What is Phenomenography

This chapter explores the roles players created, and how these structured their online relationships, in an online massively multi-player role-playing game, Kingdom of Loathing—a low-tech browser-based game with a satirical, humorous style. Existing research has often sought to understand players’ actions by classifying them into “types”, determined by motivations for play or patterns of behaviour. However, such typologies are shown to be problematic, particularly in the way that they might be interpreted as predicting behaviour. Instead, a phenomenographic exploration was undertaken, looking at players’ experiences, the roles they took up, and how they learned to perform these. This exploration shows that classifications of players are an over-simplification. Instead, the classification should apply to examples of play—not least because the game itself was not “fixed” but was constantly re-designed in response to play. This has implications for research methodology, but also for the (ongoing) design of games.