Archive: 15 posts

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Dear LBPC, I am currently a graduate student working on a paper that needs some juicy opinionated scientific support. I need responses from creative people who are passionate about not only video games, but also the music, philosophy, and culture that foundation the greatness of video games. To help collect this information, I made this fairly simple survey which answers many important questions to my research, and I would be eternally grateful if some of the people from this community would take the time to aid me in this quest. WARNING this questionnaire, though only ten questions long, may take you 30 to 60 minutes to complete if you are taking your time... I know that this is a lot to ask. But the information is thought provoking, and the more information that you can provide to me, the better this research will be in the end. If you aren't going to complete it or take it seriously, please don't start it... I can unfortunately only take in 100 responses Here is a guide to what questions will be on the survey to help you decide if it is worth your time: 1. Basic personal information (age, gender, race (put n/a if you are uncomfortable), country) 2. How long you have played video games? 3. A list of games that you have played (this list is not intended to be every game you have ever played in your whole life, just give me a list of highlights, and make it as extensive as you please) 4. Favorite Games (up to four responses available) 5. Favorite Game Music (up to four responses available) 6. An opinion question about in-game (or imaginary) cultures 7. An opinion question about types of story telling 8. An opinion question about life lessons gained from video games 9. An opinion question about what is most important to you in video games 10. whether or not you would be comfortable letting me quote your response So if you have the time, and would be interested in helping a noble goal of proving to academics that video games are not a waste of our lives, please prove to me your ultimate knowledge of the virtual worlds, and give this questionnaire a go: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RXBHXJQ Thank you very much for those of you who dedicate the time. If you have input that you would be interested in forwarding to me about the survey, please give me your feedback in this forum post, I have been keeping an eye on it to see how I can make this process better for people... I promise it will not be in vein.

2013-02-05 00:59:00 Author: Alismadia Posts: 77

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So I'm not going to waste my time or yours by actually submitting a response... and I'll tell you exactly why. I did have a look through your survey and it looks like your going to have a very difficult time actually putting this information into useful statistics. You simply give too many opportunties for user inputted answers (e.g. What do you consider? [textbox]) and it is very likely that in 100 samples you'll not get enough similiar / detailed answers for a proper comparison. If I bothered to provide information it would likely be overlooked as it would simply not be possible to put all 100 responses into a paper in an equal and fair way... so not much incentive to voice opinion. You need more 1 - 5 questions with the ocassional "Are you willing to provide further comment?" box as that would ensure that everyones view would be valid and included. If your going to be selective with the information to suit your own needs it will simply give corrupt resuts. Furthermore, like any sensible person should, I tried to skip through the questions before answering to see what was in store later... cause you know... checking a test is the first thing any schooling system teaches students incase the test tries to trick them. Skipping page one (the one asking to input personal information) revealed: Unfortunately, I need this information for science... don't worry, I could care less, and it's anonymous anyway Firstly... if you "could care less" why bother asking for it? Nobody should be forced to enter personal information if it isn't required. and secondly... if you "could care less" it must mean that you care at least a little bit as you could successfully care less... so in fact on a scale from 0 - 100 where 0 is not caring and 100 is super interested... you could be at 99 and truthfully claim that you "could care less" This type of wording simply makes your survey seem sneaky and deceptive in its intentions. My point here being that you should think more carefully about tone and word choice... if you want to be taken seriously you cannot afford to sound informal and your survey needs to let people know what you are after without deception. Finally my last point being based on the last question. This questionnaire is going to be used for science. If I like the open ended responses you provided would you mind if I quoted you in a research project? (you could totally end up in a book and be famous) Few things here: Your also not going to be quoting a credible source as you have literally no proof that the data inputted is true... you ask for a name for referrence but no academic is going to take a random... potentially quite silly name (usernames) as a credible source and will shoot you down pretty quickly. The anonymous nature of the survey also could lead to the possibility of further corrupt results... not saying you would... but if someone peer assessed your work they would want to know who the people really were and why their opinion is more valid over someone elses. This is the sort of thing you should pass around a local university / college campus and get volunteers with real names and qualifications to study. So that is why I'm not going to waste your time or mine, minus the 2 - 3 minutes taken for you to read this (which may not be quoted and is for personal advice only) or the 10 minutes it took me to write. For what its worth however: I am doing a research project on artificial cultures, focusing primarily on the realm of video games. I would have taken the line of argument that these cultures are far from artificial and are a very natural evolution of society based not around the media itself but the hardware powering it... an unintended consequence as it were; rather than a intentional goal of these products.

2013-02-05 01:45:00 Author: ForgottenEnigma Posts: 1414

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Hello, Thank you for posting the extensive response that you did, it gave me a lot of insight into some of the details I included in this survey. There is one point I suppose I should clarify, and I think would help to clean up the problems of bias and useless information that you declared earlier. I am doing this work for an anthropology based paper, and where I know that there is no way to prove that you or anyone who is taking the survey is actually a real person, or someone who cares at all about video games, I do know that every single one of those responses is important to me and to my research... There are really only one or two questions that I would be able to do statistical analysis on, but that is not really what I was looking for in this survey, I was looking for opinions, and opinionated essay responses, which is why there are so many of those types of questions. I have gotten some interesting varied responses to this survey thus far, and it is because some people skip through it expecting it to be a gimmick, or filled with flaws, but then other people have given me exactly what the questions ask and it has been amazingly useful to me to see what they have come up with helping me open my eyes to the diversity that I need to know more about in this endlessly vast gaming world. So yes. I know its not your run of the mill survey, and its not very scientific in the end I suppose, so I am sorry for the false advertising on that one... but I think that if what you mentioned above were your true concerns, I would encourage that you do take the survey seriously at some point and give me as much insight to gaming as you have provided for survey making... like I said before: its not going to waste, I promise.

2013-02-05 09:29:00 Author: Alismadia Posts: 77

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I wanted to complete it, but I didn't quite understand what you are asking here: Do you think that video games provide insight into gameworld cultures? If you do, can you describe an example in some detail?

2013-02-05 11:52:00 Author: gdn001 Posts: 5891

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I wanted to complete it, but I didn't quite understand what you are asking Hello, to help clarify, let me present an example, considering the legend of zelda series: In Hyrule there is a system of belief that surrounds the triforce and the creation of the planet. This is in some cases considered to be the faith of that particular virtual world... The game itself, especially when considering the multiple canon games in the series, offers a number of important details that help illuminate what is entailed in this faith, and how people within the world interact with that faith... If you consider this element within a game or series of games to properly reflect an imaginary culture, then that is what I would ask for you to elaborate on: thus both showing me if this is an element of video games that is pertinent to your experience, and opening my eyes to how it has impacted you as a gamer participating within virtual worlds.

2013-02-05 18:56:00 Author: Alismadia Posts: 77

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It seems interesting, and i gave it a look. Im sure u can get some usefull information out of this, for your purposes.... but.. i have to say i would have liked it to be able to get a look at all questions first... before filling anything out... i tried starting it and had to end it on the 2nd page allready... with the feeling that there are more questions i might struggle with, i didnt continue... Im not really able to fill out what games i played in my life... its too much.... at one point in my life i have to admit i was into emulation, not even for retro games, but even in modding consolses and handhelds. And yeah... i played alot of different games... must be atleast over a 1000 or something (didnt play trough all them, but u got quite a good overview of the different gaming-libraries of consoles) But even without that and just listing the game i own/owned... i wouldnt even be able to do that... do u really need that information? Wouldnt it be enough to just put a number down? It just seems impossible to even closely list the games i played in my life... im playing since a little child and still to this day im playing regularly. It would be pretty much the same if u ask, what movies a person watched in his life... who could answer that? Seriously... who could? Anyways, it sounded appealing to me, to participate here, but well if questions are impossible to answer or i got questions about the questions, or if i cant get a overview of the various questions, so i know, if i can answer them all and judge if its worth my time or not, im not so interested anymore. I mean i guess, u dont need to list or fill out all of it, or not every person needs to fill something out they dont feel able to, but well, maybe u need to put more clarification up, since there are some problems to answer some questions and some complaints for it allready. Besides that i never had to fill out a form which asked for my race haha... man, i live in germany, i never heard of that one before.

2013-02-05 19:57:00 Author: Rough-Tea Posts: 422

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It seems interesting, and i gave it a look. Im sure u can get some usefull information out of this, for your purposes.... but.. i have to say i would have liked it to be able to get a look at all questions first... before filling anything out... i tried starting it and had to end it on the 2nd page allready... with the feeling that there are more questions i might struggle with, i didnt continue... I must admit, this has indeed been an eye opening experience for me... this is the first survey that I have had to make for research of any type, and there are so many things that I wish I could change about it, but unfortunately I can't go back on this version right now due to the fact that there have been quite a few remarkable responses to the questions I laid out. To begin, I really did not expect people to respond by listing every single game they have ever played, and I wish I could edit that question ask for as many as people wish to put down or something along those lines. I can completely understand not wanting to go through with a list that large... I will also say that I completely underestimated the power of separating questions by page... this has caused more controversy than any other element in the survey, and I think that I will edit my first post to let people have an idea of what is in stock before going to the survey, just to help clean up this mess as much as I can. My honest goal in separating the pages is that I thought it would make the survey more exciting to work on because the beginning stuff is so uninteresting... In any event, I am very glad to have your feedback, and I will amend my initial post to this in order to try and introduce the mysteries and help people gauge what they can expect... maybe this will help make the survey a little more approachable

2013-02-05 21:09:00 Author: Alismadia Posts: 77

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So, i filled it out and hope the questions i gave turn out to be any useful information to you, it was quite interesesting, to actually think about some things for example whats your favourite game and especially explaining why... well, some questions where though lol, like the one about gameworld cultures.... it isnt really that clear enough what u ment by it, even after your answer post about it... but i tried to answer the questions as honestly and good as i could, u gotta see the fact that im german, and cant explain myself in a detail or putting my thoughts exactly the way i would in my mother language... besides that, it wasnt never really clear to me what the aim of this survey was, if u would have explained it in more detail, it would have been easier to give the answers u wanna hear lol or the information u need... cause if u wanna know how games affected me as a person/or in my life, "what they gave me"....i dont know... i could write tons how books affected me in a philosophical way, or even movies.... but games... not much. Well, if u want more insights into games, i suggest u watch some videos of developers having seminars/readings at universities... i really recommend Jonathan Blow the creator of Braid, there are some Videos with him, on youtube for example, that are very interesting, i like him as a person hes quite intelligent. Might help u in a way.

2013-02-06 01:02:00 Author: Rough-Tea Posts: 422

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Thank you, I appreciate the help, and I will go check out your suggestions... watching the devlopers sounds really interesting

2013-02-06 09:40:00 Author: Alismadia Posts: 77

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I filled it out

2013-02-09 05:07:00 Author: Ryan86me Posts: 1909

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I filled it out Yay, thank you for helping out! Progress is moving along nicely in collecting results, please continue to keep word of this project going everyone!

2013-02-09 10:19:00 Author: Alismadia Posts: 77

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All done.

2013-02-09 11:03:00 Author: SnipySev Posts: 2452

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I did it. I had trouble with the game cultures one, so I plopped down a sloppy answer there. But I tried my best to answer the others

2013-02-09 14:59:00 Author: TheMonkeyBlade Posts: 687

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Am I he only one who understood the game cultures bit? Or maybe I misunderstood and I just think I understood. But tyat's okay. Because it was for scince... you monster.

2013-02-09 15:03:00 Author: Ryan86me Posts: 1909

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Am I he only one who understood the game cultures bit? Or maybe I misunderstood and I just think I understood. But tyat's okay. Because it was for scince... you monster. hahah I definitely did not anticipate having as many problems with that question as I have ended up having... the responses that I get for it are typically just fine though, so I hope no one is worried about what they put. Thanks again to everyone that is helping out, it is very exciting to get responses, and they are all so interesting to go through

2013-02-09 16:15:00 Author: Alismadia Posts: 77

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