Community Help the University of Missouri-Columbia answer: Why do you play games?

It's a way to kill time no different from bicycling in the woods now and then or just playing toss the ball on the lawn.

It's no major scientific revelation what different people want from games - they want to have fun. If they don't have fun, they won't play. Any other answer is pure hipster gibberish.

People hate games other people love because different people have different opinions.

Why does this require 15-20 minutes to figure out, Mr. hipscumbag?

How prestigious is this University on a scale 1-10? I will put "involved in computer game related studies at U of M-C" on my CV.

Well, I was gonna do it but after 3 pages I realized it would take quite some time. It's 5AM! I'll do it tomorrow.

I didn't see any Breivik or Columbine related options...I am disappoint.

I got to page 4, but rage quitted...very badly made research, it's a insane ammount of question to ask and expect people to fill in, they are clearly pushing in some agendas, and A LOT of questions are the exact same thing....did they really need three different questions like this:

And there are tons of repeated questions like those....they could cut like 40% of that MASSIVE questionary just by editing it a little, but if they don't have the goodwill to edit their research, I ain't gonna have the goodwill to answer it...

Yes, on an IRL interview with a survey professional that can be discretly used on some very important subjects, but to use that so often and obviously on a internet survey it's insane! No one is gonna crawl over more than 100 questions, clearly feeling like they are answering the same stuff over and over again....I don't doubt that most of the people that start the survey quits around page 3-4 too...

More like 10 minutes to complete. It doesn't take long at all.

Clearly written by a story fag though.

To what end? What is the actual practical purpose of this project, and in which ways will it benefit the participants and the researchers?

And I do agree that the questions seem to be written by people with poor understanding of the subject, but isn't that the case with most psychological research?

Yes, this is how it tends to work. I would prefer to make the questionnaire shorter if we could, but we are in an early stage of development. We need a lot of questions and a lot of data before we can see what shakes out - see which are the good questions which measure ideas well and see which are the bad questions that don't measure much at all.

I deeply appreciate everyone's time, if they do volunteer; if you don't wish to volunteer, you have every right not to, of course!

Also, it is possible to start and stop the survey - if you come back within a week, you can pick up where you left off.

Since we're very interested in the ways that certain groups of gamers are different from each other, I'd say that this is perfectly according to plan! I'm well aware that the Codex attracts a particular breed of gamer. Developing this survey will help us in the laboratory measure these differences in preferences and attitudes, which I personally find very exciting.

The survey is just too long. Fuck, that already felt like a chore half-way.
And $20 in Amazon gift thingies? More of an insult than incentive, guys. Just ask nicely if you can't afford paying, next time.

Still, if this improves the chance for someone, somewhere, someday, making a game with what I like in mind, then why not.

We're trying to develop this survey as a tool to measure the preferences and behaviors of different players. As you've probably noticed from some amount of forum discussion, certain things seem to be important to some players while other players don't care about those same things at all. We think that these will be meaningful predictors of whether certain players will find certain games enjoyable (a player who hates to lose will probably not enjoy roguelikes!) and potentially how, when, and how frequently people play games.

This project is something of an extension of Nick Yee's Daedelus Project in which Dr. Yee attempted to separate and measure different players' reasons for playing MMOs (UO, SWG, DAoC, WoW). We hope to broaden and refine this sort of survey for more general use on a wider population of players.

There's no immediate benefit to you, the volunteer - so please don't feel like you are obligated to participate.

The re-phrasing of questions will appear in any serious online surveys, too. The bigger problem, present in most tests and surveys I have ever seen that is not really fixed by the re-phrasing, is that you can relatively easily think of several types of context for many (if not most) answers that will significantly alter the meaning of the response; this is often caused because the questions pre-suppose a certain context. These are the two I'm currently at (and there are much worse):

The first question probably pre-supposes multi-player video games, but it could also be interpreted in a variety of ways by people who play (almost) exclusively single player games ("Do I think about other people playing this and what their reaction might be to the problem I'm solving? Is my rage shared by others at the RPG Codex? Does this endow me with a certain sense of brotherhood?"). The other question is not specific enough about "losing"; there are too many forms and interpretations of it to give a meaningful answer (Multi-player? Dying? Getting an unfavourable delayed outcome/consequence?). I find myself answering too many questions with "neither agree nor disagree" or "N/A" for this reason.

The problem is worse with actual tests where the outcome can become almost wholly dependent on being able to reverse-engineer the test creator's thinking process, but I think it can also damage usability of survey results. I had many disagreements over this when we were creating various types of tests and surveys back at the university, and I was always pushing not only for as clear and unambiguous formulations as possible, but also for asking the respondents to provide brief context for their answers.

Edit: Which is basically what Jaesun complained about in the meantime.

But they won't, and this very comment of yours reveals how meaningless it will be, since the questions are too general and don't take genre conventions or any game characteristics, features, combinations of features and such into account at all. It's perfectly possible that the exact same person who dislikes losing in an MMORPG PvP setting will enjoy roguelikes very much, for example.

I can only see this giving out any useful data at all if it was focused on one specific genre (or better yet subgenre) of games only.

Yep, context matters. I hardly play multi-player games, yet at least 30% of all questions were mp related. I don't play games to get violence out of my system (that's what posting on the dex is for), yet 70% of the questions clearly wanted me to be a little kiddie with anger issues. I actually do mod games, so all the questions about "hypothetically" modding games were also
Next time make a survey where I can trash dressing up, pay to win and story-fags some more.

But the real question is, if I complete the survey, will I be able to download the password for the encrypted .rar file?

I consider myself caucasian. Halp.

DOES BEING VIOLENT IN THE GAME MAKE YOU FEEL UNVIOLENT OTHERWISE? ARE YOU GONNA GO POSTAL???