College Honors Thesis: Request for respondents for study on MMORPG play/use

[IoLoneWolfoI]

Fellow Gamers Unite: Requesting survey respondents for College Honors Thesis on MMORPG gamers and play! Help very much appreciated!

Do you like to play MMORPGs like: World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Guild Wars, Vindictus, Star Trek Online, Tera, Lord of the Rings Online Age of Conan, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Everquest, Aion, Rift, EVE Online, The Secret World, or Warhammer Online? If you are 18 or older, click on the link below to take a survey on your gaming, social relationships on and offline, and possible positive and negative health outcomes related to your MMORPG play. The survey should take about 10-20 minutes and utilizes question from prevelan scales usedt MMORPG research."

http://uncc.surveyshare.com/s/AQAINQD

A couple of Disclaimers - Based on current feedback thus far.
- The project is approved by the social and behavioral institutional review board of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
- We are taking your e-mail to verify that this is the first time that you are taking the survey and it is not tied to your response.
- Once the survey goes down all data is stripped from the website - you're perfectly safe.
- If you've questions, comments, and concerns I am open ears to anything you've got to say.

My contact information is in the survey, if you wish to get the results once publication is finished you can contact me at the end.

[Devia]

That took longer than expected. You may want to give an estimate regarding the time required to complete.

[Rollercoaster]

Done! & it said 20-30mins at the beginning.

[Celestialstrife]

There took it for you Good luck!

[Fievel]

Done~

[Kiehl]

Done

[Tajin]

done

[IoLoneWolfoI]

To everyone,

I greatly appreciate your time and support for the research ~ truly it all means a lot to me and I greatly appreciate it!

Concerning the whole thing about time Devia... it is in the Potential Risk or Harm Section of the initial consent form before you agree to take the study. Incidentally I probably should be posting that information on the recruitment script. It would make sense to. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.

Thank you again everyone!

Best,
Justin

[Pharaun]

Done

[Souj]

I'm going to write a research paper on how many people who play MMORPGs and write research papers write research papers on people who play MMORPGs.
We should just have a database that anyone can grab this info from because it seems 4-5 times a year this comes up lol

Not bagging on OP, do what you love etc. Just making an observation.

[IoLoneWolfoI]

I'm going to write a research paper on how many people who play MMORPGs and write research papers write research papers on people who play MMORPGs.
We should just have a database that anyone can grab this info from because it seems 4-5 times a year this comes up lol

Not bagging on OP, do what you love etc. Just making an observation.

You've no idea how great that sort of thing would be for a researcher such as myself. The reason why you are beginning to see small blips concerning MMORPG research is because it's an up and coming field in psychology. Online communities have been common practice for a while but a focus on MMORPGs only reaches back a decade or so and that research is brief. Scott Caplan & Nicholas Yee are at the forefront of the majority of the research. Understanding the players, their personality, why they play, and what the outcomes look like are invaluable data. It helps to shape the games and tailor experiences, and it helps us to develop new things that may be highly beneficial to the players and allow them to gain a lot more from playing the game. This kind of research aims to be a really good thing.

The reason why they pop up on here is because in order to get a viable sample that is truly representative of the gamer you've got to go to the source and we know where that is as gamers ourselves. Y'know?

Incidentally that would probably make for a really good paper topic. Self-servant interests and investment in the community would be the answer to that I presume.

[Cliron]

Justin, Is there a way that you could provide me with a link to a good review of the literature or perhaps even your literature review for your thesis?

I'm a psych researcher and although in the more clinical-medical side of things, I had thought about something similar to your project as a thesis. Something in the realm that MMORPGs could act as a unique social support which may act as a buffer against the consequences of having very limited peer interactions (geographic isolation, disability, etc).
However, I also wonder if the inverse of this hypothesis could be true for people outside of the limited scenarios where it would be beneficial, by preventing the person from having that 'push' or 'pressure' to do things (e.g. a healthy teen with modes of transportation, readily available peer support (etc) spending 5-6 hrs a night on an MMORPG instead of availing of that social support might not net gain from the MMORPG social support and could find him or herself in more distress. I think of it like an elixir that cures temporarily, but ultimately poisons in the long term.

Of course theres a billion variables, and would be interested to know how you hope to analyse the data? I think some form of a regression would show some pretty fantastic results if you had the correct scales and demographic variables.

(I couldn't do the rest of your survey because I took 'do you play' as, currently when I'm not currently playing any MMORPG, sorry!)

[Dizzy's]

Done, it probably took me longer to do since i did it on my phone.

[Coren]

Done.

Hopefully you guys are figuring out ways to keep the deranged assholes from shooting up schools.

[Intrinsic]

I feel this survey is targeted towards people who spend a large amount of time in game, not someone who logs in, does a daily, a few quests or battleground and logs off. A lot of the questions dealing with in game play or social relationships were guesswork on my part, I just had to ask myself if I had to accomplish this task do I believe it would be difficult and answer based on that.

[Furionstormrage]

Done.

It didn't feel like it was aimed at me, hopefully I don't skew your results too much.

[IoLoneWolfoI]

Justin, Is there a way that you could provide me with a link to a good review of the literature or perhaps even your literature review for your thesis?

I'm a psych researcher and although in the more clinical-medical side of things, I had thought about something similar to your project as a thesis. Something in the realm that MMORPGs could act as a unique social support which may act as a buffer against the consequences of having very limited peer interactions (geographic isolation, disability, etc).
However, I also wonder if the inverse of this hypothesis could be true for people outside of the limited scenarios where it would be beneficial, by preventing the person from having that 'push' or 'pressure' to do things (e.g. a healthy teen with modes of transportation, readily available peer support (etc) spending 5-6 hrs a night on an MMORPG instead of availing of that social support might not net gain from the MMORPG social support and could find him or herself in more distress. I think of it like an elixir that cures temporarily, but ultimately poisons in the long term.

Of course theres a billion variables, and would be interested to know how you hope to analyse the data? I think some form of a regression would show some pretty fantastic results if you had the correct scales and demographic variables.

(I couldn't do the rest of your survey because I took 'do you play' as, currently when I'm not currently playing any MMORPG, sorry!)

Hello Cliron,

I responded to some things you put up on the other post in MMORPG. Firstly, if you are wanting to still take the survey then just sling in another e-mail to do so. It's a hashing system and you'll be able to. Those 'No' response get removed anyway so it will be okay. I would very much welcome you taking the full survey. That way you will also get an idea first hand of what is being asked. I do need to go amend that and make a note below it.

If you could e-mail at the e-mail address I put up in the other forum then I can send you my literature review citations and any pdfs you may be looking for. Granted that all may need some pruning as the research aims changed and I didn't take some of my cites out yet. That'll happen before publication.

As a note I will tell you as much 'Real-world' social support does act as a buffer when levels are high, even better when 'virtual-world' social support levels are high (at least when they are perceived as such). There is promise in that and what you say isn't too far off the mark.

An even better note. I have a sample of about 700 right now - purely the community and should be getting several hundred more from participant pools at UNCC. The latter behaves differently and this is of course has to do with the situation the individuals are in and being forced into certain scenarios or time restrictions. I plan on splitting the pools once the research is done and writing another paper concerning how those population vary and what it may mean. (I can't discuss at length what I am studying exactly since the study is still active).

Concerning data analysis there are two things that work great for this research - Hierarchal Multiple Regression & Path Modeling. I'm still an undergrad and my analytic abilities aren't great.. I need some more training in that area. However, I have a PhD student here whom is my colleague and is amazing with syntax and we can run just about anything in a few lines of code! We ran a HMR on some data I pulled early for a presentation at SCRA and the data is promising at this point.

But yeah, just e-mail me and we can discuss things further. I would like to ask that if you are wanting to take the survey and are going to go ahead and use an alternate e-mail to take it to please do that before we talk (i'm certain you are familiar with the ethical implications of prematurely discussing an active study).

Thanks again.

Best,
Justin

[IoLoneWolfoI]

To everyone else,

Thank you so much for taking the survey and supporting the research - it means a lot to me and I appreciate that.

Don't worry about skewing samples. I'm getting a picture of the community as a whole and there are always ways of cherry picking and reanalyzing data to separate players who may have few hours to those whom play excessively. That's why that hours question is important. This research is to better understand and benefit the community so every little bit helps my friends.

I am grateful for each and every one of you!

Thank you!

Best,
Justin

[Silenka]

Ah, in the past year...? Too bad, I quit FFXI like 2 years ago =/

[IoLoneWolfoI]

It's all good Silenka! I appreciate your consideration all the same! :]