Understanding the preferences of the virtual world vs the physical world (study)

CS1310

Greetings and salutations,

To participate in this study and do the questionnaire, you need to be an MMO player and be 18+. I’m a master student doing placement and a project for my supervisor, Mark Coulson, in Middlesex University. We’re trying to understand escapism as a concept using MMOs. Escapism is a fairly unknown concept, is mostly seen as derogative and is used to imply when someone is escaping from something. However, not much is known about what people escape to. This is an exploratory study examining preferences, likes/dislikes, and problems in both virtual and physical worlds.

This study will attempt to understand escapism on greater scale using MMOs, because MMOs can be thought of as a whole new virtual life and persona. Nonetheless, this study does not just focus on escapism, because people play for many reasons and have numerous motivations, which have nothing to do with escapism. We hope to reduce stigma and get an idea of what drives people to either virtual or physical worlds.  What we're interested in is what keeps us in virtual or physical worlds, what pushes us away in both and what attracts us in both. As gamers ourselves, we know the importance of virtual worlds and, therefore, we will not underplay any aspects of virtual worlds. On a personal note, I play quite a bit myself, so this topic interests me. When the survey is done, we'd like to give back to all participants and summarise the results to any who want to give their email at the end of the survey. Understandably, many people do not like surveys. Hell, I don't like taking surveys and here I am distributing them to you fine players. However, they can be useful finding information and I hope this is such a time. This post was kindly granted permission from the moderators.

The survey will take, approximately, 35-50 minutes to complete and is extensive. If anything, it shares the grind to MMOs The survey will ask many questions about your life, in general, and then ask you to compare virtual worlds to the physical world.

Good luck!

https://mdxl.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8wWL97IsvTuxBzf

Please ask any questions.