Participate in a Masters thesis survey regarding motivations for playing online video games

Pnurchili · December 2015

Click the link below to Participate in a Masters thesis survey regarding motivations for playing online video games (MMORPG & First-Person Shooter).

https://indstate.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5vC6r2S4h8F2YHX

Kiyoris · December 2015

I'll do your survey if you can get me a Magic The Gathering Crimson Hellkite in mint condition from the Mirage set to complete my collection.

Kiyoris · December 2015

hijacking thread

Kiyoris · December 2015

Stizzled said:

Are we really that interesting

apparently we are

we need to start demanding compensation, set up a union, demand food coupons

azarhal · December 2015

Stizzled said:

Why do so many people want to do their thesis on gaming habits and motivations? Are we really that interesting or misunderstood? I can't even remember how many of these threads I've seen pop up asking for the exact same thing.

Money would be my bet. Game publishers pay for studies like theses.

Kiyoris · December 2015

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5022221/uploads/editor/hg/7eu0nn68uyy4.gif

waynejr2 · December 2015

Stizzled said:

Why do so many people want to do their thesis on gaming habits and motivations? Are we really that interesting or misunderstood? I can't even remember how many of these threads I've seen pop up asking for the exact same thing.

I wonder if they are doing an honest bit or if they have some hidden agenda. Like, trying to make a connection between games and violence and such. Why is gaming any different from people who watch sports, follow bands, watch tv/movies, read, etc. These are pastimes or hobbies. It isn't much more complicated than that.

If anyone does it, let us know what kind of leading questions are asked. Are they multiple choice questions? Essay?

Quizzical · December 2015

You've got to ask better questions than that if you want a useful study. Any conclusions that you come up with will really just be a case of, if you ask goofy questions, you get goofy answers. Of course, that describes a large fraction of the world's psychology experiments, and is probably true in much of the "social sciences".

waynejr2 · December 2015

Quizzical said:

You've got to ask better questions than that if you want a useful study. Any conclusions that you come up with will really just be a case of, if you ask goofy questions, you get goofy answers. Of course, that describes a large fraction of the world's psychology experiments, and is probably true in much of the "social sciences".

Does he have the "Have you ever" or the "will you in the future" type of questions?

Axehilt · December 2015

Stizzled said:

Why do so many people want to do their thesis on gaming habits and motivations? Are we really that interesting or misunderstood? I can't even remember how many of these threads I've seen pop up asking for the exact same thing.

It's an intersection of personal interest (hey I like games!) and profit potential (the industry makes a lot of money.) Naturally it'll be the result of many studies. Even more than the subjects which are only motivated by profit (which will have a lot of studies done for that reason alone.)

Kiyoris · December 2015

made a new forum signature, you like?

Elsabolts · December 2015

Im retired and online games now take the place of what I did in the Navy

Quizzical · December 2015

waynejr2 said:

Quizzical said:

You've got to ask better questions than that if you want a useful study. Any conclusions that you come up with will really just be a case of, if you ask goofy questions, you get goofy answers. Of course, that describes a large fraction of the world's psychology experiments, and is probably true in much of the "social sciences".

Does he have the "Have you ever" or the "will you in the future" type of questions?

There's a whole bunch of stuff on a 7 point scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree" that seems more designed to get numbers they can average than to explain anything. And a lot of the questions are just weird. For example, you're asked to rate statements like:

"Games like TWISTER are fun because of all the physical contact that takes place"
"I enjoy making others nervous or flustered?" (their question mark, not mine)
"I have written on, marked up, or damaged objects that didn't belong to me"

And it goes on and on and on with something like 200 questions or so before you get to the end. Most of it seems to have nothing to do with gaming. Given the propensity of psychology studies to lie to participants, I wouldn't be shocked if it's a study in how many goofy questions they can get people to answer before they give up and stop.

Konfess · December 2015

If I wont the lottery.

This is where I stopped taking the survey.

waynejr2 · December 2015

Quizzical said:

waynejr2 said:

Quizzical said:

You've got to ask better questions than that if you want a useful study. Any conclusions that you come up with will really just be a case of, if you ask goofy questions, you get goofy answers. Of course, that describes a large fraction of the world's psychology experiments, and is probably true in much of the "social sciences".

Does he have the "Have you ever" or the "will you in the future" type of questions?

There's a whole bunch of stuff on a 7 point scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree" that seems more designed to get numbers they can average than to explain anything. And a lot of the questions are just weird. For example, you're asked to rate statements like:

"Games like TWISTER are fun because of all the physical contact that takes place"
"I enjoy making others nervous or flustered?" (their question mark, not mine)
"I have written on, marked up, or damaged objects that didn't belong to me"

And it goes on and on and on with something like 200 questions or so before you get to the end. Most of it seems to have nothing to do with gaming. Given the propensity of psychology studies to lie to participants, I wouldn't be shocked if it's a study in how many goofy questions they can get people to answer before they give up and stop.

Wow, that is bad. I love your concluding sentence!

@Pnurchili "do you think you can dissect us with this blunt little tool?"

waynejr2 · December 2015

Konfess said:

If I wont the lottery.

This is where I stopped taking the survey.

There are many things I would stop doing if I won the lottery!

anemo · December 2015

But look he's part of the community with 9 other posts.

Pnurchili · December 2015

It's an honest study. Nothing hidden. I have been a gamer since Pong in the mid to late 70s. Video game research is actually a lot of fun. Also, research on this subject is not about replicating studies of tired 50 year old theories. You should take it. It will help me out a lot.

Pnurchili · December 2015

Quizzical said:

waynejr2 said:

Quizzical said:

You've got to ask better questions than that if you want a useful study. Any conclusions that you come up with will really just be a case of, if you ask goofy questions, you get goofy answers. Of course, that describes a large fraction of the world's psychology experiments, and is probably true in much of the "social sciences".

Does he have the "Have you ever" or the "will you in the future" type of questions?

There's a whole bunch of stuff on a 7 point scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree" that seems more designed to get numbers they can average than to explain anything. And a lot of the questions are just weird. For example, you're asked to rate statements like:

"Games like TWISTER are fun because of all the physical contact that takes place"
"I enjoy making others nervous or flustered?" (their question mark, not mine)
"I have written on, marked up, or damaged objects that didn't belong to me"

And it goes on and on and on with something like 200 questions or so before you get to the end. Most of it seems to have nothing to do with gaming. Given the propensity of psychology studies to lie to participants, I wouldn't be shocked if it's a study in how many goofy questions they can get people to answer before they give up and stop.

The study is looking at several different motivations, thus a variety of questions are asked. They may appear to be unrelated but they are actually needed. The theories being used have never been applied to video gaming, that may be why they seem so strange.

Pnurchili · December 2015

waynejr2 said:

Stizzled said:

Why do so many people want to do their thesis on gaming habits and motivations? Are we really that interesting or misunderstood? I can't even remember how many of these threads I've seen pop up asking for the exact same thing.

I wonder if they are doing an honest bit or if they have some hidden agenda. Like, trying to make a connection between games and violence and such. Why is gaming any different from people who watch sports, follow bands, watch tv/movies, read, etc. These are pastimes or hobbies. It isn't much more complicated than that.

If anyone does it, let us know what kind of leading questions are asked. Are they multiple choice questions? Essay?

No Hidden agenda. We are not connecting video games to violence. We are applying a theory to gaming motivations that has never before been used. The questions may seem strange for that very reason.

Phry · December 2015

Surveys, always come across as being somewhat dodgy to me, could be my naturally paranoid outlook, but its a bit of an odd time of year to be doing this kind of thing.

Gdemami · December 2015

Stizzled said:

Why do so many people want to do their thesis on gaming habits and motivations?

Because they are not good enough to study something real :-P

Quizzical · December 2015

Pnurchili said:

It's an honest study. Nothing hidden. I have been a gamer since Pong in the mid to late 70s. Video game research is actually a lot of fun. Also, research on this subject is not about replicating studies of tired 50 year old theories. You should take it. It will help me out a lot.

This isn't really your fault, but others in your field have poisoned the well for you. I'm sure you've heard or read of many psychology studies that deceived participants about the real nature of the study. That leads to potential participants being suspicious of all future psychology studies, including any that are completely honest with participants.

Trying to avoid that is why, in economics, a study that misleads its participants is completely unpublishable. It's hard enough to get useful data even if the participants believe that you're being completely honest. If participants are trying to figure out how you're lying to them rather than taking the stated incentives seriously, it's just shy of impossible to accomplish anything. Even if the results of a study are amazing, it's not the last study that anyone will ever want to do, and it's deemed that publishing a study that deceives participants will harm future research enough that it's better to kill it.

Those who did psychology research in decades past chose differently. They deemed it acceptable to outright lie to participants. That poisoned the well and makes your attempts at doing research much harder. And now you have to live with it.

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There is also another sense in which your forebears have poisoned the well for you. A lot of psychology studies are complete garbage. Not being in that field myself, I don't have a good gauge on just how bad it is. But a large fraction of what attracts media attention surely falls into that category. And I don't mean outright frauds; I mean the ones that the media actually treats as serious, important studies.

Far too many studies ask goofy questions about seemingly random things, get data from people who aren't taking it seriously at all (commonly undergraduates who have to participate to get class credit) and then try to extrapolate from there to serious, important things. While I hardly have the full background on your study, it sure looks to me like that's what you're trying to do.

There's a well-known problem in political polling that if you ask people questions that they haven't previously considered, you get erratic results. Results can be heavily influenced by slight changes in the wording of questions. Even a given question can give very different results just because of the questions that preceded it.

For example, if you ask whether people are for or against gay marriage, people know what you mean and results should be reasonably stable. If you ask a question about US foreign policy toward Morocco, I'd dismiss the results out of hand as completely meaningless unless "not sure" is offered as one of the choices and that's the one most people pick. Any other answer from someone who can't tell you the difference between Morocco and Malacca isn't going to be meaningful.

The questions in your study have a very acute case of this. You ask people goofy questions about things that most people haven't seriously pondered, and so your results will mostly be statistical noise.

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A lot of studies in the social sciences then compound this problem with statistical voodoo that would be dismissed out of hand in any field that valued truth more highly. For example, you're presumably familiar with with 95% confidence interval for results to be deemed valid. And that is a decent rule of thumb if you decide on exactly one thing that you're going to test before you start gathering data and know ahead of time that you're never going to test the data in any other way.

But if you're going to test the same data set for a bunch of things that you decide ahead of time, you need a much stronger statistical test to deduce relevance. xkcd had a pretty good explanation of this:

https://xkcd.com/882/

And if you're going to gather a lot of data first and then decide on some more regressions to run after you've had a look at the data, even a p-value of 10^(-6) often isn't statistically meaningful. Five thirty eight had a brilliant post demonstrating the phenomenon several months ago:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#part1

And that's even before we consider that most studies that could have given perfectly good results have the effects that they're looking for killed off by a small sample size. Gathering good data is the essence of science, but it's hard. But just because it's hard doesn't mean that statistical voodoo on random junk data is an acceptable alternative for anything besides career advancement within an ivory tower that most of the world ignores as irrelevant.

A lot of statistical noise can be acceptable if it's completely random and you have a large enough data set to find the signal. Sufficiently large data sets can then make the noise mostly cancel itself out. But that's only if the noise isn't somehow biased. There's no reason to believe that that will happen with the questions as you've designed them and plenty of reason to believe that it won't. And that's if you had the funding to get a large data size, which most studies don't.

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I'm not here to disparage you. And I certainly wouldn't expect you to change your life trajectory on the basis of an Internet post by a random stranger. I only mean to explain why it's so hard to get people to fill out your survey and take it seriously enough to give you something other than nearly pure statistical noise.

Clearer questions would help a lot. However common questions of the form, "please rate this random thing on a scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree" are, they're only infrequently a decent gauge of opinion.

Wizardry · December 2015

Ok dude need to restart your questions.

Number 2 is already an either or while likely MOST play both genres.

Mendel · December 2015

Yawn. Sorry, I only got about halfway down the Agree/Disagree page. Exactly how many times do you need to ask about thinking? I think I like to think I enjoy thinking. Or maybe that's the stroke talking.

I thought it was interesting that there were more categories for how often you play a week (# hours) than there were age categories. The highest age category was for '23 and older', I felt immediately like I wasn't in the target demographic for this survey. Since one of the questions was about online relationships, and online dating has existed for less than 10% of my life, it really doesn't apply at all. Bridges have existed longer, but there wasn't a question about if I had jumped off a bridge. (Only low ones).

If this survey really is for a Master's thesis, then I hope you get some help building a better set of questions. I think you're going to need it.

Kefo · December 2015

Sorry I tried but you are asking redundant questions and questions that are a yes/no when you should be able to choose multiple categories.

Why can't I play both online shooters and mmorpg's? If I play mmorpg's like WoW or FFXIV then why do you ask me if I play a online game with a avatar? I didn't go farther then that because it felt like I was wasting my time and the result you are trying for looks like it might be very skewed or completely incorrect.

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Participate in a Masters thesis survey regarding motivations for playing online video games

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Participate in a Masters thesis survey regarding motivations for playing online video games

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