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Video Games as Ethnography: Conveying Non-Stereotypical Cultural Identities Through Sensorially Immersive Storytelling

Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In 2025, gaming website SteamDB reported that a little over 21,000 video games had been released that year, with independent videogame studios accounting for 99% of these releases on gaming platforms (Steam, 2025). Given this high volume of videogames, players are positioned to experience and play through a vast range of highly stimulating and enriching environments. There has also been an increase in the creation of videogames, whose intentions are to foreground specific cultural experiences. This research will explore how the videogame industry’s large and exhilarating terrain can create room for independent digital content-creators from diverse cultural backgrounds to portray their own customs, traditions, heritages, and values in ways that activate the player’s senses and inspire active learning. Through an application of David Howes’ proposals regarding the future of multisensory anthropology, as well as Sarah Pink et al.’s conceptualization of digital ethnography and Othon Alexandrakis’ discussions on digitization, this research investigates how non-stereotypical portrayals of lived cultural experiences in videogames invite active learning in ways that are both participatory (stimulating to the senses) and critically informed (culturally sensitive). By engaging with two independent videogames titled Venba (2023) and Never Alone (2014) as field sites, this research also investigates how independent videogames can not only serve as models for a new methodology in writing and teaching ethnography, but also counteract the exclusionary and discriminatory practices that persist in the broader gaming industry by creating space for underrepresented voices to reclaim narrative agency and reshape their representation in digital spaces.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221500962
Cites: 6
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Related to: 10