Everyone is doing it, though, (Jeromai has links) and as we all know, if one of us jumps off a bridge, we all have to, so this morning I found myself once again clicking on choices to help build a database for Nick Yee.
Nick and I go back a long way. I think I was still on my first or second round of EverQuest when I happened on a survey he was doing about relationships among MMORPG players, probably as part of his Daedalus Project. Because Mrs Bhagpuss and I both played EQ I thought I'd do my civic duty and fill out the form.
As I recall, he was gathering the data for some aspect of his academic career as well as out of a personal interest in the genre. He got his PhD but that in itself eventually led to the project going on indefinite hiatus: "Getting my PhD also meant being more disciplined about what I say and put out, and this had the effect over the years of putting more and more time into each issue of the Daedalus Project. As a personal project, the time it takes to run Daedalus began slowly to directly compete with time I could spend writing an academic paper among other things."
One of those "other things" turned out to be Quantic Foundry, which he co-founded with Nicolas Ducheneaut, another academic with an interest in massively multiple online gaming. I did the Gamer Motivation Survey back when it was first offered and I've done it several times since then, as and when it rears its head in the blogging community.
I thought I was done with it. It never really tells me anything I don't know. The questions are very generic and the result always seems to be a predictable synthesis of the input. But, y'know, everyone else is doing it...
So I ran through the survey this morning. It takes, as promised, less than five minutes. A lot less.
The very first question raised some issues.
How recent is "recent"? I hesitated before filling this in, thinking I haven't really played that many games released "in the past few years". In the end I decided to go for what I'm playing the most at the moment.
Apparently 2004 and 2012 count as "recent". The database recognizes and accepts both Guild Wars 2 and EverQuest II but although the much better-known and newer Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp comes up, it's "not in our catalog yet" and I have to click to add it.
Am I seriously supposed to believe I'm the first person who's taken the survey who mentioned AC:PC? Shouldn't I get some kind of server first for that?
Moving on to the main event, I whipped through the survey in a matter of seconds. I tried to be completely honest and answer as I felt, not how I thought I should feel. The result was that for the majority of questions my answer was either "Not At All" or "Slightly".
There were a smattering of "Somewhats" and two "Verys". The terminology varies slightly from section to section but you are always ranking your responses from one to five in ascending order of engagement. I never responded "Extremely" to anything.
The resulting pictograph for "Primary Motivations" makes it look as though I don't play video games at all. Paeroka, under a title similar to the one at the top of this post, wondered at that with her results. Mine are even more extreme.
My "Secondary Motivations" look a little more engaged but still well down in the "meh" zone.
The rubric, however, tells a very different story: "Calm, Spontaneous, Relaxed, Independent, Grounded, and Practical". Other than the misplaced comma after "Grounded" I wouldn't challenge any of that. It seems to be a pretty accurate reflection of my current state of mind where gaming is concerned.
But it does seem paradoxical, doesn't it? That such very low engagement with almost every aspect of the hobby should come with such a positive description? I'd have said it suggested an almost complete disinterest in the entire concept of gaming rather than a laid-back, zen-like cool. I'll take it, of course I will, but it does remind me of the kind of fortune teller who only tells you the kind of fortune you want to hear.
I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on the results, which are picked over at some length by the QF website, save to say that having read the detail I find much of the interpretation unconvincing or just plain wrong.
To give one example, I scored incredibly lowly on "Action", which is defined thus: "Gamers with high Action scores are aggressive and like to jump in the fray and be surrounded by dramatic visuals and effects. Gamers with low Action scores prefer slower-paced games with calmer settings."
Um, no. That's just nonsense. I love to play aggressively. I like to play AE classes that hurl themselves into the middle of armies of mobs or players and unleash fiery death all around them. I turn all my visual effects up to maximum in every game, even to the detriment of gameplay, so I can have the feeling of falling through the roof into an exploding firework warehouse. In PvP I chase other players to try and kill them even when it's one hundred per cent certain I am going to be killed myself for doing it.
So how could I possibly get such a low score for Action? Because the question I was asked was this:
"Constant action and excitement". Who wants that? It would be unbearable! It's like asking "Would you like to live on a diet of nothing but donuts forever?" and then interpreting a flat "No, I bloody would not!" as meaning "Well, you obviously don't like donuts then, do you?".
Most of the questions are like that. I was a little snippy with UltrViolet for deconstructing the semantics of the survey but I hadn't taken it for a couple of years and I forgot how sledgehammer unsubtle it can be. Compared with, for example, the recent pop culture personality profile test I took, the QF one seems positively primitive.
Unsurprisingly, given the level of detail in the survey, the games it goes on to suggest I might like to play are comically unsuited to my tastes and interests. Despite having quoted two MMORPGs and a quasi-MMO as the games I'm currently playing, almost nothing like that comes up in the list of things I could buy from Amazon (that being the only place you can buy games according to QF. I expect there's a good reason for that...).
Anyway, I'm not going to pick at the results any further. Suffice to say I find them both unconvincing and unhelpful, even if the banner headline ""Calm, Spontaneous, Relaxed, Independent, Grounded, and Practical" is very flattering.
No doubt we'll all be back here in a couple more years, doing this all over again. After all, we're most of us not going anywhere and neither, it seems, is Nick Yee.
Can't wait.
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