John Dallman
Hero
It seems remarkably obsessed with the idea of starting a business.
Gamesurvey.org – academic research on hobby gaming community
bayonetbrant
Explorer
Yep, per the original announcement - there is a bunch in there on entrepreneurship
one of Dr Mercer's key areas of interest is entrepreneurship, so he's interested in how gamers rate on those scales, especially since so many game companies are started by gamers who say "hey, I've got a great idea!"
aramis erak
Legend
That worked.
I'll note that the genre list is pretty weak.
TheHand
Adventurer
Agreed, even with that being part of the mission statement I felt like there were more questions aimed at “do you want to run a business??!” than the hobby itself.
John Dallman
Hero
It reads more like a sales tool for business start-up services. Given that, and the way the positive end negative ends of the scale confusingly flip around, I felt my answers would be of no value and abandoned the survey.
bayonetbrant
Explorer
What you would like to have seen different? (probably too late to change now with ~1400 or so responses, but could help us for the future)
bayonetbrant
Explorer
Unfortunately, there are some academic "scales" that try to capture various dimensions of specific concepts (in this case, entrepreneurship) that can get really long. The scales we use for the motivational questions are quite a bit shorter and are the same ones we used back in '06.
It would be nice to have a shorter version of that tool for the entrepreneur part, but that might have cost Dr Mercer some of the statistical validity he would need for the academic side of things.
bayonetbrant
Explorer
I can promise that absolutely NO ONE associated with this survey is trying to sell you on a start-up! I was a pretty crappy business guy when I was trying to run my own publishing company, and I can't imagine I would serve as anything more than a series of cautionary tales of what not to do in a case like that.
The scales flip by design b/c it's intended to make sure you're paying attention and not just on auto-pilot. I'm not a fan of it doing that way, but that's how that set of tools are designed.
aramis erak
Legend
Without looking at the list again, I can't be more specific, but the list is EXTREMELY board and computer focused... for example, RPGs have almost no 4X games, but do have romances, and 2X and 3X games (which 2 of the 4 X's vary; D&D tends to be explore and exterminate.)
John Dallman
Hero
In which case, the wording of the survey and its alpha-testing have been done carelessly, without questioning the author's assumptions.
I'm partially sighted. I was doing the survey on a landscape-format laptop screen, with the font sizes turned up far enough that I have about six question rows on the screen at a time. With the screen like that, it's much, much easier to keep track of which end of a scale is positive mentally than keep scrolling back up to check.
The "intended to make sure you're paying attention" excuse does not really make sense. If you don't notice the scale inversion, a lot of your answers will be incorrect, but is there a statistical check that's powerful enough to tell the different between that and someone with odd preferences? I really doubt it.
The survey fails to consider accessibility issues, is carelessly worded, and has bogus reasons for a software limitation. I've seen badly done social science several times, and this is another example.
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