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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 8871759" data-attributes="member: 177">Surveying on a large scale is a tool for getting at the zeitgeist.  While you can use that to write peer-reviewed papers, you can also use that to inform design decisions.Except, by definition, personal experience isn't the zeitgeist.  Personal experience is anecdote, local effects, while the zeitgeist covers an entire culture (with a nod to what "culture" we are talking about).You can handle the zeitgeist of your three gaming stores, perhaps, but that really doesn't scale.  Your stores don't speak to the tendencies of the larger audience, are not reliably representative of gaming as a whole.By my own statements, my own personal experience has little to do with zeitgeists.We could, however, talk about the current designer's zeitgeist - looking at the design of games put out recently. That's something that's more accessible, what with it being published and advertised at us.  However, that kind of gives one vote per game, no matter how small that game's player following, so we have to be careful how we think about it.</blockquote>