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

[Ulminati]

When someone annoys you IRL, do you imagine to cast Disintegrate (or something similar) on him?

I imagine ordering my squadmates to set up suppressing fire while my marksman flanks him to negate cover bonusses, throwing out smoke grenades to cover the advance, then taking him down with an aimed shot once it's my turn again.

DarkUnderlord
Since we're doing hugeass animated gif "emoticons" anyway, any chance we can haz this?

If it receives a million brofists.

YAY! I AM SO EXCITED!

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

I imagine ordering my squadmates to set up suppressing fire while my marksman flanks him to negate cover bonusses, throwing out smoke grenades to cover the advance, then taking him down with an aimed shot once it's my turn again.

Do you consider aimed shots (especially to the head) DEEPLY satisfying? I'm talking *really deep* here.

 

[Ulminati]

I imagine ordering my squadmates to set up suppressing fire while my marksman flanks him to negate cover bonusses, throwing out smoke grenades to cover the advance, then taking him down with an aimed shot once it's my turn again.

Do you consider aimed shots (especially to the head) DEEPLY satisfying?

No, but they are the most efficint use of action points.
I do, however, masturbate to tables of the average penetration of shells fired from various models of WWII PaK/KwK guns against steel plates at a 30 degree slope. The 7.5cm KwK 45 L/100 never lets me down.


Also, the other night I was playing WoT and piloting a PzKpfW III armed with a KwK 37 L/24 loaded with HE shells. I turned around a corner and right into a PzKpfW VI Tiger (P). I panicked and fired off a shot, even though everyone knows it has a hull armor value of 200/80/80 mm and the KwK37 only penetrates around 43mm in combat conditions. Lo and behold, a lucky shot to the back third of the side (between the rear drive wheel and the ammunition rack) ruptured the fuel tank and caused the Tiger to catch fire. Apparently the guy piloting the tiger had not invested in fire suppression, because the tank burned out without being able to return fire. That felt DEEPLY satisfying.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

I do, however, masturbate to tables of the average penetration of shells fired from various models of WWII PaK/KwK guns against steel plates at a 30 degree slope. The 7.5cm KwK 45 L/100 never lets me down.

OK. How often does this masturbation occur on average?

 

[Ulminati]

I do, however, masturbate to tables of the average penetration of shells fired from various models of WWII PaK/KwK guns against steel plates at a 30 degree slope. The 7.5cm KwK 45 L/100 never lets me down.

OK. How often does this masturbation occur on average?

3-4 times a day. In fact, I am masturbating right now.

 

[Angthoron]

Why are you rude, bong? Does conversation and using punctuation make you feel uncomfortable, so you have to rely on childish insults in an attempt to make me go away?

What film was that?

 

[GarfunkeL]

Didn't even take 10 minutes.

 

[Grunker]

Another gem from social sciences.

 

[Ulminati]

Another gem from social sciences.

social sciences.

Now there's an oxymoron.
I guess the üntermensch couldn't into something prestigious like mathematics, physics or anything else where you're required to provide "repeatable results" instead of "indications".

Then again:

 

[Sceptic]

Joe Hilgard – Principal Investigator

No you're not. That Bartholow fellow is. You're just the student. Don't steal titles.

 

[hipscumbag]

Done. I don't mind the repetitive questions as much and I am aware, from my loose academic relation to psychology and survey techniques, that they do serve a purpose. I do think it went a little overboard, though, at the expense of response rate. What will be interesting is how you guys interpret the data.

(2) No doubt you're looking for whether people answer two questions with virtually the same content in different ways depending on where they come up and how they are worded. It would be a pity if that was just a way to argue that the survey format lets you get through people's own self-image and presentation to what they really feel - I think that privileges the survey too much. It would be much more interesting to respect seeming contradictions as contradictions, rather than harbouring underlying continuities. (Easy one: why would people like to blow up corpses when they don't like violence in games? Answer isn't necessarily that they are in denial, and actually want the violence.)

So yeah, let us know when you have an article or something we can read.

You're on the right track, but it's nothing quite so sophisticated or devious. We ask the same question a bunch of different ways just to get a more reliable and accurate composite measurement.

Imagine that I'm trying to figure out how much you enjoy games that make you think. If I only ask you "How much do you enjoy puzzles?" I've failed to take into consideration all manner of other games that require careful thought. So, we need to ask you about your attitudes towards puzzles, strategy, tactics, calculation, and heuristics.

Once we've got enough data, we dump it into analysis, which tells us which questions seem to go together to make good composites, and which questions behave poorly. With time and data, we have a powerful new tool: a new way to measure individual differences and preferences in games, something capable of measuring the differences between grognards and casuals, storygamers and action addicts.

Thank you so much for your time and interest. We really appreciate it.

 

[hipscumbag]

Joe Hilgard – Principal Investigator

No you're not. That Bartholow fellow is. You're just the student. Don't steal titles.

While Dr. Bartholow is my faculty advisor, this project is my baby.

 

[serch]

'Do you consider yourself hispanic?' is a extremely difficult question for an iberian (spaniard or portuguese)

 

[hipscumbag]

About a year ago, many of you participated in an internet survey to help us understand different players' different tastes in games, and whether any of those were associated with more gaming problems, like losing sleep because of excessive gaming. The research has finally been published. Better yet, it's at an open-access journal, so everybody is free to read the manuscript -- you don't need a subscription to read the article.

You can find the research here: http://www.frontiersin.org/developmental_psychology_/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00608/abstract with a download for the full PDF.

This research has been tremendous fun for me, as I've always struggled to understand why everyone's tastes in games aren't exactly like my own!

In short, our finding was that people who play games to escape their lives and problems have more problems because of their gaming habits. This is exciting to me, because it seems that problem gaming may not be so different from other addictions, like alcoholism or problem gambling. However, it also suggests that treating problem gaming may not be so easy as just taking away the XBOX, since those real-life problems will still persist.

We also found increased problem gaming among players who like to play with others and players who really like unlockables and achievements. It's possible that MMORPGs represent a "triple threat" for problem gaming, as players can escape into an immersive virtual world, develop online social obligations to their friends and guilds, and level up and grind loot forever.

One thing that I found exciting was that we were able to demonstrate that our measures really are related to peoples' favorite games. For example, stories are much more important to players who listed Bioshock or Mass Effect as one of their favorites, and less important to those who like Call of Duty or Super Mario. Similarly, Skyrim players love to grind skills and complete collections of every single item, while fans of the original Deus Ex think it's a waste of time.

I wanted to give everyone who participated my sincere thanks. I hope you find this research interesting, and I hope we can do more research again in the future!

p.s. if anyone has an "in" at NeoGAF please let me know -- I'd like to sample some data from there but their admin never got back to me.

 

[Haba]

One thing that I found exciting was that we were able to demonstrate that our measures really are related to peoples' favorite games. For example, stories are much more important to players who listed Bioshock or Mass Effect as one of their favorites, and less important to those who like Call of Duty or Super Mario. Similarly, Skyrim players love to grind skills and complete collections of every single item, while fans of the original Deus Ex think it's a waste of time.

This is really interesting data, thanks. Are you still planning on further research?

 

[hipscumbag]

This is really interesting data, thanks. Are you still planning on further research?

Absolutely! The next thing we're interested in is whether peoples' personalities are related to their tastes in games. However, I have about three other projects on my plate right now, so it's gonna be a little while before I'm ready...

 

[St. Toxic]

I play video-games to suppress my homicidal rage, but the rage only grows when I don't win.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

'Do you consider yourself hispanic?' is a extremely difficult question for an iberian (spaniard or portuguese)

About as difficult as a central African answering whether or not they consider themselves black.

 

[Roguey]

I find it fascinating how Baldur's Gate fans utterly hate losing.

 

[Grunker]

I find it fascinating how Baldur's Gate fans utterly hate losing.

lol

 

[Infinitron]

I find it fascinating how Baldur's Gate fans utterly hate losing.

 

[Cursed Platypus]

'Do you consider yourself hispanic?' is a extremely difficult question for an iberian (spaniard or portuguese)

Not really? Hispanic is those coming from south and central America. Spaniards are sometime mistakenly referred to as ''Hispanic'' but they're officially European or ''Caucasian''.

 

[hipscumbag]

I find it fascinating how Baldur's Gate fans utterly hate losing.

It's actually the other way around -- sorry that's unclear! In the full article, we refer to that factor as "Loss-Aversion", and questions like "Winning is fun; Losing isn't" load upon it. So Baldur's Gate fans are actually some of the people most okay with getting crushed periodically. I was really hoping to get enough roguelikers in the sample to see how they compare, but didn't have the data for it... I'd guess that people who can deal with losing several hours' progress at Dungeon Crawl or blowing a promising Spelunky run are quite resilient.

 

[Kane]

Your research is flawed because it fails to encompass the whole array of games and misses out on both complete genres and important subgenres.

Your list lacks sandbox titles. You should've included games like Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies.
Your list is also lacking in the breadth of shooters, there are virtually zero movement and agility centered shooters like Quake, UT, Tribes on that list. Instead there are 3 or 4 different types of tactics shooters.
Strategy games are completely left out.
60% of the games in that list are RPGs.

If you cherry-pick games this way your argumentation will always proof true or be incomplete at best.

I grade this B+. The methodical flaws prevent this paper from being an A grade.

 

[hipscumbag]

Your research is flawed because it fails to encompass the whole array of games and misses out on both complete genres and important subgenres.

Your list lacks sandbox titles. You should've included games like Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies.
Your list is also lacking in the breadth of shooters, there are virtually zero movement and agility centered shooters like Quake, UT, Tribes on that list. Instead there are 3 or 4 different types of tactics shooters.
Strategy games are completely left out.
60% of the games in that list are RPGs.

If you cherry-pick games this way your argumentation will always proof true or be incomplete at best.

I grade this B+. The methodical flaws prevent this paper from being an A grade.

Heh heh, if you'll read the full manuscript you'll see that we asked participants to write down their three favorite games. Because this was an open-response question, not a multiple choice, this resulted in a fantastic amount of work for me as I merged games within the same franchise into each other, as well as misspellings and variations (e.g. "Assassin's Creed 2" and "Assassins Creed II" and "Assassin Creed Brotherhood" all had to be merged into the same response). What you see in the table is just the 20 most-frequently indicated games -- games mentioned more rarely than that were too uncommon to make statistical inferences about.

The emphasis of this study was also on breadth. We wanted to be able to measure game attitudes in all people, not just grognards. I'm also interested in the differences between, say, Halo and Quake 3, but that's an exceptionally specific question compared to stuff like "How important is a story to you" and "Do you play by yourself or with others". Maybe one day I'll get around to that sort of thing. (John Romero, call me!)

Besides, this is just one facet of the manuscript. We've come up with a whole new measure, which is internally reliable, and this is a single expression of validity. Even after that, we still have the interesting findings regarding pathological gaming.

I grade this comment A-. I am grateful for your interest but would be even more flattered once you read the .pdf.