Between 2006 – 2012, much of our gaming research focused on World of Warcraft. During that time, one side project we worked on involved an analysis of over 22,000 guild names in World of Warcraft. We found that a basic grammar was able to parse about 90% of the names. This allowed us to create [...]
In the Gamer Motivation Profile, we asked gamers to list their favorite genres and games in open-ended text fields (up to 3 of each). With data from over 100,000 gamers, we are able to identify the most frequently mentioned games for each gaming motivation. Our Approach It is difficult to do fuzzy string matching on [...]
The super short version: We validated and refined our motivations model based on data from 30,000 gamers around the world. If you’re a gamer and haven’t taken the Gamer Motivation Profile yet, consider doing so before reading about the model. We developed the Gamer Motivation Profile such that data collected over time could be used to [...]
When we launched the Gamer Motivation Profile about a month ago, we really weren’t sure how gamers would react to it. Running a factor analysis on survey data is one thing, but figuring out how to present a self-scoring profile back to gamers is an entirely different thing. Were we presenting way too much detail [...]
We asked gamers to tell us how much they agreed or disagreed with polarizing statements about games and gamers. These statements touched on a broad range of issues, such as microtransactions, gender inclusiveness, and whether games are becoming too dumbed down. We received responses from 1,127 gamers. We’ll slice through this data in several ways, [...]
Using factor analysis to cluster motivations is a fairly standard method in psychology, but figuring out how to best show the individual results back to people is relatively understudied. This is because, as most readers know, research psychologists tend to publish aggregate findings in academic journals rather than create customized reports for each of their [...]
The super short version: We generated an initial inventory based on a literature review of existing models, tested it with 1,127 gamers, validated it with another 600 gamers, and used factor analysis to identify 5 groups of motivations. If you're a gamer and haven't taken the Gamer Motivation Profile yet, consider doing so before reading [...]
We used a crowd-sourced design website to create our company logo. For a very reasonable price, we set up a project brief and then dozens of free-lance designers on the site submitted designs over a one week period. A week after the project deadline, we had to choose the winning design. We received a lot [...]