Gaming Survey

done

done

I filled in your survey, but my main issue is that many of the questions are not simple yes or no questions.

I would have appreciated the chance to explain some of my answers, i.e. because a yes answer is not for the reason the question implies.

Also, the final question felt like you wanted me to answer yes, but I replied no and I would have liked to have provided examples.

While I have completed your survey, I can agree with the slant that others see. I wish you luck in your dissertation, but I strongly caution you to let the evidence speak for itself and do not mold it to fit the crime.

Thank you all for completeing the survey and also for the feedback many of you have left. I appreciate what you are saying i made errors it is clear when wording some of the questions. I also appreciate that the questions are quite narrow for answers but this questionnaire is designed to gather initial broad information before pursuing more detailed information in interviews i am conducting.

Done. Good luck.

I hope you post your paper when it's done. Hey, you aren't Twixt, are you?

I'll chime in, as well. Should I leave spoiler space? Eh, couldn't hurt...



















Two of the questions dealt with whether or not video games were becoming more violent. The first question asks, point blank, "Do you feel video games are becoming more violent?" I answered "Undecided" because, to my mind, it depends on the time frame and the genres being considered. Comparing, say, God of War III to the first Legend of Zelda is one thing. Comparing it to God of War II is another. Comparing it to Farmville is another, as well.

The follow up question asks something like "Do you feel the increased violence in video games relates to an increase in the qualities of graphics technology?" Predicated on my previous response, I had to take a non-answer there. However, when a question later on included a "if you answered 'no' to the previous question..." clause, it made me wonder if the investigator even realized someone might feel video games weren't becoming more violent.

Of course, this isn't a Simple Random Sample: I'd expect a pro-video game bias in the response because of the audience. Good luck, though!

Filled it out as well...

I'll admit that there is a good amount of vagueness about a lot of the questions.

I just don't believe that relating violence to graphics development is true. Does it maybe become more realistic? Maybe. But there's been violence in video games dating back into the Coin-Op era of the late 70s/early 80s.

I guess it depends on your perspective...

Thank you for the time...

@Travlr (Main) / @Tymers Realm (Test)

********************* Survey Spoilers **************************

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sfort Several questions are highly subjective in meaning, and others come across as leading. By the end I really started to feel like there was a bias toward games being too violent and too easy to acquire.

I also fealt this way when taking the survey. While taking the survey, I felt as if it want me to select the answers to which the bias was steering, which invalidates the purpose of a survey. It's too late to change the survey now, but in the future, you may want to consider the wording in order to eliminate bias as much as possible.

To add to my survey results, I feel that games, books, and movies should create an empathetic response in the audience. Any good story, regardless of medium, should. If a story involves cruelty to animals, for example, without doing anything with it, like driving character to action, it won'
t be a good story. Just like in other mediums, some games are built with only shock value and gimmicks; these games lack a good central story, and therefore aren't worth my entertainment dollars. In other words, a game can still have extreme content such as torture, murder, etc., as long as they are elements of a story, and not just the end-all-be-all to the game or story.

As far as violence related to graphics technology. No, not wholly. Really, it's a complete package of technology, including AI, procedural rendering, and processing capabilities of the gaming devices as well.

Done.









And like others, I have a few complaints about how the survey was constructed. In particular, I have an issue with the question asking if a rise in violence in video games is the result of the ability to create more realistic graphics. First of all, the wording assumes that the person filling out the survey believes that there has been an increase in violent games. It's biased as all hell, and an absolutely horrible question to even have on what you say is a preliminary survey because it completely invalidates one of the possible answers for the question immediately preceding it. Furthermore, if I'm remembering the question wording correctly (and please tell me if I'm not), it implies causation between the ability to create more lifelike graphics and an increase in violence. Again, a serious faux pas when you're trying to conduct serious research. At most, you might be able to get away with asking someone if they believe that there could be some correlation between the two, but even that's kinda sketchy since all that question would produce is unquantified, subjective data. After all, correlation can be either positive or negative.

You say that this is just an informal survey designed to gather broad information. In this task, I'm afraid it fails. It's vague, skewed toward producing data that supports one particular argument, and honestly a little on the short side. You don't need to break out the heavy statistical analysis or anything, but this survey really needs to be re-written if you want your further research to be built on a solid foundation.


Now as an addendum to my survey answers:

I'm not entirely sure that violence in video games has actually increased over time. I mean, there was a Texas chainsaw Massacre game for the Atari 2600 where you played as Leatherface and your objective was to run around killing people! That's just one example of many, and I'm not even counting games like Custer's Revenge *shudder*. It's certainly more obvious than it would have been back in the Atari or NES days, and that IS tied to the increase over time in graphical quality, but in my opinion, it's not a case of direct causation. Everything in video games has become more realistic and visually intense over the years. Also, as video games have become more and more mainstream, there have been more and more people scrutinizing them. And what constitutes "violence" as far as your dissertation goes? Is it graphic violence? Realistic violence? Violence that could be copied by people outside of video games? Because if you mean violence in general, then it's been a major part of the video game industry long before Halo, Call of duty, or Grand Theft Auto.

I did not really find the survey biased, though it's hardly a polished example of expert polling, it's a typical amateur's try at it

I happen to think that video games overall are becoming less violent. Early video games mostly were full of violence, after Pong at least. There was Asteroids which was all about destroying things. There was Space Invaders which mostly had to do with killing aliens that were set on killing you. There was Centipede which was about shooting bugs and mushrooms. All violence all the time. Also Nethack which was mostly about killing monsters and then eating them.

The Infocom games were early text based games and while they were only moderately violent, they did contain some offhanded violent actions.

Nowadays it's very easy to find games with minimal or no violence. Farmville is a good example. Peggle is a great game, no violence at all. Like Tetris or Pong, they're completely nonviolent games. There's more of these every day it seems! Great stuff.

A game like City of Heroes has a lot of violence, but even CoH is tending toward less violence as it goes on, at least making the attempt to add things to do other than fight. Games like Eve Online grow from a niche to a big deal; they are not very violent though they do have big battles, but you can play them completely nonviolently through resource gathering and commodities trading if you prefer.

A lot of games are just as violent as they used to be, and of course with better graphics you can have more cinematic or realistic violence if you choose, but that isn't quantity of violence, it's quality of violence! Completely different thing, right?

Spoiler space since everyone else is doing it!









Enough people have explained well enough why this isn't a useful survey that I won't go into it. Questions that are obviously skewed make all the data the survey gathers suspect.

Ignoring that, my main complaints were with questions #2 and #10. I wasn't sure what #2 meant and only figured it out once I read the spoilers. While taking the survey I was wondering if the implication was that sneaky art departments add in blood when no one's looking. That said, I didn't think games have gotten more violent, so answering a question assuming I said yes was awkward anyway.

Question #10 bothered me. I'm not sure where the assumption that you can empathize with a character OR realize that the game and the real world don't overlap comes from, but it's not accurate. In my CoH roleplaying experience, I know that maintaining an IC/OOC barrier and occasionally pausing to talk to other players directly doesn't keep me from empathizing with those players' characters. I can empathize with characters in single-player roleplaying games even while considering the effectiveness of the game's conversation modeling. Empathizing with literary or film characters doesn't require me to forget that I'm reading a book or watching a movie. It is possible to enjoy good characterization without forgetting that the characters are fictional.

I think the question was meant to ask if you empathize with characters or are detached while playing a game, but it's hard to tell.

Overall, I agree with others who have said that, if possible, this survey needs to be rewritten and tried again. As it is, I'd be hesistant to accept any conclusions it helps draw.

I'll be closing this survey in roughly 10-12 hours. Thank you again to all that took the time to answer it.

The survey is now closed, thank you all for your participation and the overwhelming feedback.