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The Ethnographer’s Dilemma: To Understand a World That Is Not Your Own While Avoiding to Misrepresenting It

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Indie Video Game Development Work

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Abstract

The Introduction discusses the epistemological and methodological issues pertaining to the external scholar’s capacity to describe a community, or more adequately, an epistemic community wherein he or she is not a member. Drawing on anthropological literature and the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in particular, the current study is staged as an exploration of the video game development community, and more specifically the so-called indie community that produces digital artefacts that the author knows very little about. The study is thus introduced as an exploration of a domain of unfamiliar expertise and an idiosyncratic professional and community-based culture. The chapter presents the study design and the empirical data collection and data analysis activities, and describes the content of the volume.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The concept technological frame was introduced in science and technology studies and comprises, Bijker (1995: 123) writes, “all elements that influence the interactions within relevant social groups and lead to the attribution of meanings to technical artefacts.” That is, the technological frame constitutes the technology as what it practically speaking is. In Pinch and Trocco’s (2002: 309–310) more recent use of the term, a technological frame “captures the way a whole series of practices, ideas, and values get built around a technology.” Importantly in this context, the technological frame “includes both the ways technologies are produced and the ways they are used and consumed.”

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    Alexander Styhre

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Styhre, A. (2020). The Ethnographer’s Dilemma: To Understand a World That Is Not Your Own While Avoiding to Misrepresenting It. In: Indie Video Game Development Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45545-3_1

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