Frustration with video game research and a path forward.

[6bangerBOOM]

Just a few more surveys and I'll be through! Don't hesitate! This is a super painless survey and you'll be helping a good cause (kinda).

[KeepItShut]

I breezed through and took it for you, hope it provides some help. Good luck with your paper.

[mikeyg36]

I'd also love to read it when you're done. You should try posting on neogaf and giant bomb.

[6bangerBOOM]

I'll post the literature review up when I'm done. Should be tomorrow. I won't be done with findings/discussion (where I interpret y'all's responses) until next week.

[45thCamaro]

Just submitted

[Camaro_Corvette]

Bah, I didn't see this.

[6bangerBOOM]

Y'all asked to see the paper: Here is the literature review. This is basically all the theory work in the paper that comes before the sections where I analyze y'all's responses. BTW, camaro5 accounted for over half of my data, and y'all provided some rich well thought out answers. Couldn't be happier you guys and gals right now. Now let me get back to this damn paper so I can be doen with it and focus on my upcoming 3.91 differential swap!

Video game lit review.pdf

Some of this discussion is grounded in post-marxist thought (not communism) and may not make too much sense if you haven't read any post-marxist scholars. I'm particularly proud of the segment about violence though. Feel free to comment/critique on this thread!

[camaro-dreamer]

Certainly, this is an interesting concept. However, I do want to propose a thought question based upon the last section of your literature review. How might your thesis, in general, play out if self-imposed nomenclature such as a "social gamer", "casual gamer", or "hardcore gamer" did not exist? In other words, I think gamers are pigeonholed by their own notions of what they are rather than what they actually are based upon socially acceptable norms in their own society. In essence, would a gamer from a violent community become more violent than a gamer from a non-violent community after playing the same violent game for the same period of time?

Do you perceive any potential bias by asking your set of questions on a forum where the average age of the training set will probably be in their 20s? I would guess that the vast majority of people of this age have already decided upon their moral compass.

Of course, this is all conjecture on my part. However, I will say that it is interesting reading the thought process of someone engaged in social sciences after having spent so long writing my own engineering PhD dissertation.

I think you may want to pay an English major a few bucks to help you out with your grammar mistakes.

[6bangerBOOM]

Originally Posted by camaro-dreamer

I think you may want to pay an English major a few bucks to help you out with your grammar mistakes.

Lol, it's a pretty "rough" draft isn't it? No worries, I still have a week of clean up time before I submit. Just wanted to get it out to the communities that have helped me so much to produce it!

Bias will always be present in both the data providers and the analyzer. All knowledge creates bias (wisdom is something different than knowledge), so when I ask a sample what they know about being a gamer biases will always be present.

You brought up an interesting point about choice. Fairly consistent in the data was the theme of composing ones identity versus having said identity imposed by others. In that I mean some people claim they choose to accept a gaming identity because they do not care what others think, and others decide to keep it from public view because they do not want to be "labelled" as a gamer by their peer groups (and thus suffer the judgements associated with the negative connotations of gaming).

And yes, when we try to ascribe labels to ourselves we are just as right as we are wrong. To a degree we do fit our compose labels, yet we are always more than just them. A violent community will likely produce violent subjects regardless of pastimes. Violence is both a socially learned and natural behavior.