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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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5:11pm on Thursday, 21st July, 2011:

Unasked Questions

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At some conferences, I sit in the audience through all the presentations and never ask a question, yet at others, I ask more questions than anyone else. This conference is one of the latter.

Here are some of the questions I didn't ask, on the basis of not wanting to appear to be as rude/facetious as I really am (in no particular order):

On what basis are you calling your software a game?
Did it occur to you that there's a reason MMOs have been treated differently to other online games in past research?
Why didn't you think it might be a good idea to have a game designer to look at your game design?
Could it be that divorced parents who play online games with their their children got divorced because of online games in the first place?
Have you noticed that some countries are far more concerned about addiction than other countries?
Wouldn't it be easier just to ask designers why they did that?
You didn't notice that players can carrying on multiple text-based conversations at once, then?
So if your research is correct and computer games are addictive and legislation should be introduced to stop this, won't that put you out of a job?
And you believe what your survey respondents told you because why?
Do you see any correlation between players' attitude to cheaters and what our attitude would be if we found out that you'd made it all up?
You will get a PhD for this, but do you believe you should?

Hmm, actually I could probably ask those questions at pretty well every academic conference I go to in this area...

My own talk went better than I expected. Fortunately for me, the conference organiser (Thorsten Quandt), who has some very high-quality data about online gamers in Germany, spoke after I did. If he'd spoken before me, I would have appeared rather lightweight in comparison. I had a narrow escape there, I think...

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