In the past 40 years, computer games have become an overwhelming success in the entertainment industries as well as an established cultural medium. While the video game industry has well-established methods of data collection (in the form of game metrics) to deal with the inherent complexity of video games, the field of game research has not sufficiently addressed its own status as an independent field of inquiry with a unified approach to data collection for game analysis. Instead, individual studies use methodological approaches that start from zero every time, thus creating information silos that provide interesting individual and anecdotal insights, but that do little to advance this field as a whole. This thesis intends to build on such studies to propose a more cohesive approach to data collection for the study of games that also contributes to the field of research methods. A unified method of data collection would ideally be robust enough to be applied to different genres (e.g., adventure, MMORPGs, point-and-click games) and could produce verifiable results, allowing researchers to compare like-with-like and make data sharable across disciplines to encourage the interdisciplinary study of video games. The main contribution of this thesis is a three-part, step-by-step methodology of data collection for the study of PC games using video records as data within a robust framework. The methodology is showcased by means of three case studies as examples of practical applications of the methodology. The aim of this methodology is to make games more systematically analysable, and thus more accessible as objects interdisciplinary study and scholarly critique.