Help wanted with RPG research project

[tychsen]

Hi everyone

I am currently starting up a research project where I will be surveying the motivations for why we play role playing games, and in conjunction with this project I request your help in taking a survey available at: www.playingstories.org

The motivation behind the project was formed via an on-going research project on the way people communicate when they play RPGs in tabletop and digital formats, that has been running for a bit over two years now. When talking to the participating players, it was obvious that the reasons for why we play RPGs vary a lot - more than I had originally thought. It also looks like the motivations for playing tabletop and digital games varies.

I would like to look into this in more detail, and have therefore created a simple website, www.playingstories.org, where volunteers can access two surveys, one on tabletop RPGs, one on digital RPGs (single- and multi-player). I am hoping to get a few hundred people to participate and will of course post the numbers on the website for the community to enjoy. It is strictly a research, not-for-profit project, and no commercial interests are involved.

I hope you will take the time to stop by the site. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them. Feedback, critique, suggestions for new items to add to the surveys, anything - is welcome.

Best Regards
Anders Tychsen

[Ron Edwards]

I'd like to throw my support toward Anders' project. He graciously asked about posting, and I think the cause is near to the hearts of many people who post here.

During the heyday of the big GNS debates, a lot of people wanted to know why I stopped at creative agenda and didn't address the larger issues of general motivations toward play. Myresponse was always that Social Contract encompasses everything else in the model, and that the key words "let's play!" are subject to the same things that any other social activity is.

But what are those things, relative to role-playing? Any special features? Geek stuff? Maturation stuff? Sex stuff? Anything? I always said, "If anyone wants to investigate that, more power to them."

So yes - go for it, Anders. Lots of us would like to know.

Best, Ron

[xenopulse]

Hi Anders,

Before I hit you with my criticisms, let me say that I'm as glad as Ron that someone's undertaking this project. Have you run the questions by other people before putting them up online? Here's my first-glance feedback on them.

The survey suffers somewhat from an assumption of absolutes. In my case, I play different games at different times with different styles and approaches. So, many of your questions would receive different answers depending on what group, mood, and game system we're talking about.

Similarly, some of the "How enjoyable are the following" questions really depend on the group dynamic. Do I enjoy killing off other people's characters? Not in most games (unless it's dramatically satisfying for all players involved). But in a game of Power/Evil or another competitive romp where it's all part of the agreed-upon style? You betcha.

Some of the questions seem to be aimed at a particular issue but can be interpreted in other ways. For example:

"How important is it to you that your character is as optimized as possible for their purpose?"

I assume this aims at min-maxing character efficiency. But players could also optimize characters for maximum dramatic potential, maximum potential for growth through failure, maximum potential for stirring up shit, and so on.

There are some really good questions in there, but I think your survey might benefit from some reviewing and some inclusion of additional options. I'm looking forward to the results in either case Good luck!

[tychsen]

Hey Christian

Thanks for the feedback :-) I have indeed run the questions by others before putting them online - I have other the past two years been running a series of experiments with RPGs, and have had about 30 of the participating players fill out the questionnaire, provide feedback and so forth. As you can imagine, there are a lot of opinions about how to best formulate the questions, as well as a range of professional concerns in terms of research methodology.

One of the reasons for putting it on the net is to get additional feedback, just like what you do, and hopefully over time mature the surveys, expand them or similar. As you note there is a problem in that we have different reasons for playing different RPGs etc. which can lead to people feeling their answers cannot be covered in the options provided, or that different game contexts would give different answers, etc. On the other hand, including too many options makes the survey to cumbersome, difficult to analyze (and time consuming). It is a work in progress, and what I will do is after an initial period collect all the feedback, and update the surveys and the site accordingly. So please, keep the comments flowing, the more the more precise/useful the results. Thanks again.

Cheers
Anders

[Jake Richmond]

Tychsen, this is a very neat survey, but it feels to me like it covers a very limited kind of game. To answer these questions I largely had to refer back to my days of D&D and Star Wars gaming. Very few of these questions seemed to apply to the game I'm playing now and the style of gaming I'm enjoying. Because of that I'm afraid that I might be giving you very inaccurate info.

Jake

[M. J. Young]

I'll add a couple of insights.

First, there were a few questions, such as the importance of mechanics, for which the answers are impacted by the distinction between games I play, games I run, and games I wrote. I'm probably on the high end for interest in mechanics even when I play because I also design, but if I'm not running the game (and I didn't design it) I tend to sit back and let someone else worry about the mechanics.

Second, I took both surveys, but I wasn't certain whether to take the CRPG survey or not. I played a decent number of CRPGs many years ago, but gave them up because I did not really enjoy them--I was looking for something I got in RPGs that wasn't there.  That was long enough ago that MUD/MUSH/MUX games did not exist (which of course means that MMORPGs did not exist either), so I'm looking mostly at early games for the C64 (e.g., Bard's Tale, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) and online chatroom freeform (the Red Dragon Inn at Quantum Link and maybe in the early days of AOL).  My exposure to the current generation of such games is all through my kids (and some through members of the Christian Gamers Guild, of which I'm chaplain so I sometimes get e-mail asking questions about such games)--but nothing about those games has ever made me think I would enjoy that. I just feel like the problems of CRPGs have not really been solved.  Thus my answers to the second survey really amount to why I don't play those games.

I hope that helps. I did put my name on the surveys (so you can discard them if you like....)

--M. J. Young

[Eero Tuovinen]

I guess that the criticisms towards this, or any other similar survey, might be best summed by questioning the theoretical basis - what are the assumptions the surveyor brings to the table with his set of questions? Laymen seem to commonly think that just asking questions will get you valuable information, but for the most part this is rather far from the truth; your data will nigh inevitably be filtered by the assumptions and the theoretical framework your survey is based on. The questions are only meaningful insofar as they resonate with the structures of reality and the understanding of the participants.

I for one would be interested in hearing more about Ander's theoretical framework for the survey, if he wanted to discuss it with us. A superficial glance suggests that the survey is intented to profile populations of established, long-term D&D groups and provide correlations between different common features of group composition in a team-based rpg environment. Consequently it is perhaps a bit surprising that there are no questions to filter or weight replies in any way. I'd have expected a question about what games the participant plays and likes at the very least, to filter out anybody who doesn't actually play a traditional tabletop roleplaying game as intented by the surveyor. This seems an invitation for data contamination, when lots of people for whom the subject matter at hand is completely irrelevant go and fill the questionnaire. For instance, I myself filled the questionnaire half-way through before realizing that actually, almost all questions presented were completely contextual and/or irrelevant for my own rpg hobby experience, and I could answer each of them whichever way as long as I didn't know what kind of roleplaying the surveyor was discussing in the first place.

[Ben Lehman]

I just completed the survey, and I don't think it was as difficult as all that.

What I would like to see is some of the false dichotomies taken out.  For instance, I have no idea how to answer "do you prefer character interaction as opposed to combat?" because I don't think I've ever played a game where character interaction and combat were actually opposed, as in you could do one or the other but not both and not neither.

Finding the questions where you are expecting a sliding scale between two extremes and breaking them out into two questions "Do you enjoy character interaction?"  "Do you enjoy combat?" would be really helpful.

yrs--
--Ben

[tychsen]

Hey everyone

Thanks for your excellent feedback, and thanks for taking the surveys. You are hitting the weak spot in the surveys spot on: Because RPGs wary a lot in terms of rules, the way we play them, the motivations for why we play them as we do etc., the survey questions will feel limiting to some people (as noted by Jake). It is a problem I have not been able to find a satisfying solution to - beyond using one heckuva lot of questions! Also, there is a further restriction in that I would like to try and replicate as many questions as possible in both the PnP and CRPG survey, so that I can cross-compare the date.

Jake, would it be an idea to add a question asking the person taking the survey to briefly describe their preferred/most commonly utilized style of gaming? Similarly, would it be useful to add a question asking whether the survey is being answered in the capacity as GM, author or player?

Mark: CRPGs do provide very different experiences, I completely agree. In the experiments I have been running PnPs and CRPGs I found that the degree of well-functioning group dynamics amoing the players/GM was the dominating factor in determining the quality of the gaming experience, where the game character and previous CRPG experience (i.e. no problems with understanding the game interface) were primary for CRPGs. The games offer very different experiences - hopefully the recent advances in AI and automated storytelling systems can broaden the scope of CRPGs.

Ben: Good point with the dichotomies. These were introduced to provide some bi-polar questions, which are handy in comparing with the CRPG situation, which is more black and white in terms of opposing ends of a sliding scale. I will try and figure out how to separate the questions this affect without causing problems for the data already collected.

Thanks again to you all, your feedback is appreciated.

Anders Tychsen

[Jake Richmond]

Jake, would it be an idea to add a question asking the person taking the survey to briefly describe their preferred/most commonly utilized style of gaming? Similarly, would it be useful to add a question asking whether the survey is being answered in the capacity as GM, author or player?

It may well help. If this were my survey then those are questions I would want answers to. Are these the kind of questions you are looking for answers to? If not, then it may not matter. It seems likely to me though that the people here on the Forge will approach these questions in a different way then a more traditional gamer would. As a result I think you might be getting inaccurate data.

[tychsen]

Hmm. What I am mostly concerned with is finding a way to capture as much as possible of the variation in the motivations for play in a 40-50 item questionnaire. By providing a couple of questions in the beginning such as the ones suggested it will be possible to interpret the replies a bit more in context (as you note, people approach these questions from different angles). It is not something I had originally planned, but hey, that is why you get feedback on things :-) - irrespective, I will give this some thought. Thanks again.

Cheers
Anders

[M. J. Young]

Anders--it might well help both surveys to include a question asking for the two or three favorite and one or two least liked games in the category. Just as someone who lists "D&D" and "GURPS" as favorites and "Call of Cthulu" at the bottom will have a very different conception of what role playing games are from someone who puts "Sorcerer" and "Legends of Alyria" at the top and "Rifts" at the bottom, so too you'll have a spread of difference between those who list MMORPGs versus solo console games versus MUX games.  The RPG/CRPG distinction was sufficient maybe fifteen years ago, but by now the diversification in both sides of the hobby has probably made a big difference. I personally know people who would play D&D and Everquest but not Final Fantasy or Universalis (for different reasons). Getting a handle on what kinds of games each respondent has in mind when they answer the questions might help a great deal.

--M. J. Young

[tychsen]

Hi

Sorry to respond so late, I have been at a conference in Melbourne and caught the flu. Was even hospitalized yesterday - with the flu! Weird considering it was just your garden variety version.

Good idea with the favorite and least liked games - I will add those items in as soon as I get back to work. I am also toying with the idea of adding a short open-ended questionnaire to give people some more leg-room - from the feedback here and other forums it is evident that people feel the survey items are ok but constricting. Thanks again.

Cheers
Anders