4. Results

Much like the previous chapter dealing with the project’s overall methodology, the results chapter presents a summary of the study results covered in more detail in each of the individual study papers and the design reflections paper (see Appendices I, II, III, and IV), while also including more information which was omitted from the individual papers for reasons of length or their specific focus.

A broad overview of each of the papers and their findings is presented below, in Table 3. The rest of the chapter will present these findings in more depth. With this structure, the reader will have both a quick and simple point of reference (i.e. the table), and more specific and detailed summaries of the individual papers available before the subsequent chapter, where the study results will be used to develop the general framework of digital gaming practice.

Paper Focus Research questions Findings

Play Your

Own Way: Ludic Habitus and the

Subfields of

Digital

Gaming

Practice (Appendix I; published as Jaćević, 2022) Perception How do players with different degrees and types of gaming experience understand and relate to minute game design differences? Familiar players analyze more deeply, discriminate more strongly, reuse perceptual and action patterns more often, sometimes to the detriment of performance

How the Players Get Their Spots: A Study of Playstyle Emergence in Digital Games

(Appendix II; published as Jaćević, 2021) Appreciation How, when, and why do players settle into a particular playstyle when playing a new digital game?

Playstyles emerge at moments of discovery, when one’s ludic habitus preferentially interprets design cues and categorizes a game as a kind/type of game