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Researcher seeking guild members to interview
jlothian
Member CommonPosts: 2
Heyyas everyone,
I’m a Pennsylvania State University Researcher (and long time WoW player) seeking World of Warcraft guild members for a research study on game features and trust.
I’m looking at how players decide to trust other guild members/other players and attempting to determine how features of the game alter those decisions. The research will involve interviewing members of guilds. So far, interviews have taken roughly an hour, with the longest being two hours. They can be conducted via Vent, Skype, or other voice-chat service as long as it can be recorded. I've also done a couple via in-game text chat as well.
Participants must be 18 years or older, be located in the US, and be/have been an active member of a guild that runs dungeons or raids. It would be useful to also have players that have played since Vanilla or BC, but this is not a requirement.
The official call for participation can be found here:
https://sites.google.com/site/trustmmorpg/
I’ll be hanging around off and on over the next few days to answer any questions that pop up.
Thanks!
-J Lothian
Comments
I trust players who build and cultivate a persistent online persona on the official forums(and supplemented by guild forums when applicable) and in-game through regular public channel use. That leads to sharing VoIP information, and regular voice chat leads to further trust outside the game space.
I've shared exploits/bugs/gold with players with the basic "get-to-know-you" method above, and I've shared real world currency and had my cable bill reduced with the VoIP connection(knew a guy who works for comcast and gave me a huge discount once I gave him my comcast account info for helping gear him in BC)
The crossover between real-life and in game is always an interesting topic - particularly because people treat it differently. Some people are very rigorous, demanding that the two shall never overlap (this is play, that is real life). While others, like what you mention, let them bleed together over time as you get to know people. This is one of the areas where MMOs have really torn apart some older ideas about psychology and play.
It also makes my research a bit more difficult, since I have to consider not only that people play differently, but also that their relationships are highly dynamic over time - and that game features can have an affect on this.
Do you still play? Have you seen any game features implemented that have made forming these relationships harder or easier?
Playing online is alot like driving a car. We don't ever consider the fact that theirs another human being behind the wheel, just actions from a car. We rage if they drive too slow or drive too close or stop at a green light too long and never once think "hey maybe that person is having the worst day of their life" because we look at it as a mindless machine unconvincing us.
Most people handle online play in the exact same manner.