Comments on: Thesis Of Warcraft

By: Ted

Ted — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 01:03:54 +0000

They want to find correlation between symptoms of anxiety and depression in real life and in interactions in WoW. You don’t need to a random sample for that. They just need to find enough crazy and sane people to fill out the survey so they can distinguish between the two and find any interesting differences between how the two groups experience real life and WoW. They want to know if anxious or depressed people in real life function better in an MMO environment. They’re not looking for whether the game “causes” anything. It’s the other way around if anything. This is a totally valid thing to be looking at in this way.

By: Maloth

Maloth — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:32:11 +0000

I did read and fill in the whole test, next buttons included. The specificity is a non-issue because although they tangentially relate to WoW you can not have any certainty whatsoever that they actually are a result of the game without establishing a control group. That was the intended spirit of my comment, not just read-the-first-page bashing. Demographics are essential to establish on any survey. There’s no such thing as a “random sample” that is not controlled, as ironic as that sounds. Pass this survey around a church, and you’ll get substantially different results than if you passed it around a retirement home, an office, or a fire station, despite the fact that it’s ostensibly targeted at “WoW players”. Internet pages like this are usually clique-targeted, meaning you’re going to get a half dozen concentrated streams of people with similar backgrounds or interests that were also willing to fill in a survey, not an actual representation of the player base.

By: Cooper

Cooper — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:22:08 +0000

I’d personally be more interested in having clearly defined economic, social, health and racial subcategories. It’s a shame Maloth didn’t actually read the rest of the survey as the questions DO get rather specific (in a vague description of generalized-anxiety/depression disorders) as for what the test is measuring, but those metrics, without a backdrop of demographics, are going to be pretty useless.

As a psychological test, it works. As a social scientist, I’d too like that background info – but by having the same questions about outside WoW and in WoW, you end up with all you need to compare responses and start doing covariance or whatever tests you need.

By: Visi

Visi — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:02:13 +0000

One thing to mention. Mos- Ok, ALL of my friends are online, and while I spend most of my time on the computer, most of that time isn’t spent on WoW.

Some of the questions were a little unspecific, and it would have been nice to have a “other things to note” box at the end.

By: AbyssUK

AbyssUK — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:24:05 +0000

This comments section gave me a headache.

By: davidAlpha

davidAlpha — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:47:29 +0000

lately RPS has a lot of comments from people who are not (Too put it midly) interested in or capable of having a good, clean and well argumented discussion. Its too bad because thats what makes this site great.

Also I agree very much with H4plo, but I’d still be interested to see the results.

By: Primar

Primar — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:27:19 +0000

Survey seemed fairly good, will be interesting to see the results, should they publish them. I still don’t think that MMOs or gaming can be isolated as a cause of anything though; far too much depends on the player or environment to specifically define a game as a good or bad cause.

By: Master Huang

Master Huang — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:14:49 +0000

Hiya hamachi wu, remember me? We use to play together in WoW. Anyway, I think what hamachi said is really the true stories of WoW players. I personally experience a similar phase in my life and WoW had helped me to get through. I’ve been playing 18/7 ever since.

By: Batolemaeus

Batolemaeus — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:30:14 +0000

What Zeno said.

By: The Hammer

The Hammer — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:07:07 +0000

Congratulations, Leelad! :)

By: h4plo

h4plo — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:51:17 +0000

Maloth hit it dead-on, at least with the “measured demographic” bit. I imagine that the goal of the conductor is to generate a random survey, but there are a rather limited number of ways to do that; his best bet would be to get ahold of a list of all regularly played accounts, pick an early-A name at random, and send the test to accounts in intervals of some arbitrary number. Relying on sites like this and I imagine the other gaming sites he used is going to heavily skew his data, and I worry for him that the people reviewing his doctorate are going to throw it out.

I’d personally be more interested in having clearly defined economic, social, health and racial subcategories. It’s a shame Maloth didn’t actually read the rest of the survey as the questions DO get rather specific (in a vague description of generalized-anxiety/depression disorders) as for what the test is measuring, but those metrics, without a backdrop of demographics, are going to be pretty useless.

By: eoy

eoy — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:32:35 +0000

Interesting test. Some of it hit very close, and especially the dry mouth part got me worried as that’s something I feel every day while I’m playing.