Data: Daedalus + Presence Paper

A new daedalus issue is out. Several articles in this issue focus on role-playing:

• 20% of players role-play at least once a week. 28% of players indicated that at least one of their characters belong in a role-playing oriented guild. 24% of players have role-played a scene or event with a group of at least 10 players.
• Role-players talk about which character creations they feel are over-used and what counts as original.
• What are the protocols of role-playing? What makes a role-player a good role-player?

Also just out in press is a journal article on MMORPG demographics in the journal Presence (manuscript PDF here). Many of the basic player numbers - average age, gender ratio, average hours per week - are in this paper, as well as a factor analytic model of player motivations. Also some numbers on relationship formation and potential leadership skill acquisition.

The turn-around time for journal articles pains me, especially in this era of blogs. This paper was actually written in 2004 and accepted in mid-2005. Nevertheless, this resolves the problem of people in academia feeling hesistant to cite a website when talking about who plays MMOs.

</em Jedi mind trick> - cite this article in your paper:

Yee, N. (2006). The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments. PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15, 309-329.

Comments

[Arnold Hendrick]

The most interesting part of this analysis is on the final page of the demographics: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001525.php?page=4

I was struck by the fact that in the 18+ age category about 60%tried role-playing, but only about 20% actually stuck with it and identified themselves as regular RPers.

This gives credence to idea of having RP servers, such as DAoC, WoW and EQ2 have. Of all the RP server approaches I've seen, DAoC's always struck me as the best, because of their character naming system and their fairly cost-effective (and fair) way of enforcing it.

[illovich]

from the character creations article: On WoW, everyone is an orphan. Well, that's true most places where you roleplay because it's easier than having any kind of relationship with ... parents. *gasp* [WoW, F, 21]

To me, this is one of the more puzzling standards of RPG/MMORPG authorship, the complete lack of parents (which is usually simply not explained or introduced as a topic inside the magic circle).

In WoW (to use the state of the art) it's actually a bit more forgivable as everything is more stripped down and basic. In Everquest 1 I found it to be a bit troubling that although my character came from this basically supportive druid grove/community, no one ever mentioned my folks.

My question is why don't developers ever throw some sort of family into it? I've thought before that it would be pretty trivial to make an instanced tutorial zone that was the character's village (town, city, dystopic planetary outpost, etc.) that contained a randomly generated family for the player to be tutored by, and that they could return to from time to time for questing, maybe their family house could also serve as a bank access point, etc.)

Discussions of mechanics aside, why avoid the virtual family? After all, in real life you don't pick your parents so why would a player mind being assigned virtual instanced parents (note: I am not discussing other ideas I've seen which have newbie players actually being "born" to other characters. Although interesting, that idea has numerous problems that are immediately obvious especially in large-scale VWs.).