Early survey data posted

 Posted by (Visited 6144 times)  Game talk
May 082006
 

Mischiefblog has posted some of the early raw data from that survey I mentioned a while back, so that those who wish to can run their own analyses.

Some of the prelim results are up too, confirming some usual findings: more women who are partnered, age around 30, and so on.

  2 Responses to “Early survey data posted”

  1. pantomimeHorse says:
    May 8, 2006 at 1:03 pm

    “Designers and developers should take the fully employed (66.0%) and greying markets in mind when creating new content.”

    I’m just an unemployed student and even I wish something were done about playing time requirements. I think this effectively means that games will have to restrict possible advancement to about one hour of playing time a day; the real challenge then will be making the game still interesting to those who wish to play it 24/7. Of course, this is the challenge already: how do you make a game people just want to keep playing? I just wish the usual answer to that question didn’t depend so heavily upon treadmilling. My point is that the solution to one problem is a solution to the other.

    My own idea for an MMO game would revolve around scheduled events. Think Planetside, but players dont’ just continually stream in and out of the world. Players participate in making the large strategic war plans, then depending upon these decisions, players fight out the actual battles at scheduled times. Perhaps there would be an RTS element in between, e.g. the large-scale unit movements are made in a turn-based fashion, then the medium-scale decisions play out as an RTS, and for certain actual fights, players take direct control a la Battlefield. The war would have a definite start and end, perhaps restarting every 1 or two weeks.

    Because the real action comes at scheduled times, the question then becomes if you could find some way to give people a way to inhabit the world in between these events. I’ve come to really detest gear gathering and in fact all things generally to do with farming, so that’s out.

  2. pantomimeHorse says:
    May 8, 2006 at 1:14 pm

    Let me clarify that:

    If you make a game that people want to keep playing but don’t feel obligated to play (or obligated to perform some task now so they can do the real playing later), then you’ve made a game which is real-world friendly and not a treadmill.

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