Killed 10 Boars  Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008    | |
Master Looter  Posts: 1719 Joined: 24 May 2005     | Done and done. You're lucky I turned 18 earlier this month
I am teh "Wakka Wakka" It's very obvious that you fell from the retard tree and hit every branch on the way down- |
Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 | Thanks =) I wish I didn't have to limit the age like that, but I would have had to go through a much longer approval process if I didn't limit it to "adults". |
WarCry Choice  Posts: 2239 Joined: 5 Jan 2007     | Done and done. P.S.: You should've added a "Different Country" option to your last question ;) |
Site Manager  Posts: 4759 Joined: 6 Dec 2004 | Damn, seems grad students still aren't amazingly imaginitive. We used to have 2 or 3 of these threads a week, they've died down a little lately, but i suppose report season is a-coming so expect a hundred more "survey about mmos for my report" threads. No offence to you btw, I personally know the annoyances of trying to pick subject matter that hasn't been done to death. I |
WarCry Choice  Posts: 5831 Joined: 29 Jun 2004   |
Agreed. If they were intelligent they would try and compile the surveys that have already been done and not waste as much of their time. Try searching our forums here and other gaming affiliated sites. (HiNt)
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Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 | @ Sigoya - Thanks for your response! I did think different country might be a needed option, but I didn't want to change the questions too much. I copied most of the survey directly from a national (US) survey so that I can compare my results to theirs. The number of people who have changed countries should be small enough that it won't effect my results. @ mrcheese and Greever - ahhh the flames, how I missed you. I got a much better reception on the WoW forums... interesting. At any rate, I have looked over a lot of previous research, including the extensive survey data collected by Nick Yee. I am basing my project partially on his research. However, most of the previous research has not dealt specifically with measuring social capital in MMOs. So while you may think this topic has been "done to death", it hasn't. Maybe you have been witness to a multitude of researchers who have not had their work published, because I was unable to find much in this area. And whether or not it has been done a million times, it is common scientific practice to repeat past experiments in order to recreate the results and expand on them. Thank you for bumping my thread, and I hope you will take the time to complete my survey. |
Master Looter Posts: 1719 Joined: 24 May 2005 | Eh. I've filled out tons of these. It all really depends who posts it, if it's someone who's been here awhile or someone who I know, I am way more likely to do the survey. You seem to have good typing skills, and seem to be intelligent. That's why I did the survey.
I am teh "Wakka Wakka" It's very obvious that you fell from the retard tree and hit every branch on the way down- |
Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 | That's why I've been following this thread. I know I don't like to click on random URLs on forums either. It's unfortunate that I don't have the rep here to back up my research - I'm more of a lurker usually. Thanks for taking the time to fill it out. =) |
Site Manager Posts: 4759 Joined: 6 Dec 2004 |
Thank you for the amazingly patronising response. Odd how people in these situations are always so condescending to the community they're trying to get to help do their research. While I agree retesting well trodden ground is a good opt-out for those who cannot think up new areas to research, are you really expecting the results to be wildly different from everything before it? Social interactions and related topics within MMOs has indeed been "done to death", do scientists routinely test general relativity and gravitational theory just to make sure all the previous work was correct? I'm not sure as my degree is in a more technical area - i'll have to ask some of the physicists I know. We have indeed been witness to dozens of people conducting the same surveys as yours and as nothing groundbreaking would have been established, I'd assume their work was not published - much like yours. Anyway, best of luck with the Business / Economics degree =). I |
Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 | If my reply was "amazingly patronising", it was only because I was responding to your comments about not being "amazingly imaginative". You honestly don't think you were being patronising yourself? Not to mention that you were undermining my attempt to get responses by encouraging people to think it wasn't worthwhile. As for your questions, I do expect the results to be different since nobody has attempted to measure the social capital of these worlds while comparing it to that of the real world. There's a lot of talk about these worlds teaching us social skills, or how you have to be social within the world in order to accomplish gaming goals, but there is very little about them as a hobby that can benefit your life just like joining a sports team or a book club or something. Do you talk about playing WoW with people that you work with? Would you even dream about mentioning it at a job interview? Most people would say no because it's considered a subculture, not an actual hobby. The scientific theories you mentioned are well established theories that have been around for... centuries? I'm not sure how long - I'm not a science major. MMOs/Virtual Worlds have been around for about 10 years (30 if you count MUDs). It is hardly a mainstream topic and graduate students are not the only ones investigating it. The Pew Internet & American Life Project, a highly respected research program, just released a brand new study that they did on virtual worlds. They don't think it's been done to death. So please stop patronising me and my project. I have already received an incredible response - over 800 people have taken the survey and I thank you all for your time. I am happy to keep collecting responses though. The larger the sample, the better representation I can give of the virtual world community. |
Site Manager Posts: 4759 Joined: 6 Dec 2004 |
That was sort of the point there champ. Anyway, you specifically state your survey is based on questions on a national survey... So are you simply collecting more data for their study? Seems so. I fail to see how you can draw new conclusions from old research. Also to everyone else: Note how there's another of these threads around. It's almost as if I knew this would happen, eh? Sorta ruins your theory that it's new and cutting edge research when we've been getting threads on it for the past 3 years and already there's pretty much a duplicate one here. As before, really best of luck with the Business / Economics degree =). I sincerely look forward to purchasing coffee from you / throwing loose change at you on the street in the future! Oh, just to add, done a little research of my own. The results fit nicely with what has been said before (much like I expect yours to): http://lin2.warcry.com/forums/read/16.38883#285294 Yours might be dressed up slightly differently, but the crux of the survey is the same. Also note a few of these are offering monetary incentives to complete the surveys, I know a lot of Psych students at my Uni used to offer a small amount of cash to those filling out surveys for them. You just seems cheap and rather lazy by comparison - at least the Psych students used to go door to door around campus for their answers. Remember - time is money. I'm sure you know that being on a Business / Economics degree though =). I |
Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 | You're running out of good objections it seems. Let me address the only part of your comment that had anything to do with my study. Yes, I specifically stated that my questions are based on those of a national survey. "Based on". About half of them are copied directly from that survey so that I can use them as a control - I will compare the answers I receive to those of the previous study. The other half were changed slightly so that they would apply to MMOs - That way I can compare the results of the MMO to that of the national survey. Maybe you'll understand it when you read my analysis. And the duplicate study? Forgive my paranoia, but the timing and your obsession with discrediting me makes me suspect you created another account simply to prove your point. I'm sorry to the other poster if that's not the case. As for your closing... I don't even know what to say. I imagine next you'll just flat out be calling me names. Whatever, it doesn't bother me. Every time you respond, you are bumping my thread and I keep getting more responses. So thanks for saving me some work. =) |
Site Manager Posts: 4759 Joined: 6 Dec 2004 |
Feel free to ask a moderator to check the IPs of each account. I have better things to do with my time than create surveys to discredit lazy students on joke degrees. My degree had a little business involved in it and I can safely say it was the easiest part of my whole course. Passed it with flying colours purely through common sense. Your claim to have over 800 responses... Is a little doubtful - at least from this forum alone. This forum has perhaps 50 regular visitors, so unless each of us filled it out 8 times, you're stretching the truth or have spammed it all over a lot of forums (incidentally making you no better than chinese spambots selling cialis and viagra). Call it what you will, you're making minor changes to a national survey and doing a comparison. If "about half" of the questions are direct copies, that makes the survey about half your own work. Most reputable universities consider that plagarism, i'm sure the USA has a much more lax stance given that students there get course credits simply for arriving at a lecture and any idiot can pass given enough time - here in England it's treated a lot more seriously. Usually resulting in dismissal from the university and being added to a blacklist making it nearly impossible to obtain a degree. Keep turning up to those classes, i'm sure you'll accrue enough credits to get that graduate degree eventually! =) I |
Dungeon Crawler  Posts: 889 Joined: 7 Aug 2006     |
LOL the funny part is, is that cheese made his point so blattantly that you actualy got "paranoid" as you said, and then you tried to create a whacky scenario that could some how discredit a valid point Cheese made,even though any regular of these forums knows he's correct, as would you Gealach, if you would watch this threads general section for a bit.
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Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 |
See? name calling. Shizzie, I'm paranoid by nature and I don't click on urls on forums unless I have good reason to. Honestly, I wouldn't have clicked on my own link until a few other people had and had reported back here, which is why I was watching the thread to try to alleviate concerns. mrcheese, at first I was impressed by you - you had the most intelligent objections to my study of any of the forums I posted on. The most I got elsewhere was "zomg keylogger". But your later responses are not as well thought out. I've already stated that repeating and expanding upon other people's work is good scientific practice. And if you bothered to go to my URL, you'd see that I had to get IRB approval through my school. So if it was plagiarism, I never would've been approved. As of this moment, I have 914 respondents to my survey, with 75% completing the entire thing - an impressive statistic for a graduate student relying on people trusting her random posts on forums. This thread has had only about 500 views itself, many of them repeat visitors to watch the flame war no doubt. So, no, they were not all from here. I think I got relatively few responses from this forum actually judging by the timing. The responses have slowed down considerably. I stopped posting in most other places because I didn't want to be an annoying spammer, and the replies to my other threads have died down. I will soon be closing the survey anyway so that I can finish analyzing the data and write my paper. When I have something to post, and hopefully when I get something published, I'll come back and let you know. Thanks for your time. |
Site Manager Posts: 4759 Joined: 6 Dec 2004 | How is that name calling? You join specifically to get something from others then, like all the previous surveys on this subject matter, will disappear, never to be seen again. Your only defining feature seems to be that you're not an automated script, so well done on that. I |
Epic’d Out  Posts: 5986 Joined: 28 May 2004  |
Trying to stay on the neutral side of things here, even though I support everything cheese said based on being around about the same amount of time, if it doesn't bother you, yet your finding it annoying based on the tone of your posts, why fuel the fire? We have seen dozens along the same lines as your survey, and the same thing always happens. If your paper gets published, well done. If it flops, better luck next time. The point is, instead of giving fuel for us to use, just turn around and thank us for our criticizing input, even if you don't mean it. On the same note, I am paranoid with clicking URLs posted on pages, that being the reason I always mouse over a link to see the real one, then running a scan on said site before doing anything else with it. If I cant verify the real link, I stay away. Regardless of our forum's flame-fest, good luck with your paper.
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Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 | Thanks for the neutral response, Naota. I appreciate it. I understand that there are a lot of people doing similar studies, and I expected the hostility from some people. I wasn't going to post on this forum for that reason. I'm actually surprised at the responses I got elsewhere - they were overwhelmingly positive. Why fuel the fire? Partly to keep my thread bumped for additional responses, partly to refute mrcheese's attempts to discredit me, and partly because it was fun. I won't be responding to negative posts here anymore though. I have enough data and new responses are starting to trickle in. Besides, I've already been treading the line of professionalism and to avoid completely jumping over it I'd better leave things as they are. =) Thank you for the advice about clicking URLs. I'll keep it in mind. |
Site Manager Posts: 4759 Joined: 6 Dec 2004 | It was indeed fun. I didn't intend to troll this post, my first comments here were actually trying to support while politely informing that we get a lot of this kind of thing. Claiming yours was unique while I sifted through the same set of questions i'd seen time and time again just brought out my trolling instinct. Anyway, your survey's done, so I doubt we'll ever see you again. Bye! =) I |
Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 | I didn't mean to claim it was entirely unique. I know people ask this kind of stuff pretty often. Thanks for the followup response. ;) I do intend to try to get my work published even if I have to simply host it myself. That way other people can use my results and hopefully won't bother you again with the same exact thing. I promise to come back and post the location of my study when I'm done. Until then, bye. =) |
Master Looter  Posts: 2194 Joined: 10 Jul 2004 | I find validity in your research Gealach. Although I agree with Cheese that there have been countless others before you, who've also been studying video gaming sub-cultures, one cannot deny the rapid expansion and acceptance of such sub-cultures. Within your own survey, there are interesting questions that are asked that could be further examined. Looking at the cosmologies of different sub-cultures, within the gaming culture as a whole, you can probably find interesting world views that conflict with one another. LARP= Live Action Role Play... for those of you who don't know. Now this is just an anthropological viewpoint. There are so many ways to approach this topic in an interesting way, and I hope you find a way that would make a difference in how modern academia recognizes video games, its culture and sub-cultures.
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WarCry Choice Posts: 5831 Joined: 29 Jun 2004 | FYI, I'm not being condescending or hostile in any way. Most of us on this off-topic forum have been here for years and have seen more of these surveys than you could probably imagine. I'm not going to astound you with my vocabulary or try to combat your obvious mastery of the english language.(or at least your ability to fumble your way through a thesaurus) However, you do need to realize you are wasting a lot of time on this topic. If you want to do something new/refreshing and actually get your work published and acredited you need to pay a lot of attention to redundancies amongst your own survey and previous surveys. You really need to do some comparisons in hard data that previous surveys have established and manipulate what you have around it to fill in the gaps(if there are any). Tip: Stay away from WoW forums. WoW is just a small perverse demographic of the MMO community, you need to stick to gaming sites as a whole and don't allow yourself to fall into specific gaming forums for experienced MMO people. Warcry, theEscapist, Allakazam general forums etc... are all good places to start, but don't go to specific game forums unless you are planning on doing this project for years upon years and basing a doctorate on it. (GL if you are...) Oh... and if you think bumping this thread is doing much good it isn't. You've already conversed with pretty much everyone that is a regular here, and chances are you aren't going to pick up a significant amount of activity beyond that. Not to say you aren't going to get relevant information still, just not a lot of diversity.
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Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 | I meant it when I said goodbye, but I wanted to respond to the latest posters. My survey is still open for a day or so until I finish analyzing the first batch, but responses have basically stopped, and I don't expect any more from this forum. Greever - Thanks for the tips on other forums to use. Wish you had mentioned that earlier. ;) My sample is heavily weighted toward WoW - a flaw that I will definitely mention. I did post here and on the Penny Arcade forums, but I was well aware of the reaction I'd get without being a veteran poster, so I guess I didn't pursue too many non-specific forums. I wonder if I hadn't posted on the WoW forums at all if I still would have received such a high number of WoW playing respondents - the game does have the highest market share of MMOs after all. Regardless, that is definitely a weakness in my study. I do think there is some interesting data in what I have collected. While the survey is open, I'm not going to go into it in too much detail, but if you look at the "academic" articles on MMOs/virtual worlds, they just don't quite get it. Most of them are not written by gamers I'm sure, and it shows in their analyses. I don't think I'm going to write anything mind-blowing. I'm not very good at writing, and as a Library and Information Science major, my training in this type of study consisted of about six weeks of "how to conduct a survey and write a research paper analysis". But maybe it will be enough to help all the other academic researchers think about MMOs a little differently. |
WarCry Choice Posts: 5831 Joined: 29 Jun 2004 | Well, if you want to see what I mean by a slightly skewed community when surveying WoWnuggetz, go post a request for survey takers on the Eve forums and check your answers. Eve and WoW are both MMO's but worlds apart. If you are shooting for the MMO's in general WoW is an anomaly of the community. WoW has drawn in the regular population into the world of MMORPGs. You have to come to places like this to get a fairly comprehensive view of O.G. MMO whores in general. Though you have to go to LOTS of places like this and wade through the same complaints of the oldy moldy posters such as I and the others. Do your homework beforehand and we can be very helpful though... :-P
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Killed 10 Boars Posts: 11 Joined: 23 Nov 2008 | Well I have to say that you are absolutely right about Eve players being different, at least as far as their reasons for playing. Even with the small sample I have it's obvious. I haven't even started analyzing the social capital section of the survey yet though so I don't know if the differences will continue. I'm still considering taking your suggestion about looking for more Eve players to fill out the survey, but I'd have to wait a few more days for my surveymonkey account to renew. And at that point I'm not sure it would make it into my paper. I may still do it for curiosity's sake though and write a followup paper. I haven't looked into it yet, but i'm assuming the official Eve forums limit posting to players with active accounts? If you could suggest other places to look for respondents, I might follow through with it. (I do see the Escapist and allakhazam in your previous post) I would like to see a larger population of Runescape, Lineage and Second Life players too. |
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I used to play AC on Thistledown - Long live the House of Windsor!! Since then I've been playing other MMOs, mostly WoW. My experiences have become the inspiration for a research project that I need to complete for school. Who knew homework could be fun?
As part of my graduate degree in Library and Information Studies, I need to write a research paper, and I have chosen to study the social interactions of groups within MMOs. I am asking for volunteers to complete a survey about their experiences in virtual worlds/MMOs so that I can compare the results to the real world.
If you are 18 years or older and have been a member of an MMO for more than 3 months, please take a moment to complete the survey: http://sites.google.com/site/socialcapitalofmmos/
Thanks for your time.