New Daedalus project!

 Posted by (Visited 5190 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 102008
 

The Daedalus Project.

Lots of stuff to dig into, but here’s some highlights:

  • 23% of users create their own guild
  • 20% join because a real life friend invited them
  • Only 4% come via random invite
  • 26% have been in guilds for longer than 2 years
  • 59% join guilds where they know someone in RL
  • Women were twice as likely to be in guilds with romantic partners
  • 20% of people pick a class and always go for it in game after game
  • 17% go for class abilities instead (hardest, crowd control, overpowered, etc)
  • 11% go for the aesthetic of a player race
  • 67% have a preferred class type.
  • On average players have 8.7 characters on their account, but most everyone can identify a “main”
  • Genre: Both genders like fantasy best, but men also like futuristic spaceships a lot.
  • More people like being a vampire than a vampire hunter, but women are more into being a vampire than men are.
  • 80% of people would rather be in the least popular faction.

F13 interview

 Posted by (Visited 4510 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 102008
 

While I was in London, an interview with F13.net came out. We also did a small key giveaway for entry into the Metaplace testing, but those are all gone. Don’t worry, there will be more. 🙂

We covered stuff ranging from Metaplace to academia and game studies, to the AAA MMO market.

F13: What do you make of Blow’s assertion that “modern game design is actually unethical”?

Raph: Jon’s take on the underlying mechanics of fun, from a chemical point of view, isn’t very different from mine. I think that Dan Cook probably said it most succinctly, that “game designers are hijacking the learning systems of the brain.” But perhaps we might tweak that to “the REWARD systems” of the brain.

Lots of other things accomplish this, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil. A lot of work goes into devices and designs built to encourage gambling, for example, and if you read up on the subject, you quickly find that there’s something deeply manipulative about it.

On the other hand, we are also tapping into that when we give someone a gold star for doing well in grade school, and this is usually used for a positive purpose.

A balanced look at violent videogames

 Posted by (Visited 8223 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Mar 262008
 

It’s nice to see more balanced treatments of the complex subject of videogame violence starting to make it both into the scientific community and the educational community. I’ll have to track down this book, Grand Theft Childhood.

From the interview on Open Education:

A number of our findings went against common wisdom. One surprise was how many preteen girls played M-rated video games. About a fifth of girls rarely or never played video games. But another fifth had played Grand Theft Auto “a lot in the past six months.” Based on some of their comments, we suspect that girls play these games differently and for different reasons than boys. Since we bought into the myth that girls don’t like violent games, we didn’t recruit them for focus groups in this set of studies. We hope to talk with GTA-playing girls in future studies.

New crossgender play stats

 Posted by (Visited 8364 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Mar 042008
 

Majority of women, men swap gender in MMOs – Joystiq

A recent study called Gender Swapping and Socialising in Cyberspace revealed that 70 percent of women and 54 percent of men swap their genders when playing online games.

This is interesting because it doesn’t even remotely match the statistics from older worlds, where gender-swapping was done mostly by males — and to a far lesser degree.  Interesting to speculate on why it might be different now. I presume that the study is based on WoW…

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