Gender and Tabletops, Branching
A semi-structured interview protocol, with three subjects' real paths traced through it.
Design, observation, and interviews by Beau Johnson.
Study and participants
Question
How do patterns of behavior around gender and self-professed identity manifest when women graduate students with similar interests play a board game together, and how do those behaviors compare with how the participants describe themselves? The group played Settlers of Catan under observation, then sat for individual semi-structured interviews that replayed clips of their own play.
Participants (pseudonymous)
- Kitty Pryde. Late twenties, PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction, Digital Media. Studies gender and identity representation in online games and social networks. Professional background in internet and gaming journalism.
- Jean Grey. Early thirties, PhD candidate finishing a dissertation on new literacies, digital media, and mathematics education. Background in higher-education mathematics.
- Rogue. Early twenties, master's student in Digital Media, headed toward doctoral work on hands-on electronics construction and women in computer coding.
How to read the tree
The protocol runs in three sections, INTRO, SELF, and VIDEO, with an optional GAMER GATE probe. Each question is a node; branches sort the subjects by how they answered. Kitty Pryde's recorded interview ends early, so her later nodes are marked not captured rather than filled in.
Quotes are lightly cleaned from recorded interviews, with wording preserved; auto-transcription had swapped some speaker labels, corrected here. The GAMER GATE section of the protocol supplied provocative quotes from the fall 2014 discourse as elicitation prompts; those are omitted here, and the probe itself is preserved.