Idea Generation: Word Circles

Word Circles are a useful tool for helping narrow your field of research, or just to find something to research in the first place. They allow us to take our subject area and look within them to find interesting questions for our research projects.

There are four simple steps to creating a word circle, and they are as follows:


Step 1:

Write a number of words related to your subject area on to a page, then take the words that most prominently relate to your subject area and arrange them in a circle on another page

Step 2:

Pick a few words in your circle and use them to create a question. It doesn't matter if the words don't quite relate or if the question sounds strange.

Step 3:

Take these question and attempt to answer them briefly.

Step 4:

Use these answers to create new questions, then repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have what you need to create your essay.

Source: "Worlds in Play: International Perspectives on Digital Games Research"

I stumbled across this book or at least a particular section of it, after googling the term "immersion in video games". Up until now i have been trying the physical books available from my college library, unsuccessfully. Now with this simple search i believe I've found something useful. Watch this space.

Before i start i will say that it seems that i have no means of accessing the entire book without purchasing the thing myself, and unfortunately google has cut out some pages which may have proved useful, still I've taken what i can. Here are my notes:

Here's a link to this source.

[UPDATE]:

I have found whilst searching for other sources something that probably would have been apparent had i read a brief summary of this books contents. It turns out this book is a collaboration of different articles that can be found around the web in their entirety, including the immersion study i was interested in reading about which i found HERE.