Revisiting Norton Long's Ecology of Games: A Network Approach

Because the ecology of games (Long, 1958) is generally a qualitative perspective, it rarely has been applied as a means of empirically analyzing the management of community affairs. Here we pair the perspective's emphasis on key actors' goals with a conceptualization of local issues as reference points for the structure of local games. To illustrate, we examine the building of Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1990s using this approach. We treat connections among the actors involved in the affair, the games in which they were involved, and the stadium‐related issues they addressed as three‐mode network data. We use multidimensional scaling and network‐based measures to generate a picture of the structure of the ecology of games relative to the stadium affair. We find that a relational treatment of the ecology of games helps us understand the structure and process of community affairs, and enhances the descriptive utility of Long's perspective.