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First Wave of Project Massive Study Complete
Project Massive, a Carnegie Mellon University study into the habits and tendencies of Massively Multiplayer Gamers, has completed research into their first wave of questions. The results are available on their site, and include some interesting observations (nearly 30% of players spend time in a MMOG to interact with real-life friends). If you're interested in participating, their second wave of questions is available. Similar projects include Nick Yee's The Daedalus Project, the TerraNova Blog, and Constance Steinkuehler's Selected Papers. Thanks to clampe for the submission.
I don't have any friends, you insensitive clod! (Unless you count the robots...)
I wish the percentages (the actual number value) had been printed somewhere on the graphs.
Someone should conduct a survey on why people keep coming back to Slashdot for mod points, doing meta moderating to get mod points, and post comments that earn mod points. This is beginning to look like a reward system where a success is reflected in the number of mod points you get from your comments.
I once had a signature.
I wander about that poor guy that plays 156 hours per week. Poor guy. When does he have time to read slashdot?
that the majority of MMOG players play to socialize, not to mindlessly kill monsters. For that purpose there are macros. While in every game there are always a small 1% who simply sit alone and powerlevel, 99% join clans/guilds/corporations and/or socialiize.
Like, for example, last night, I spent hours chatting with guys on the OOC channel in Anarchy Online. It turned a boring night of leveling into a seriously awesome night. Few non-MMOG-gamers realize how much socializing matters in these types of games. They simply focus on the mindless powergamer who's the first to hit max level.
But then again, to be fair, plenty of the top level people socialize! I used to know the guy who held the record for a 3-day run to level 150 during the Earth and Beyond beta. He was an awesome guy, loved giving stuff to new players (his entire method of leveling involved this--get a massive amount of easy-to-mine gas from gas clouds, give it to a noob, get levels of trade experience, repeat 1000 times).
This also implies that 70% of MMOG players have no real-life friends... Didn't take a study to tell me that fact!
I love the huge spike at "18 years old" on the "How old are you" graph.
Looks like that's when people move away from home, get high-speed internet, and play games non-stop. No more mom around to tell you to go play outside!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
156 hours? Maybe someone should have tossed out that response, considering there are only 7 * 24 = 168 hours in a week. Seems impossible to me.
It would be interesting to compare this to first person shooters. With the new voice chat capabilities and integration of buddy lists, I know meeting people to try my skillz against is part of the fun. Is it less social beacuse there's more killing of your friends?
Being a former Evercrack addict, I know this all to well. I spent almost 6-8 hours a day playing this game. Then after 2 years of playing (And my Wizard acheiving lvl 63) I had to stop. Mostly because I never went outside, neglected my wife and basically became a drone. Now that's it's been 1 1/2 year since I played the game, I'm looking forward to World of Warcraft. (If my wife let's me play)
Do we know each other?
But maybe the 156hour-player leaves the game on and tells his player to sleep while he sleeps (while dreaming nerdly dreams of shapely elves, no doubt).
That would leave him 12hours/week of non-gaming time wherein he might:
1. Use the facilities (and no, I'm not suggesting any bathing takes place)
2. Answer the door to pay the delivery human ("Greetings noble courier! I commend thee on thy speed!")
3. Participate in online MMOG surveys
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
How is this a troll? I RTFA and agree with parent. The article is interesting just to see how MMOG gamers "perceive" themselves, but doesn't actually provide any interesting facts. IE, most of the players say they play for fun, they play Everquest a lot... there isn't really that much to it.
Based on the questionnaire results, it looks like the survey primarily attracted hardcore MMORPG fans, which may skew the results.
For example, Question 6 asks how long you have played your MMORPG game. The results show somewhere around 65% to 70% (the exact numbers are not given in the article) have been playing a single game for more than a year. It should be no surprise that question 7 shows that approximately 95% find enjoy MMORPG's - if you played a game for over a year without enjoying it, then you have some issues you need to work out!
I believe that questions like "are MMORPG's enjoyable?" would have different results if the survey attracted more casual gamers, or gamers who quit playing after a few months due to their bad experience. But, those types of individuals are less likely to fill out a questionnaire about MMORPG's.
I wish there were a way to see the questions for Wave 2 without taking the survey... and if you click "no, i don't want to take it" it takes you to the last page of the survey... odd.
Any hoo, I think this just confirms what most of us already knew. Simply killing monsters is only fun to a point... kill an orc, get a bigger sword, kill another orc, get an even bigger sword... there is a limit to the fun to be had from killing monsters, leveling up and getting phat l3wt. Especially because the rate at which you level and get new items is a logarithmic scale, it takes 10 times longer to get from level 11 to level 12 as it does to get from level 1 to level 2.
So what do people do? They socialize. They form guilds, work together as teams to do stuff, or just hang out. After all, that's the whole point of an MMO, there are other people. If you wanted to go around killing monsters in a huge world, just play Morrowind or something.
Love the Third Amendment?
Worst. Troll. Ever.
:/
Sigh, I remember the days when trolls actually took the time to disguise their insults well enough to actually generate loads of angry responses
Netrek was extremely fun.
:/
Too bad the players that remained playing it were all the assholes & drove all the newbies away. Now you can't even find more than a couple of players trying it out at any given time, when there used to be a dozen servers maxed out most of the time.
For those who don't yet realize it, MMORPGs represent a serious problem. As some evidence, I would point you to the response given to question 15 in that survey:
15. What is your main reason for ongoing subscription to {game}?
6% Participation in the Game
20% To See My Character
29% Fun
14% Friendship/Social
8% Relaxation
9% Addictive Nature of Game
9% Other
In particular, 9% of the people ADMIT they are addicted to the game. We all know that most addicts refuse to be categorized as such, and 9% of these people openly admit it.
Further, 20% of the PLAY TO SEE THEIR CHARACTERS. These are game characters, which they created and control. These characters are basically figments of their imagination. This is like saying 20% of them enjoy their imaginary friends.
That's just not right!
- 08% interesting, adds a new perspective
- 17% argues with above
- 22% psuedo-scientific/legal anlaysis of the article
- 11% asks question that are answered in the article
- 19% answers question that have already been answered by other readers
- 10% spin-off topic that establishes new thread
- 42% follow ups to spin-off topics
- 12% the subject being described sucks, here's why
- 04% response only intelligible to poster
- 06% this subject proves that Linux is better than Windows
- 02% this subject proves that any browser is better than IE
- 02% this subject proves that any language is better than Java
- 01% spam
- 01% first post humor
These numbers exceed 100% because the percentages overlap.This is an attempt to be funny. Moderate as such.
Netrek is a good game, but it hardly qualifies for "birthplace". Netrek is directly adapted from the Plato game Empire, which was written in the 1970s. Plato terminals had 512*512 graphics back then, the whole system was way ahead of its time. They also had graphic multi-user dungeon games before MUD was even written. Some people have put together a working version of the old Plato system, complete with Empire, Oubliette, and Moria, at: http://www.cyber1.org - probably worth a look if you're really into the history of computer games. Interesting that they can effectively emulate an old 70s mainframe computer on a dual opteron running Linux these days.
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
I get the impression this survey had a self-selected sample. In any case, their results show that most of the players participating came from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, and that around 90% of the respondents are male. Online gamers as a whole (some 48% of Internet users play at least casual games, according to Gametrust) are around half female, and I'm sure even on more "hardcore" games a much higher percentage are female. On Furcadia more than half of the players are female. I also noticed a heavy bias towards email and web forums for communication outside the game, in preference over instant messengers and voice chat. I think the general population tends more towards IM and voice chat than this sample does - I know our players love both of those.
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
MMORPGs are boring as sin. That's because most make the basic gameplay automatic and scriptable so you can chat while you're doing it. If you're not chatting you're sitting there watching the kill foozle/mine fuzzle animation for hours on end. I'd like to see a gameplay driven MMORPG that made soloing fun for those first several hours I'm catching up with/making new friends. I guess it's just too tempting to bolt on a crappy dungeon crawler to a chat client and hire an art department to pretty it up.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I know the feeling. I've got friends who it is impossible to socialize with anymore unless you go onto DAoC.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
50% of players agree or strongly agree that they play MMORPG's to roleplay.
49% of those players either lied on the survery, or are delusional.
Apart from the fact questions, these are some of the most loaded questions I could imagine asking on a survery. Seems like a waste of time.
Number 5a basically boils down to asking MMORPG players if they enjoy playing them.
What are they going to say to that? no?
cripes.
Selling virtual junk online. It doesn't pay well, but it's probably at least as good as a fast food joint's wages.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I didn't cross-examine the site to find out how many people were actually tested on but it's by far very inaccurate. what about the asian market which is saturated with mmorpgs such as JinYong Online, MU Online, Risk Your Life, Ragnarok Online, Gangster Online etc etc.