PhD Survey - Participants requested for Study about Griefing in MMORPGs

Thesis Title:
Causes, Magnitude and Implications of Griefing in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

Hello,

My name is Leigh Achterbosch and I am a candidate for PhD at the University of Ballarat, Australia. I am inviting you to participate in a study about the act of griefing and its implications in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). This is one of many invitations posted on various MMORPG and online game forums.

This research will explore the following questions; what are the causes and implications of griefing in MMORPGs, and what magnitude of griefing exists in this genre? The intention is to contribute new research and knowledge about griefing and its sociological impact.

The study will involve an online survey for participants of the ages 16 and above. This survey will cover your experiences as someone that has performed griefing, been subjected to griefing, or as a witness to the acts of griefing.

You are invited to participate by following the link <removed> and completing the questionnaire that will take approximately 20 minutes of your time (You can save and reload unfinished surveys should you require). You will remain anonymous by completing this survey. The online survey will remain open until an appropriate sample size is collected. I will repost here when the survey has closed. At some point in the future when data has been collated and analyzed I will repost with some preliminary results in this forum thread.

I would like to thank you up front for any time you allocate towards this research endeavor. Feel free to spread this survey link around!

EDIT: This survey is closed, thank you.

Is this legit or just a fancy attempt at spamming?

It bring at a real survey page, if that's what you are asking. The URL is also legit.

Didn't bother checking if the supervisor for the survey was really working for the University of Ballarat though.

Originally Posted by Maylander
Is this legit or just a fancy attempt at spamming?

Its legit. The host is a edu.au domain and the supervisor is staff for the University of Ballarat, http://guerin.ballarat.edu.au/ard/it…/cmiller.shtml

Don't worry I am not a bot, or scammer. Although scamming in mentioned in the survey as a part of grief play!

Allrighty then, I'll take the time to reply.

Thanks you, appreciate it.

Anything for science!
*did the survey*
I hope the survey goes well, and gives you good results.

Good survey! I think it might have been better to divide the first question in part 3 up into "never, rarely, occasionally, often, always". "Never" and "always" mean I can't think of ANY exceptions!

I remember "spamming" in a game called Orb Wars. This was WAAAAYYY back in the late 80's, long before "spam" meant anything other than canned meat. They set the game up so you could issue commands with macros. I set one up to keep sending tells with looong messages in them. Being as how we were down at 1200 baud at the time, that turned out to be a debilitating attack! I only used it once and I asked my opponent before the match if I could try it out. After we found out how well it worked, we both went to the developer with it and they quickly cut the max size of a macro way down. Since I got permission I wouldn't count it as griefing but still, it means I was spamming back before most spammers got out of diapers!

Done. Nice survey.

Excuse my ignorance (I don't play MMO's - well, I played 1 ….) - what is 'griefing'?

Kind of harassment. Generally trying to disrupt and destroy people's fun. Out of purpose, out of boredom, sometimes.

Wikipedia has (of course) an article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefing

pibbur who is not playing WOW and won't comment on MMO(rrowind)…

Done.I hope you will post back findings here

Thank you. Once I have analyzed it, I shall post findings. May take some time though, lots of data and comments.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
Kind of harassment. Generally trying to disrupt and destroy people's fun. Out of purpose, out of boredom, sometimes.

Ah - Ok, I suspected as much, but wasn't sure it had been spelled correctly ;-) I can see why MMO's would suffer such…grief.

The server hosting the survey had a hardware failure over the weekend and is now fixed. The survey is ready to go again!

This survey will still remain open for a while - thank you all, this website has a good 'hit' response to my survey.

Done - for science

Edit:

While I experienced some Griefing over my many, many years of gaming, since maybe the last two years I only play World of Warcraft from time to time and only on Servers with PvE-Mechanics, where Griefing is reduced to a minimum because of the limited possibilities to do so. The Game gets more and more boring year after year though - but in my limited Sparetime I just don't want to expose myself to griefing anymore.

I've both been the victim of griefing, and in deathmatch games been a griefer myself from time to time.

I've never griefed an MMO before, i think people that do that are just sociopaths. FPS deathmatches are different for some reason - i dont know. It's the all-out chaos of the thing, there's death everywhere, it's complete anarchy and nihilism anyway, and it just feels pretty good sometimes to sit perched on top of something and rain grenades or snipe into a hard-pressed battle below….

I must confess I did a bit of griefing in EQ1. I loved training the specters through the beach in oasis in EQ1 didn't do it much, about 3 or 4 times ever, but boy did I have fun!