cance that could not be satisfactorily covered here.

What has been achieved through this thesis is an exciting and valuable methodology for video game design study. In a similar way to how I analysed specific objects from the game worlds of Final Fantasy games in a term paper in my first year, I have here looked at particular spaces and places in Skies of Arcadia. While this makes it sometimes difficult to consistently maintain a critical distance from the game itself as the constructed and traded object in question - I have been criticised for slipping into treating game worlds as if they were real' - I believe that this approach actually unlocks a more critical engagement with the game's design, by questioning specic strategies, rather than looking at the entire game as a whole. Combining this object-focused approach with a networked analysis of game development and consumption makes it possible to aspire to a view of games not as products lifted out of a background context', but as multi-nodal network effects.

There are so many possibilities for how this methodology could be applied in the future. The most obvious is to study other games' objects and spaces in the same way to give a comparative and longitudinal perspective that challenges the existing taxonomisation of games according to the hardware on which they ran. A similar methodology could also be developed for character design, although this would have to integrate theories of identity and teleoperation. Even more exciting is the possibility of applying this networked methodology to online games, particularly if access could be gained to demographic and behavioural metric data gathered during the course of the game’s life. All that is known about who played Skies of Arcadia is that most players were young men. At the time of writing, online games are connecting to people’s social networking profiles to gather data on their tastes and preferences, their friendship and family networks, and much of their activity on other parts of the internet. If the same methodology developed in this paper could be applied to games like that, I could for example know not just that Nasrad mimicks the Taj Mahal, but also how many of the players are known to have visited the real-world Taj Mahal, how many players commented on the fact that Nasrad’s palace looks like the Taj Mahal, and what effect such recognition had on the length of time they spent in that area. This sort of insight could reveal a great deal about game play experiences as network e]>