Experience, habit, and flow: Games user research and the forgetting of player identity
基于四年民族志研究，揭示游戏用户研究中心理学主导的玩家概念如何忽视社会背景和玩家真实体验，并指出虚拟现实等新技术暴露了这些概念的局限，呼吁重新审视其理论基础。
This article examines the dominant conceptions of “the player” and “player experience” that are constructed through videogame development. Emerging from four years of ethnographic research with "user researchers," who use social scientific methodologies to collect and report player feedback to studios while games are still in development, this article argues that the conceptions that predominate in games user research come from psychology and psychologically informed theories of design (particularly human-computer interaction). These conceptions, which tend to foreground a tight feedback loop of player, hardware, and software, frame players as shaped not by social context but by habits of gameplay. Lived experiences are thus written out of the game development process. Virtual reality, motion capture technology, and accessibility considerations are showing the limitations of these conceptions, though, and this article argues that these limitations invite a wholesale reconsideration of the theoretical premises and uninterrogated biases that undergird social scientific research conducted in videogaming spaces.