Theme 4: Qualitative methods

I've chosen the article "Real brands in imaginary worlds: investigating players’ experiences of brand placement in digital games" by Mike Molesworth published in "Journal of Consumer behavior" (Issue 5, 355-366). This article has 36 citations according to Google Scholar.

In the first place I’ve found this article interesting because of the chosen research method: author used qualitative approach and conducted focused interviews with game players. In this study Molesworth tries to explore how the context of gameplay effects on the players attitude towards the brand placement? We can see that this research question requires the qualitative study, so the research design suits well to the purpose of the study.

I need to mention that I've read a variety of publications on the topic of consumer attitude towards placements in various media and most of them apply quantitative methods. Usually researchers try to understand how much attention consumers pay to the placements, whether they think positive about placed brands or not by conducting surveys. But in the case of games it is essential to consider not only "perception" of the brand message, but also interaction with brands since it is possible in virtual reality. Context of the placement becomes more important than ever.

Molesworth worked with 5 focus-groups of players aged 19 to 38, during each of experiments 6 people were involved in discussion and collective playing experience. Despite the fact that the sample size is large enough and it proves the reliability of the results, I have suggestion about the recruiting of groups for the study. Groups of 6 were formed at random, when it could be more beneficial to recruit group by some criteria: for instance, female versus male players, adult players versus young adults and etc.

Nevertheless, this does not diminish the quality of the study. The main focus was made on comparison of attitudes towards brand placement in games of different genres. Author came to conclusion that brands appeared in racing simulators were welcomed by users and the brands in strategic life-simulation games (like Sims) may become a matter to reflect on: some users compare their real-life consumption experience with the virtual world.

To conclude, the monomethod study may be improved by applying criteria for sampling. Also it could be complemented by other methods to achieve more detailed results on interaction with brands. For instance, personal interviews could be used to analyze the emotional connection with brands which probably wouldn’t be disclosed in group discussion. The limitation of focus groups is an effect of “group averaging” when respondents may support the opinion of the most competent member of the group without sharing own feelings.

The article “Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses” by Fernaeus & Jacobsson appeared to be almost a revelation for me. I’ve used to customize my electronic devices in order to make the usual operations with them less “automatic” and more “human-like”, but I had to idea that this practice may become an objective of scientific research. When I firstly looked thought this article it wasn’t even clear for me how study of actDressing can be related to the development of the real robotic systems?

I didn’t know that much about contemporary robotics so I was really amazed with the abilities of Pleo dinosaur. If I understood correctly one of the practical implementations of this study is possibility to “teach” Pleo to switch to the sleeping mode when the owner of the electronic pet puts the pajama on it. I wasn’t even aware that such well-developed sensitivity is already possible for robots!

From this article I’ve learned that not only textual or symbolic systems may be used to control the robotic systems, but also the physical system of gestures and acts. The concept itself was brand new for me, because I wasn’t aware about this technology in the first place. Before I’ve read this article the simple voice recognition by robots seemed to be pretty innovative technology for me. But now we passed this stage and machines already can recognize our gestures. So we can interact with robots using another communication model, but further development of technology requires certain theoretical framework. Fernaeus & Jacobsson proved that semiotics can provide the approach in order to determine which cultural/symbolic acts can be used in human-computer interaction.