A meta-synthesis “is about the comparative textual analysis of qualitative findings” (Jensen & Allen, 1996, p. Meta-synthesis surfaced to distinguish those forms of qualitative meta-analysis whose purposes are more interpretive than aggregative (Timulak, 2009). Researchers have, therefore, constructed various forms of qualitative meta-analysis, whose specific processes depend on a study’s goals. In doing so, qualitative meta-analyses can pursue various ends, including “the development of a new understanding, a need to reconcile conflicts in the literature, the identification of central findings in an entire literature…the desire to raise critical consciousness about shortcomings or biases in a literature” (Levitt, 2018, p.

In short, the purpose of qualitative meta-analyses is to study the studies. My hopes are that its results are generative, that it bolsters connections to disciplines outside of game studies, and that it builds conduits for needed re-politicizations of agency in the field.Ī meta-synthesis is a type of qualitative meta-analysis, a methodological approach that allows researchers to aggregate, summarize, and understand the findings of primary qualitative studies in a particular field. By gathering together and examining many similar and many divergent perspectives, this study advocates against totalizing views of agency and contends that gaming agencies are plural potentialities that are always negotiated, always contingent, and always in flux. In seeking answers to these questions, this meta-synthesis tosses some ideas into the constant flows of conceptual change and it signals several possible directions for future research. The methodological equipment of a meta-synthesis is especially befitted to foreground the ideological work of a field’s definitions and conceptualizations, to wrest out the subterranean currents of power that churn among theories.Ī set of central questions guides this study: 1) How has the field of game studies defined and conceptualized agency? 2) What are the assumptions underpinning the field’s understandings of agency? 3) What are the relationships between these theoretical configurations, both in terms of their thematic subject matter and the networks of their citational practices within and outside of the field? And finally, 4) Why has agency assumed such a prominent position in game studies scholarship in the first place? To bring these repercussions to light, I have conducted a meta-synthesis that maps, compares, and critiques various strands of research on agency that crisscross the field. Yet, even as the magnitudes of their impacts intensify, their political lodes and necessary interrelationships remain concealed under the surface. Others have broken away to develop along separate tracks, often making only minimal contact with other entrenched camps, the drifting fragments of nascent concepts, and the old and new theories of agency that lie outside the field’s borders.īuried beneath these expansive debates about agency in video games, the formations of common theories and the fractures of contested concepts reverberate across and beyond the field. Some research segments have crystallized around shared interests, concerns, and objectives. The frictions of this rapid expansion have sparked various deliberations and disagreements. Their ever-increasing reach and frequency in the young field have ensured that agency is no obscure nook of scholarship, but is a growing foundational premise of game studies research. Studies on agency in video games have proliferated during the last two decades.

Keywords: agency, embodiment, meta-synthesis, player agency, illusory agency, nonhuman agencyĪt this point, it seems that much of the field of game studies functions in response to Murray’s (1997) conviction that agency is an aesthetic experience that is essential to our encounters with video games. Ultimately, this paper advocates against totalizing views of agency and contends that gaming agencies are plural potentialities that are always negotiated, always contingent, and always in flux. By addressing individual studies in their interrelatedness and divergences, a meta-synthesis gauges the tremors of thematic trends and tensions, exposes the assumptions that undergird a field’s conceptual apparatuses, and draws out fresh nuances from the central topic.

This paper undertakes a meta-synthesis of fifty-nine qualitative and humanistic studies in order to comprehensively examine the research on agency in the field of game studies.

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