Ultimately, each user decides which form of advancement they will pursue, and the richness and complexity of the environment eliminates the need for super-ordinate goals or storylines. Every user is motivated by a different combination of the possible rewards. The result is that adventures, stories, and most importantly, meaningful interactions and relationships between users emerge. Functional constructs within the environment facilitate these social networks – combat groups (temporary collaboration between a few users), guilds (persistent user-created membership organizations), and ideological alliances (agreements between guilds or “racial” groups).
The survey study consisted of a series of online surveys that were publicized in web portals that catered to MMORPG users from the years 2000 to 2003. The approximate number of active subscribers to each existing MMORPG was publicly available, and it was usually clear which MMORPGs comprised the bulk of all MMORPG players. Therefore, users of the four most popular environments were targeted for the study – EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Ultima Online, and Star Wars Galaxies. A survey with new content was usually publicized every two to three months. Each survey took about 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and typically 2000 to 4000 respondents would complete each survey. In each survey, respondents were asked to provide their email if they were interested in participating in future surveys.
At the beginning of each survey phase, in addition to the recruitment at websites, respondents already inthe database were contacted via email to notify them of the new survey in which they could participate. Over the course of four years, 30,000 unique users participated in the survey study.
Lack of motivation and integrity in web-based surveys are two potential concerns, but studies have shown that web-based respondents are typically highly-motivated due to self-selection and anonymity does not have an adverse affect on data integrity [for review, see 29]. Sampling bias is also a concern. In particular, a skewed representation of dedicated and heavy users is possible. Because of market competition, demographic information about users of these environments is not publicly available; however, informal communication with representatives of some of these companies has corroborated the basic demographic representativeness (average age and average hours per week) of the sample. Also, the
sampling bias in using a large, non-random sample of MMORPG users to generalize to other MMORPG users is probably not any riskier than the standard practice in experimental psychology of using small, non-random samples of mostly Caucasian students between the ages of 18 – 22 who are enrolled in introductory psychology courses to generalize to all of humanity.
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