----------> (Forward) Introduction 

  

Added Feature: The Comment Mousover icon (12/8/99). Move your mouse cursor over this icon This is a sample of the Comment Mouseover icon. You can read additional comments in the following presentation wherever this icon is present. where it appears to read recently added comments.

 

First of all, I would like to thank all the people who filled out a copy of the questionnaire. I would also like to tell those people who filled out both the survey and the questionnaire that I really appreciate your taking their time to do both. This made it possible to connect the two sets of data in a way that would otherwise have been impossible. Some of you indicated that taking the survey or questionnaire made you realize things about your gaming behavior that you hadn't thought of before. I am glad that you did and I hope that you will learn more from reading my results from the study.

 

Contact and Comments information are at the bottom of this page.
  

For non-psychologists and people not interested in methods and statistics: Go right ahead to the Questionnaire Discussion section. Everything else is mainly the nuts and bolts of my study that is here for completeness.

  

For psychologists and people interested in methods: Online studies of this kind are only emerging recently because the necessary tools for doing them have only become widely available and approachable in the last few years. I am glad to have had the resources to have undertaken this study. 225 people responded to my online questionnaire and the way the factors laid out in the analysis was very satisfying. This is not to say that I don't wish I had done certain things differently. For those of you who are unfamiliar with RPG's, here are a few links to articles aimed at introducing the game to non-gamers:

1) What is a Role-Playing Game? - An essay written for people who have never participated in Role-Playing Games before. It does a good job of describing what RPG's are and are not in an easy to read manner, providing anecdotes along the way.

2) What is Role Playing? - An article written for people who have never been involved in an RPG but feel that they might be interested. Presents key points in a stright forward manner.

3) Playing in the Imagination: Dungeons and Dragons - An article that describes RPG's to non-gamers with plenty of anecdotes and interview quotes, and delves deeper into why some people play RPG's. This article feels much more anthropological than the one above.

      ----------> (Forward) Introduction 

   

Contact and Comments Information:

 

After you read through the questionnaire discussion section, I would really like to hear your reactions to it. In particular, if you are interested in knowing specifically how one factor influences another as in the the example in the extended discussion, I would be glad to look at the data for you.

 

I also have this whole online presentation in word format.  I also have the questionnaire data set in Excel format. Email me if you want a copy. I would be glad to share it with people interested in doing more refined correlations with it as long as you tell me all the cool things you find.

 

You can contact me by email. And if you are interested in all the other strange things I do and think about in my free time, visit my homepage.