ABSTRACT
Players' experiences engage multiple aspects of interactive digital game play simultaneously, and these influences must be considered as a whole. This chapter explores the benefits of social scientific methods, such as interviews and discourse analysis, posit preferred new directions of study, and reflexively address the methodological, analytical, and compositional aspects of this project as a whole. A different and useful direction of interactive media research is collaboration with psychologists and neuroscientists to incorporate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—a scan of brain activation—into discussions of media influence. There are a number of essential considerations regarding the process of conducting this research: analyzing the data, writing the text, and the rationale for including this self-reflective analysis. Interactive media play experiences lead to internalization of game content, ludic interactivity, and character identification in ways that are more immersive and affective than past media. Interactive digital media is more than a tool and more than a playful technical improvement on past entertainment practices.
