Yet more EQ2 data
I have referenced the EQ2 data dump to Dmitri Williams & team before, something that I helped kick off way back when and which has been supported by SOE in an ongoing fashion. Now there’s an article at Ars Technica which describes yet more findings, apparently from a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Jaideep Srivastava is a computer scientist doing work on machine learning and data mining—in the past, he has studied shopping cart abandonment at Amazon.com, a virtual event without a real-world parallel. He spent a little time talking about the challenges of working with the Everquest II dataset, which on its own doesn’t lend itself to processing by common algorithms. For some studies, he has imported the data into a specialized database, one with a large and complex structure. Regardless of format, many one-pass, exhaustive algorithms simply choke on a dataset this large, which is forcing his group to use some incremental analysis methods or to work with subsets of the data.
They got the first data dump around when I left SOE, so that should give you an idea of how big the dataset is, that it took this long to analyze!
Some bullet points:
- “Gender turned out to be a negative influence on interactions: even after their low numbers were taken into account, female players avoided interacting with each other.”
- “Time zones had some influence; players in the same time zone were 1.25 times more likely to partner than players even one time zone apart.”
- “players within 10 kilometers of each other were five times more likely to interact. Contractor concluded that, for the typical player, the game simply offered a way of continuing their real-world social interactions in a virtual setting.”
- “The average age of players turned out to be 31.”
- “their body mass index was better than the US average and, although they were slightly more depressed than average, they were also less anxious.”
- “a small subset of the population—about five percent—who used the game for serious role playing and, according to Williams, “They are psychologically much worse off than the regular players.” They belong to marginalized groups, like ethnic and religious minorities and non-heterosexuals, and tended to use the game as a coping mechanism.”
- “Older women turned out to be some of the most committed players but significantly under-reported the amount of time they spent in the game by three hours per week (men under-reported as well, but only by one hour).”
18 Responses to “Yet more EQ2 data”
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I see you’re spending more time reading Ars. I’ve been reading that site for quite a while now. They usually have better articles on it than the mainstream press. Great tech related news site. That and there’s a classic article on how two iPhone developers are suing each other over the use of “pull my finger” in a fart application. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming and welcome to Ars. Do you post there?
Unreported is the fact that such players were, on average, much better off psychologically than social ‘scientists’.
Define “serious roleplaying” and “pyschologically much worse off”. Barring any support for this statement, I think we can safely assume that it means, “I was snubbed by the local D&D group in high school and now I’m enacting my revenge! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Derek: actually, I don’t read Ars, got referred there from somewhere else.
Sam: I know Dmitri & some of these other guys. He’s a gamer himself. I would take the statements at face value, and not get offended. I wrote about that particular finding before, see the link in the post.
My apologies for the knee-jerk reaction.
My anecdotal experience with roleplayers has been that they are not significantly different from any other cross section of the population. If “roleplayer” is used in this context as a synonym for “player of a roleplaying game”, then my only objection to the comment is that it could be misconstrued to refer to a specific style of play.
Sam, here’s the actual data from the original paper he presented on it. There are statistical differences from a cross-section of the population, but the picture is somewhat more complex than any brief summary would give. And yes, it is about the game, not about the playstyle, at least in this earlier paper (they may have done more correlations and isolated it to a playstyle by now, this paper is older):
In the conclusions section:
What that finding actually suggests, in my humble and equally unscientific interpretation, is that these games are so difficult for roleplay that they inhibit it for everyone but those who can take least advantage of it: namely, the escapists, running from themselves.
Incidentally, Yukon Sam, if you’re a proficient roleplayer or interested in the subject, I have a thing you may be interested in, and I am kinda fishing for reviewers (though I have the project on the backburner at the moment). I need to do some editing before I send it out to my wide distro list.
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Raph, thanks. Those passages clarify the issue significantly.
I’d be interested to see a comparison against movie buffs, poker players or sports fans using some sort of similar methodology. I’m not convinced that these values would differ from those of any community centered on a particular form of entertainment, though they may be out of sync with the population as a whole.
Michael, that’s an interesting hypothesis, and I think it may hold true to some extent. I have found that many current MMO and social virtual world communities are actively hostile to roleplay (or at best, utterly bewildered by it).
But… in my experience, the roleplayers who persevere and create RP communities nonetheless are people with well-developed social networks and a strong sense of purpose and dedication.
Someone threw up a site based on that quote already. It’s pretty bad–I don’t even know what they’re going for. But at least they link the original article.
Here’s the link for anyone that’s interested:
roleplayersaregay.com
I’m sure there’s an appropriately dignified, composed, adult response to this that is brimming with hard-earned wisdom and adorned with biting wit.
And when I discover it, whomever created that site is going to have one hell of a penalty to their saving throw.
@Yukon, calm down “gay” means happy. Roleplayers are happy. Now, here’s your pill. *hands Yukon a red pill* Take it. It will make you feel better. No, no, take it now. Take it!
That’s exactly what I’m hoping to address with my project.
And they probably wouldn’t have much interest in answering a survey for which there were only two incentives: a pretty item everyone in their group would then have and For Great Science!, which IME is a pretty piss-poor incentive.
The survey data has massive limitations, as Dimitri et. al. have themselves pointed out. Additionally, I’ve noticed that while exemplar roleplayers tend to discard game mechanics, the more average ones fit very, very easily into the common mold.
It kinda comes down to (1) did roleplayers of the type we speak systematically avoid or deceive the survey? and (2) did the survey investigate this subset of players meaningfully? I don’t remember the survey instrument being attached to the original paper… I’ll look… nope, not there.
There is. It’s this: *stare* and then *lifts an eyebrow* and then and then *shrugs and walks away*.
I think that http://www.roleplayersaregay.com is suppised to be a sarcastic humor site.
“Buried among those happy, average players was a small subset of the population—about five percent—who used the game for serious role playing and, according to Williams, “They are psychologically much worse off than the regular players.” They belong to marginalized groups, like ethnic and religious minorities and non-heterosexuals, and tended to use the game as a coping mechanism.”
How could someone with half a brain read this quote and not simply laugh? So come on my friend, take the red pill, laugh, and enjoy the ride.
Damn. You’re good.
I wouldn’t say that. Roleplayers are, at their best, improvisational actors. And as an actor, one thing I’ve noticed as a general tendency is that, given the opportunity, we love to talk about ourselves. At length. In detail. Even the ones who are painfully shy OOC (out of character) warm up to a little persistant friendliness.
That said… I haven’t done much serious roleplay since I left UO. I’m not adverse to it – I’m delighted on those rare occasions when I can have an in-character exchange with another player. But between sustaining a miniscule but measurable profit in Second Life (a definite novelty for me, being paid to play), and racking up gold stars in Rock Band (another novelty; being near the top of a worldwide “pvp” ladder), my battered old RP hat is gathering dust in the closet.
I want the blue one. I think. Hey, anybody got The Matrix player’s guide?
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