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What roleplayers look likeFebruary 15th, 2010 |
Oldish news now, but a pre-press copy (Word doc) of the latest study using EQ2 data is out.
The paper combines the big trove of server-side data and quant analysis of our other EQII papers, with a full-on second step of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing. The result, we hope, is a pretty deep look into who role players are, why they play, and what makes them tick. The chocolate and peanut butter of combined qual-quant methods we think gives the paper good generalizability, but with depth to boot. As always, there were some obvious findings and some unexpected stuff…
The focus of the study here is to specifically examine roleplayers — they give the genre its name, but as has long been noted, are a minority of users. The paper has a great overview of the history and theory behind RP for its intro that is worth the download in it own right.
Some of the big findings:
- There aren’t that many hardcore RP’ers: 5% or so. But they don’t care whether they are on an RP server or not, they RP regardless of server label.
- They tend to be slightly younger, there’s a higher percentage of females, and they are slightly less well educated — but it appears RP isn’t about identity experimentation related to age.
- Instead, it seems that a more common characteristic was belonging to a minority group of some sort: religious, sexual, racial…
- As was previously reported and the subject of some controversy, roleplayers seem to have a notably worse incidence of reports of physical and mental issues, including ADD, learning disabilities, loneliness, physical disabilities, substance addiction, etc.
- However, these had nothing to do with the amount of time played, and in fact, RPers play less hours per week.
- Why do it? Creativity, immersion, skill-building. And in many cases, it was a coping mechanism for the problems mentioned earlier — a way of using RP as a way to ameliorate depression or anxiety, and not the cause.
- Interestingly, RPers seem to have a higher rate of turning online social connections into real world ones. The quote from the paper is “…a qualitative difference in the practices of roleplaying that makes the social interactions different — and likely richer…”
The paper doesn’t arrive at firm conclusions on that last bit, but engages in some speculation, and invites further research.
This may be a real irony of role playing—people whose main practice is pretending to be someone else may be also engaging in opening up so much through this practice that they are driving the very self-disclosure that leads to true social bonds.
This lines up with a very very old interview I gave back in the LegendMUD days:
People tend to think that muds alter how people perceive one another. That gender and race and handicaps cease to matter. It is a noble vision, sure, one shared in general by these frontier netters. In truth, muds reveal the self in rather disturbing ways. We all construct ‘faces’ and masks to deal with others. Usually in interpersonal relationships, the masks can slip, they evolve and react, and they have body language and cues. On a mud, on the net, whatever—they cannot. And people see specifically this: what you choose to represent yourself as, and THAT is more revealing of your true nature than gender, race, age, or anything else.
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[...] under: Uncategorized — Dave @ 1:41 pm Tags: player populations, players Raph Koster has a new piece on the Williams paper that I mentioned last week, where he hits on Williams’ points. One of the [...]
[...] the study is over 40 pages long and packed with information, Raph Koster has broken down the big findings on his website — namely the fact that hardcore RPers only make up 5% of the player population [...]