely interests you. Some online journals include Game Studies, Kairos, and Games and Culture, but you will also find articles about games in many other journals. (I found 278 hits for peer-reviewed, full-text articles containing the words "video game" in the EBSCOhost database at Reeves Library... there are far fewer when I search for specific games, but as you'll see, it's OK if you can't find any articles written about the game you want to study. Supply a full MLA-style reference for the article.
- Quote the author's main thesis. (That is, what is the single main claim that this author makes?)
- What evidence does the author use in order to support the main idea? Please don't go through my list and answer "yes" or "no" for each pf the following suggestions... my goal is to get you to think about what evidence the authors are offering.
- Has the author conducted a scientific experiment, putting 50 kids in a room with video games and 50 kids in a room with TV, and then counted how many fights broke out?
- Did the author merely ask the parents of the kids to answer a survey about the level of aggression the kids showed?
- Did the author show 20 girls games about war and 20 boys games about make-up, and then interview the kids afterwards to see what they thought?
- Did the author spend 6 months playing the game as a guild with other researchers, in oder to gain first-hand evidence?
- Is the author quoting from scholarly works, published reviews, interviews with gamers, Congressional testimony, or dialogue contained in the games?
- What alternative or opposing ideas does the author reject (in order to build up support for the main idea)?
- What are the sources for the author's presentation of evidence that works against the author's thesis?
- How does an academic article differ from 6A) a traditional game review, and 6B) New Games Journalism?
Peer Reviewed Articles
Find a peer-reviewed academic article on a topic closely related to video game studies.
Find a peer-reviewed academic article on a topic closely related to video game studies.
- What is an academic article? It is written by a scholar
(usually a professor or graduate student, but sometimes an independent
scholar), intended to be read by other scholars. Most academic articles are about 20 pages long. Anything shorter than about 10 pages is not likely to be an academic article -- you've probably found something else.
- A scholarly article on cancer research will be written by a doctor who has devoted her life to studying cancer; a scholarly article on medieval poetry will be written by a professor who has been studying medieval poetry for the past 10 years. An academic article is written by someone who knows that subject matter extremely well (and might not be as skilled at writing something that appeals to the beginning reader).
- By contrast, a newspaper article on space travel will be written
by a reporter who knows how to ask good questions, and knows how to
write so that the general reader can understand; but a science reporter
might write an article on gene therapy one week, astronomy the next
week, and geology the week after that.
Articles that appear in newspapers or magazines (including magazines devoted to the games industry) are written by journalists -- professional communicators who know (or who can quickly learn) a little bit about everything. In the process of making information accessible to the average reader, journalists have to simplify, and that often means making mistakes. (For instance, a journalist who hasn't played Tomb Raider may just reprint a parent's complaint that the game celebrates pointless violence; the journalist is not likely to play through the game to realize that, within the context of the game, Tomb Raider is no more violent than any number of action movies or TV shows.)
- What is peer-review? It's a filtering process, designed to
ensure that a scholarly essay has met the approval of a panel of
experts who are not directly involved in the author's research. The
reviewers might not agree with the author's conclusion, and they rarely
have time to double-check every fact or claim in the article, but in
general the peer review process is designed to make sure that obvious
mistakes or wild, unsupported claims don't make their way into
scholarly publications. (Just because a professor has written and put
it on the internet does not mean that it's a scholarly publication.)
- How do I find peer-reviewed academic articles? The easiest way is simply to use the library article database and look for a box marked "peer reviewed." That will filter out all the Time magazine profiles and corporate press releases that might otherwise flood your search results.
- What good are academic publications? They are the raw material you will use to construct your argument. I usually suggest that students keep looking for scholarly publications until they find one that makes a claim that they disagree with, and use that disagreement as the basis of their thesis.
- What if I can't find a single scholarly reference to the game I want to study?
Does that mean you have to choose another topic? Of course not! You
can quote what a scholar has to say about a similar game, and use the
body of your article to explain why that claim does or does not hold
for the game that you have chosen to study.
Let's say you want to write your research paper on Grand Theft Auto IV, but you can only find academic articles on Grand Theft Auto III, or maybe you can only find articles on video game violence in general (without a detailed analysis of any specific game). Or what if you want to write on World of Warcraft, but all the MMORG scholarship you find focuses on EverQuest or Ultima Online? Look for articles on more general topics, and insert your own examples from the game you want to study, in order to defend, challenge, or support the claims the scholarly author has made.
- What is a book review? Often, academic journals will publish short articles that contain a critical review of a full-length book. For this exercise, I'm asking you to find a full-length article (typically about 20 pages long). Here is a four-page review of Half-Real.
Much of it summarizes Juul's main ideas, but quoting from this review
without reading the actual book is not good scholarly practice.
Especially if they are negative, book reviews are useful in helping you
find "con" arguments to work against the claims made by book authors. But the authors of book reviews are more interested in assessing one specific work, so they are more limited in scope than a full-length article.
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readings
Hi Everyone! Here is my blog entry called, "Gender and Class Differences in Video Games (Ex 4: Article Analysis)"