The Daedalus Project: Player Fatigue


	« Ranking Motivations \| Main \| Welcome to The Daedalus Project » Player Fatigue [printer-friendly version] Player fatigue is the flip-side of attachment to the game. The following survey questions were used to explore player fatigue: 1) Are you bored with the game? 2) How likely are you to quit the game in the next month? For both, the response choices were 5 fully-labeled points on a unipolar scale. The correlation between the two responses was .69 (p < .001). The two were summed to create a player fatigue index for each respondent. Male players (M = 4.20, SD = 2.01) scored significantly higher on this index than female players (M = 3.60, SD = 1.85), t(2348) = 5.18, p < . 001. Younger players scored higher than older players (r = -.14, p < .001). In other words, younger and male players have faster life-cycles than older and female players. Because female players tend to be older than male players, an ANCOVA was performed, controlling for age, to make sure that the age difference wasn't driving the gender difference. The ANCOVA showed that gender was significant independent of age, F(1,2330) = 14.2, p < .001. Tags: age differences (20) , gender differences (24) , player fatigue (4) , player retention (8) Posted on April 15, 2004 \| Comments (3) \| TrackBack (0) Comments Now this is interesting. I wonder if these results have anything to do with differences in motivation (i.e., the reasons people play) between male/female and older/younger players? Posted by: Ytrill on April 17, 2004 9:14 AM I'd say "yes" to that. If your primary motivation is social, you have to start over again when you move to a new game. Yes, I know that guilds and communities sometimes move en bloc to a new game, but in my experience it rarely works out. Not everyone wants to pay for a new game, not eveyone likes the new game, many new people with different backgound and expectations join and that completely changes the social dynamics. Posted by: Astrakhan on April 20, 2004 2:57 AM I wished a "why would you leave" was implemented in the survey. I know a major driving force to leave a game is to start another one. Especially with eq2 WoW on the horizon, I would believe they would make a major contribution to how this is answered. Possibly adding a "are you planning to move to a new game, with your current guild/friends" would be interesting also. Posted by: specialj on April 21, 2004 8:15 AM Post a comment Name: Email: (optional, and not displayed) Comments: Remember info? Note: To decrease potential comment spam, comments with a link element will be moderated and will not appear immediately. Comments with more than one link are junked automatically. With regards to content, comments that contain profanity, slurs, or similar words may be censored or deleted entirely. Also, posts that are simply trolls, flames, or personal attacks have a good chance of being removed. The same applies to posts requesting character trades or asking for game-specific help.