Comments on: The Thesis: Practice and Escapism

By: craftygamergirl

craftygamergirl — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 05:17:40 +0000

That explains the rather unfortunately sterotypical nerd I knew that always played buxom females in his games of D&D. It’s a bit sad.

By: Noemie

Noemie — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:29:27 +0000

Wow…

I can allready think of examples….

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:04:28 +0000

Amazing…I was a participant in a study very similar to this. Some of my friends in college did the study for their psych class paper, interviewing RPG players to try and work on a theory very close to this. I don’t remember if the premise was identical or not, but it was something extremely close.

By: Gumby

Gumby — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 05:10:58 +0000

I will answer questions in the name of science!

By: ben robbins

ben robbins — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:42:33 +0000

@ Brian Ballsun-Stanton: This research was a long time ago, but anybody that wants to update the methodology and take it a step further has my blessing. Heck, you don’t even need my blessing — that’s the true tradition of science and academic research. I can give you the reference to the original paper for your bibliography

@ Shawn: There were doubtless a lot of flaws in the methodology, but the approach was to ask the participants to make a character they would want to play, with the rest of the questionnaire describing adventure situations and asking what their character would do. Of course the participants didn’t know the object of the study, so they didn’t know that what kind of character they chose in the first place is important.

By: ben robbins

ben robbins — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:33:45 +0000

@ Noumenon: No, but that’s a good one.

By: Noumenon

Noumenon — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:00:05 +0000

We can’t say confidently that your swing was the result of your warrior’s skill and not just chance. This fight isn’t a big enough sample size.” Inspired by this?

By: Shawn

Shawn — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:16:17 +0000

One significant shortcoming I see in such a questionnaire / theorem is simply the question of “Which character?” Most, if not all, of the people I’ve gamed with over the years have played a variety of characters with individual personalities. If the questions are to be considered only in light of the current character you may (or may not) find correlation. But correlation is not causation. Is your theory viable if the majority of characters played by a given individual are dissimilar?

By: Randolpho

Randolpho — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:19:48 +0000

Well I think the theory has merit. It’s at least plausible and fits well within my own observations on the subject.

But does it hold water? I’d love to see a very detailed study. Maybe you can apply for a government grant? :p

If you need participants, I’ll be glad to sign up.

By: Kolja Raven Liquette

Kolja Raven Liquette — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:34:37 +0000

I’d participate in this test for giggles. Sign me up!

By: Brian Ballsun-Stanton

Brian Ballsun-Stanton — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:16:00 +0000

This is.. fascinating. E-mail me if you actually want to turn this into a paper — I see a number of… avenues.

Anyways, the positivist stance here is fascinating (Scene: two groups of ragtag [academicians] standing across a [board room] roughly 20 feet by 20 feet … ) The problem is that the *internal* sample size is too low. It’s not enough to ask about the “character” one is currently playing, assuming one is only playing one game, but present and past characters. Also, you need to demographically seperate LARPers from normal tabletop gamers…. and the character one plays in both.

In terms of testing this, the experiment methodology would need to present personality tests for each of the characters a player plays. If we wanted to go positivist. I think triangulating and doing a series of interviews *and* collecting the artefacts (or a copy thereof) from each gamer would be quite significant in itself.

Anyways, my e-mail should be in the form, so send me a line.