My video game research survey

[HBY]

Hello fellow beastfeeders,
I am a Dutch student currently working on his master's thesis, and for this I am conducting some research on gaming. For data collection I have set up an online survey and I would like to ask you all to fill it out. It would take about 15 minutes of your time and as a thank you I will be giving away some games when it's done. There's a list of titles on the website itself.
Of course I will post my results here if people care. My thesis will be publicly available on my university's website, but it will be in Dutch, except for the abstract.

The survey is located at: Videogameresearch.nl

Some info on data usage and privacy:
Only me and the professor supervising my thesis have access to the data itself. The data will just be used to run statistical tests, which should then lead to some sensible conclusions.
The survey doesn't ask to fill out your name or address etc. The survey does store your IP so I can check if people have been filling it out several times, but it won't be exported to my statistics software.
If you would like to have a chance of winning a game you will be asked to enter your e-mail address. This is stored in a second database that doesn't record IPs or date and time of entry, so it cannot be linked to survey answers.

Thanks!

 

[ApSciLiara]

Aaannnnd done. Always happy to help somebody in need ^-^

 

[HBY]

Thank you very much Liara

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Sure, why not? Submitted.

I got the impression that this survey was aimed at someone at least a decade younger than me, since the only real gaming consoles that existed when I was a kid were Atari.

 

[HBY]

Thank you! And actually it's not really aimed at any age group in particular. I just tried to include all the main ways of playing games, regardless of the time period. But yeah, things have changed a lot the past few decades. I still remember playing Wolfenstein 3D with a friend. I played using the keyboard, he buttonbashed the left mousebutton as quickly as he could, and we actually believed we could make our gun fire more quickly that way . And that's not even that long ago.

 

[Skirty_007]

I notice there are a lot of questions about "what did you do with your parents" but not "what do/did you do with your kids", so I guess that's where Shneekey is coming from (also the questions about school age sort of assume games were available in schools at the time one was there).

 

[HBY]

Thank you for your comments, I think I understand both your points. I did include some questions on the availability of games and when doing the statistics I will also take into account the time period. In this case the availability doesn't really matter: if people answer that they never used games at school it's just the fact that they didn't use them that matters, not the reason. If people answer that they did use games at school I correlate this data to they're current gaming behaviour to try to prove/rule out school as a primary socialising factor (probably rule out, I don't think it has that much influence).
There's also a reason for not including questions about gaming with your kids. I'm trying to map out the parents' and friends' influence on gaming behaviour during the early years, and any long-term effects. It's true that kids can be a socialising factor at a later age, it's called reverse socialisation: kids "teaching" their parents something instead of the other way around. I decided not to include questions on that because it was a too far from the subject of primary socialisation. I might do this in future research, who knows.

 

[MilConDoin]

I almost made a derp in the beginning. Who hasn't played games as a kid? But then I remembered, that the survey was only about video games, so "games" was just the short version of "video games". And suddenly everything made sense and I could remedy my error
I hope, that I got the question about my first video game correct. When I played with my big brother on his C64. And when I pestered a friend of him. On his visit he needed to play the next round of "Weltenbrand" (I think) with me, before I would let them do whatever in peace

 

[Skirty_007]

I remember my parents taking us to the local shop at weekends to pick a £1.99 game on cassette. And my attempts at coding (for the Spectrum). I used to make loading screens and quizzes. And those magazines that used to publish part of a game (in machine code...) every week, and typing in all those numbers only for it not to work, then finding out next week what the print errors were. And local radio broadcasting games, but our radio reception wasn't great so they never worked when we recorded them and tried to load them.

I think I might have given away my age.

 

[OmegaPython]

Just finished. Hope your thesis goes well

 

[HBY]

Thank you!
I have some of those code magazines as well, printed well before I was even born. I fooled around a bit with QuickBasic when I was young, tried to "remake" the magazine games (also in a basic-like language). Unfortunately there were too many differences between the more advanced graphics codes, which I didn't understand fully because I hadn't used them ever. I actually reused my basic skills for creating one of the early drafts of this survey. I wanted to create a very long list of game titles and doing that using the webinterface would have taken days. I don't know any modern script lanuage, so I exported the survey, "cut out" a short version of the question, used a simple basic programme to insert different game titles and variable names and put it all into the same file, then imported it again. Fortunately for you I binned that particular question

I almost made a derp in the beginning. Who hasn't played games as a kid? But then I remembered, that the survey was only about video games, so "games" was just the short version of "video games". And suddenly everything made sense and I could remedy my error

Maybe that's a derp on my part. I should have emphasised that it's about VIDEO games in the survey itself too, not just in the information on the website. I have been working on this for quite a long time, and it gets hard to remember that others get to see it for the first time. A few people have tested the survey before it went online, but those people all knew what subject I was working on.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I remember my parents taking us to the local shop at weekends to pick a £1.99 game on cassette. And my attempts at coding (for the Spectrum). I used to make loading screens and quizzes. And those magazines that used to publish part of a game (in machine code...) every week, and typing in all those numbers only for it not to work, then finding out next week what the print errors were. And local radio broadcasting games, but our radio reception wasn't great so they never worked when we recorded them and tried to load them.

I think I might have given away my age.

That's okay, I remember doing punch cards on the university mainframe in FORTRAN...

 

[Lambert2191]

Done, good luck.

 

[VikeStep]

completed, remember that just by posting here that your results are now biased since most of the answers will be related to minecraft. anyways good luck with the end thesis

 

[HBY]

Thank you all! And I'm not sure if answers related to minecraft will bias my results. I don't know if playing minecraft is that different from playing other games. Also: if you only play minecraft it should appear in your answers.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with the professor that's supervising my thesis. We're going to discuss the results so far and probably set an end date for the survey. So if all goes well I should be able to tell you tomorrow when the games "lottery" is going to start. I will also give some info on the process I'm going to use to select the winners, I think that should be as transparent as possible.

 

[Booker The Geek]

Done....

Although I would think Many people would love to be able to exchange one of the titles you have for winning for a minecraft account instead.

 

[HBY]

I would exchange a few of these titles for a minecraft myself (if I wouldn't have had one already for many many years). But hey, these titles are popular nowadays