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Research by Sonja Sapach.
Scholarship on digital play, traumatic experience, alienation, social solidarity, collecting, and the methods used to study meaning as it moves through games, texts, archives, and everyday life.
Research focus
Games as places where meaning is made, tested, and repaired.
My research treats video games and media objects as social and methodological spaces: places where people learn rules, perform roles, form attachments, practice control, build shared meanings, and negotiate relationships to themselves, others, and the world.
The dissertation extends this work through trauma and alienation, asking how video games can help mediate memory, uncertainty, self-care, solidarity, and identity transformation. Earlier work on World of Warcraft developed a theory of social solidarity through sacred things, ritualized play, and shared in-game expectations.
Across the publication record, a second thread follows collecting, classification, and evidence: how creatures, books, gear, achievements, citations, archives, and digital traces become meaningful because people organize, display, protect, remember, and interpret them.
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University of Alberta Scholaris / ERA
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Dissertation
Let’s Play with Trauma: An Autoethnographic Study of Traumatic Experience, Alienation, and Control in Video Games
An interdisciplinary autoethnographic dissertation on video games, C-PTSD, alienation, memory, and control. The project combines memory work, Let’s Play recordings, digital text-mining, and a major case study of Tetris to argue that games can help transform a lack of control over perceived certainty into perceived control over relative uncertainty.
View dissertation recordArticle · Digital Studies
Tagging My Tears and Fears: Text-Mining the Autoethnography
A digital humanities methods article that tests XML tagging, Python/NLTK, R, sentiment analysis, and topic modelling against autoethnographic life writing. The piece is less about extracting clean data than about what happens when computational methods meet trauma, subjectivity, memory, and interpretive self-study.
Read at Digital StudiesArticle · Loading...
Gotta Catch Em’ All: The Compelling Act of Creature Collection in Pokemon, Ni No Kuni, Shin Megami Tensei, and World of Warcraft
A game studies article on why creature collection is compelling. Through close readings of Pokémon X/Y, Ni No Kuni, Shin Megami Tensei IV, and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, the article identifies exploration, organization, specialized knowledge, and immortality as central themes in digital collecting.
Read at Loading...Article · gamevironments
The WoW Factor: A Virtual Ethnographic Study of Sacred Things and Rituals in World of Warcraft
A methodological article on complete participant-observation virtual ethnography in World of Warcraft. It focuses on sacred objects and rituals in Azeroth, the insider/outsider balance, ethical concerns, screen and video capture, and the spatial and temporal displacement between virtual and physical field sites.
Read at gamevironmentsMA thesis · Acadia University
The WoW Factor: The Development of Social Solidarity in Azeroth
A participant-observation virtual ethnography of World of Warcraft based on 407 hours of field observations and ten semi-structured interviews. The thesis argues that sacred things and ritualized behaviour within the magic circle of Azeroth develop and maintain social solidarity, and identifies five ideal types of interaction: breaching, 1-upping, supportive interactions, sociability seeking, and silent performance.
View thesis recordBook review · Information, Communication & Society
Culture in networks
Scholarly book review published in Information, Communication & Society.
Read at Information, Communication & SocietyCommentary · First Person Scholar
Let’s Play With Research Methodologies
Public-facing commentary on research methods, play, and the methodological value of studying games from the inside. This piece connects the broader dissertation project to questions about how Let’s Play practices can become research practice.
Read at First Person ScholarThemes
Recurring questions.
Trauma, alienation & control
How traumatic experience can produce fractured relations to self, others, memory, and the world; and how games can help practice agency under uncertain conditions.
Play as method
How playing, recording, watching, replaying, and narrating games can become a serious research practice rather than just an object of study.
Virtual ethnography
How researchers enter online worlds as participants, document social life through screenshots and video, and account for boundaries between virtual and physical field sites.
Social solidarity & ritual
How players develop shared expectations, sacred things, rituals, trust, respect, and forms of social order inside game worlds such as Azeroth.
Collecting & symbolic immortality
How creature collections, achievements, books, gear, rare objects, and archives give shape to exploration, organization, specialized knowledge, and memory.
Digital humanities & life writing
How text mining, tagging, metadata, topic modelling, and interpretive reading can be used carefully with subjective, emotional, and autoethnographic materials.
Research Map
How these projects connect.
Across these projects, my work asks how people use digital play, media objects, and shared symbolic systems to survive, connect, remember, organize meaning, and regain a sense of agency. The research moves between virtual ethnography, autoethnography, digital text analysis, game studies, trauma theory, and sociology, with video games treated not as escapism alone, but as social and methodological spaces where identity, solidarity, memory, and control can be studied.