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Project Massive's Latest Findings
The ongoing study into the habits of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, Project Massive, has released their latest findings. Next Generation has a breakdown on what the numbers mean with help from the researchers. As always, they have some interesting things to say. From the article: "Saying that developers who are operating a monthly (and not hourly) subscription service have a financial interest in compelling people to spend 40-80 hours a week playing their game ignores the market realities of bandwidth, customer service, and content creation. I had the tools at my disposal to shed some light on this issue and the fact that I have no corporate backing or economic interest in the outcome puts me in a good position to tell the truths that the data reveal." If you're a MMOG player, you can participate in the latest wave of questions.
Six months and still no recognition of my research? ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Somehow I think they and Zipper Interactive are celebrating the (financial) response to SOCOM 3.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Massive is definitely the right word; I thought I'd help out and fill out the survey, but it is HUGE and takes so long to fill out I gave up halfway through. Bah.
How good of a game is None overall?
Hmm.
Plus, a lot of the questions are badly worded. For example, one question is:
The options are:
Well, I have online friends, but I didn't meet any of them through gaming; I met them via BBSes and MUDs. This means I'd want to select 0%, but there isn't an option --- I have no online friends simply isn't true.
Plus, there are occasional questions like How many hours do you spend attending to work/school/life responsibilities in the average week? What the hell does that mean? In one sense the answer is All of it, but I think it's actually trying to ask how much time I have that isn't what I consider to be free time. It could be much better worded.
A lot of the questions are like that, and some are worse, and I've had to leave a lot of the entries blank. This doesn't give a lot of confidence in their results...
This is just a survey. The numbers provided under the "what MMOG are you playing most" question only tell you the demographics of the survey sample, NOT the total online population.
The best breakdown of total active subscribers can be found here.
The fact that well over 50% of the respondants were playing primarily World of Warcraft tells you more about the results of the other questions. For instance, obviously you could not have been playing World of Warcraft for longer than 12 months, which is why the results of that question reveal a huge dropoff after that. That does not mean most people play an online game for under a year before changing, simply that the one they're playing now hasn't been around for longer than that.
they need some questions about low self-esteem, no friends in real life, addiction to farming for items and armor, and the inability to improve in a game by getting better at it instead of spending 20 hours a week getting loot. idiots.
Your example is spot on. There are many places in the survey where their coverage of alternatives is threadbare, and simply doesn't cover existing gaming options.
... currently GW isn't even in your games list. :-)
For example, Guild Wars fans will find the wording about team vs solo play at odds with how their game works, because the solo player can create teams not only with other human players but also with up to 7 "henchmen", so you're "teamed but solo". And the henchmen AI is quite often superior to the natural intelligence shown by humans, so it is extremely common in GW to choose to team with henchies by preference over human players.
Also, the wording in the survey suggests that they have preconceived notions of good and bad with respect to gamers. For example, "escaping from the real world" is inherently an aspersion against gamers, as are the many questions about "trying to cut down", etc. None of their questions pose gaming as a passtime along with other leisure activities which don't get negative fingers pointed at them. It seems that the "researchers" actually have a hidden agenda here.
And finally, there is almost nothing in the survey about challange and tactics! I find this quite incredible, since "good gameplay" is generally regarded as being all about challange and tactics. They like to focus on negative issues, and avoid all the positive ones. Very poor indeed.
It's a pretty wierd survey, and in my opinion, it's slanted to play into the hands of sociologists with axes to grind. It's also crystal clear that it was not put together with much input from gamers, since it addresses almost none of the issues typically regarded as important in gaming.
Try again folks. And tell the sociologists in the team to put away their PC agendas, and hire some gamers. And find out about Guild Wars to understand the solo/team issue
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
back to WoW for me!
It's pretty clear why it's so horribly "massive" ... it repeats the same questions again and again with only slightly different wording each time, with the very clear intention of getting you to commit yourself to a single preconceived conclusion:
"Too much time is spent gaming, to the detriment of social life."
It's about as non-scientific a survey as you can get. Its coverage of relevant issues is miniscule, and it is overtly biased in the few issues that it does address. Another gem by social scientists to demonstrate yet again how scientifically soft their discipline can be.
...why online game publishers don't like the secondary market. It removes the time commitment required to get good items or lots of money. People don't play as often, and usually quit earlier because there is nothing fun to do anymore.
When are they gonna get it through their thick skulls? We need challenges, not gear requirements or 6-hour battles or other insane time commitments.