It Takes Two to Tandem: Tandem Analysis as a Novel Method for the Critical Analysis of Games

Many players engage in ‘tandem play’ with others, usually close friends, who talk about what they play as they play it - particularly in cases of single player videogames where one player plays and the other observes. Begy et al. (2017, p.149) have studied ‘tandem play’ extensively, however, this practice of tandem play has not up until now been suggested as a formal method for analysis, directly carried out by the analysts themselves. Proposed here is a novel form of critical analysis, tandem analysis, that makes use of a pair of analysts who engage in tandem play of a videogame together, recording live discussion of the play session and then conducting a thematic analysis of the recording for qualitatively different insights to those provided by other analytical methods. Observations may be more accurately expressed in-situ so that the analysis is more direct in its expression. While three or more researchers could theoretically conduct a tandem analysis, the focus for now is establishing a functioning method with a dyad.