A New EQ research questionnaireFollow

Hello all,

My name is Richard Otto, and I am conducting another survey into aspects of Everquest for my research as a Ph.D. student. I have posted a new survey that I hope you will consider taking part in. All responses are confidential and anonymous. If you wish to take part, please follow this link.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=59679311601

If you have any questions or concerns please fell free to contact me at:

eqotto@hotmail.com

Thank you for your help in my study, and have an excellent day.

Richard Otto
GTA, University of Memphis

Personally I had already enough trolls beating dead horses this year - and its only february.....so could someone please put both out of their misery?

Work your way through januaries threads and you'll understand. You might even find something about my own position regarding psycholgy... ;-)

that was the friendly part - no for the other one

Here in Europe every student (from the first day on) has an email adress at his university and i cant belive the states are technically behind us - so if hotmail is all you have to offer you are most likely just another freak and/or wiseass and you better **** off.

Edited, Tue Feb 17 20:12:06 2004 by Leiany

Go go Gbaji!

Hello,

As there have been some valid concerns raised regarding my survey I will attempt to answer them, as it is only ethical for a researcher to respond to the critique of potential respondents to a course of research. Lets begin with Leiany's concerns that were twofold:
1) In terms of the Jan. debate on the topic, I went through all pages from Dec. 28th till today and was unable to find the topic, which perhaps was not headed pertaining to research, or perhaps I just missed it. Since you mention your views on psychology, I am assuming the post pertains to researchers looking at EQ or MMORPG's from a psychological perspective, for example the extensive work done by Nick Yee. My discipline is communications, so we look at phenomena using a different methodology when undertaking research, though Mr. Yee's work has been very interesting to follow.

2) In terms of my email being hotmail vs. edu
I do have a University of Memphis email, it is
rotto@memphis.edu
The reason that I use a hotmail email is that my Memphis email is used by my students to contact me for the classes I teach, for internal memos etc. for the committees I am on, and for my instructors to contact me. By placing all my EQ research email into eqotto@hotmail.com
it allows me to keep all of the responses to my surveys in one folder for a specific task. It just makes my life a bit easier.

Now for the concerns raised by Gbaji:
Gbaji wrote:
Now. One has to wonder why, if there are that many studies being performed; there are still so few actual published papers on the topic.

This is an excellent question. Of course I can only speak for myself and not for any other researcher. From my perspective, I am in the process of publishing two articles on EQ, one that had data garnered from people from the Allakahazam website. My publishing timeframe as a goal is sometime next year for final revisions of these two papers and then having them published probably in late 05 or early 06, depending on the journal. This current survey will lead to a new paper, which will then hopefully be published in late 06 or 07. The academic publishing route is long, but ultimately worthwhile in my view.

Then Gbaji wrote: (excerpts, edited)


There are several possible conclusions:
1. The person asking for the information is lying.
2. The person asking for the information is misinformed.
3. There's a whole lot of studies that have been done, but very few have been published yet.
4. The person asking for the information is really just collecting market research information, and has no intention of ever "publishing" anything, since that would reduce the value of the research to the firms that sponsored it.
So which is it?

Well, I am not lying when I say there are few published article in the Communication discipline regarding EQ or MMORPG's. This is the current state of affairs, as research and publishing take time to accomplish. This is changing as all the research done over the last few years is now hitting the publication pipeline, but as this is a new communication phenomenon, it will be studied for many decades, as the communities and games progress, and convergence brings together now disparate forms of communication into one new form. Also, there may be many papers on EQ, but as it is a very extensive game world, there are many subsets of communicative behavior to study, as well as looking at EQ from the methodology of other academic disciplines, such as economics or sociology, etc.

In terms of the 4th concern, I am not working for any marketing company. On Jan 28th I posted a link to the only other survey I have done, as some of the respondents wrote they were interested in seeing the information gathered. The link is:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/Report.asp?U=30730951366

This contains all the information I gathered, minus any potential identifying characteristics. I will of course post a similar link to the results of this study after it is closed.

Then, Gbaji wrote:
Do your professors actually give you a script to use when posting your surveys on the internet? Because every single one uses virtually the exact same wording that yours does. Do you really think we wouldn't notice that?...

Again, I can only speak for myself, but no, there was no script. There are guidelines that must be followed to fit the parameters set out by our Institutional Research Board, but no script. I just posted a message that followed these guidelines.

My reasons for studying EQ and MMORPG's are personal, as I have been a game player since Pong, and D and D, and the Wizardry series on my old trusty Apple IIe. I think it is an area worthy of academic research, as I believe that they represent a new form of communication and community building that is intriguing. Sorry for the long post, but I felt that such fundamental concerns should be answered. Luck and fun.

Yes, it is an excellent resource for MMORPG and Everquest researchers.

Bye the way, thanks to all who have completed the survey so far.

P.S. Allakhazam, I see you posted from Phili, when I'm not in Memphis, I live in the Pocono's, while I miss it, I dont miss 120 inches of snow in the winter. ;)