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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 wish the percentages (the actual number value) had been printed somewhere on the graphs.
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!
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!
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?
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.