http://gac.sagepub.com/content/1/1/29.abstract

This article was helpful for me to think about why digital ethnography is necessary for conducting a research on gaming culture. The author states that participant observation "allows the researcher to study the gap between what people say they do (which may sound quite rule like) and what they actually do (which is often not very rule like). Moreover, it is of "particular utility in disciplines like game studies where the object of study is emergent, incompletely understood, and thus unpredictable".