Chapter 4: Case Study 4 – Rhizomic Ethnography: Exploring the Lived Experience of an After-school Minecraft Club

In this chapter, I describe a project that sought to explore the ‘lived experience’ of a group of children engaged in on- and off-screen play, during an after-school Minecraft Club. Building on established research methodologies, an approach that I called ‘rhizomic ethnography’ was developed to study this complex site of play. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I demonstrate how this suite of participatory, playful and multimodal approaches, including use of video, comic strips and virtual model making, helped to illuminate the children's collaborative creation of a ‘virtual community’. I explain how employing a range of methods, which often emerged during the process of research, allowed for unexpected meanings to develop and, therefore, afforded new insights into the nature of children's play. Here, I also seek to demonstrate how taking an adaptive and playful approach to research, working in synergy with the research context, could have affordances for examining other examples of children's playful, social interactions.