Results from a survey from a long long time ago

[Zenier]

Hello!

Firstly, my sincerest apologies taking this long to post the results. Secondly, thank you for taking your time to answer the survey! Thirdly, re-introduction. I originally posted about the survey way back in Spring 2017 and asked you to fill up a survey for my master’s thesis. Topic of the thesis, and thus the survey, was to examine the relationship between participants' demographical/external (to the game) attributes, motivations to play and the types of capital (tangible and intangible in-game resources). Types of capital are social, cultural, economical and symbolic. Master's thesis focused on the two latter areas. Survey utilized Nick Yee's 39-item version of "Motivations for Play in Online Games" (3 categories divided into 10 subcategories), an adapted version of Dimitri Williams' 20-item social capital scale (bridging and bonding social capital, originally represented by Robert Putnam in 2000), I came up with rest of the items. Capital theory is based on Pierre Bourdieu's "forms of capital" from over three decades back.

Let’s get to business. There were a whopping 1000 responses out of which ~900 were completed in a manner suitable for analysis. That is really, really awesome amount of responses, so thank you again! The results show that player orientation is associated with avatar's available capital. Cultural capital was predicted by player's gaming orientation related to immersion, game mechanics and socializing with other players. Economic capital was predicted by player orientation related to achievement, relationships with other players and teamwork. Social capital was predicted by player orientation related to social and escapism. Symbolic capital was predicted by player orientation related to achievement, relationship and teamwork.

Let's go deeper. Cultural capital measured your, the responder’s, knowledge of FFXIV from various angles and items followed Bourdieu's classification of cultural capital, alongside with some items drawing inspiration from Mia Consalvo's term of "gaming capital". It was found that cultural capital (your knowledge and understanding) correlated with the following subcategories from Nick Yee's scale: achievement-mechanics, immersion-customization, immersion-role-playing, social-relationship, and social-socializing. Meaning that if you are motivated to learn about the game (in some form, exploration, theory-crafting even) you are indeed accumulating cultural capital that you then utilize to advance your own goals and/or share with your social networks related to the game (free company, linkshells, discord channels etc.).

This post is broken into multiple posts due to post length limitations, sorry for that!

[Zenier]

Next up, economic capital that measured how much in-game wealth and possessions you had at the time of taking the survey and in what form using gil as an anchor point (forcing some items to be "valued" through or be related to gil). Economic capital correlated with achievement-advancement, achievement-competition, achievement-mechanics, social-relationship, and social-teamwork subcategories. This then again means that those of you who focus on advancing in the game (gaining levels, raiding, hoarding gil, etc.) have in general more gil at a disposal than those who mainly focus on something else, logical isn't it. The correlation with social subcategories indicates that you share or use your free company, in-game friends and statics to "get access" to amassing gil in one form or another (rare items, selling runs etc.).

Thirdly, social capital. It was measured using pre-established and validated scale by Williams (from 2006) called "online social capital" scale. This scale has 20 items, 10 for bridging (also dubbed external social capital: your communication and interaction with others are at more superficial level - you are more acquaintances than friends) and 10 for bonding (internal social capital: you have some close friends in-game that you share your time, woes, joys etc. with) social capital. Unsurprisingly your social capital correlated with all social subcategories (socializing, relationship, teamwork). Three categories from immersion, escapism, customization and role-playing also were found to correlate with social capital. The correlation with the social parts is somewhat self-explanatory as those who play mainly for social reasons have higher amounts of in-game friends and larger networks. However, the correlation with immersion subcategories indicate that these social ties are used to as a way of escapism, and of course role-playing (those very few of you who do so). Immersion-customization was also found to correlate with social capital meaning that the true end game, glamour, is seen, and utilized, as more social aspect of the game (which makes sense, doesn't it).

[Zenier]

Lastly, symbolic capital. This type of capital measured the legitimization of other types of capital, such as recognition in-game in some form (sexy glamour, savage or ultimate titles, gears, minions, mounts, housing etc. anything visual seen by other players) meaning that your feats in-game are "actualized" when other players understand the value of the feats. Symbolic capital was indeed found to correlate with achievement subcategories: advancement, competition, and mechanics; with social-relationship and -teamwork on the list too. This means then again that players focusing on advancing one's avatar in one form or another do amass symbolic capital (it is unclear though from the results that is the recognition main motivation to play, though) as the feats are often visualizable (is that even a word?) in-game somehow. One's status in statics and other closed tight networks gives symbolic capital as you are recognized in some way: the best damn BLM ever that stands in red stuff? Or the one who uses Fantasia every weekend after getting drunk? Or one who fills personal house with nothing but chocobo-theme decorating? Who knows, as data doesn't show that, but I hope you get the idea.

Oh, this has been quite lengthy post already, but I do hope this satisfied a bit of your forgotten curiosity. I will give links to my master's thesis, alongside one publication that came from the thesis (condensed version of it basically) if you want to read more into this stuff. There are a lot of other variables not mentioned here, such as random tidbits (gender-bending? gender-ratio? age? average time you guys spend in Eorzea per week? and many more) as they would inflate the post more but will happily give these out if you ask. These are also found in the links (shameless self-plug but they do contain much more data analysis and explanation), though.

There are many items that are not that high quality, and some items are straight-up removed for being too context-limited (both culturally and geographically). Iterating is taking a while, but I want to make the survey such a good quality that others could use it in the future!

[Zenier]

Final note, thank you all again! I got more responses than I ever thought, and I guess in part thanks to that I am now chasing PhD where topic is direct continuation to my master's thesis (quantifying digital lives using "forms of capital" theory as a base)! I started in January 2018 and have been stuck on that ever since summer 2017 (applications, fine tuning the publication and working on other publications), and is one reason this has taken so long to be posted. Sincerest apologies, again! I may or may not spam you guys again in not-so-distant future with a more refined survey that has greatly reduced item count, as the one you guys got had over 170 items in total and on average you spent whoppin' 20+ minutes in filling it! My PhD now focuses on iterating the survey to be more compatible with other MMORPGs and trying to publish papers (damn you, reviewers #2 and #3), so my surveys are not used "for random academic publications" but, uh, to make it possible for me to complete the last stretch as a (doctoral) student. :P

Thank you again, and I will answer any questions that might arise. I am looking forward to them.

Links and references for those curious types, some are unfortunately behind pay-walls, sorry:
Master's Thesis: http://tampub.uta.fi/handle/10024/101482
Publication: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/50126
Bourdieu's forms of capital: https://www.marxists.org/reference/s...ms-capital.htm
Nick Yee's scale: Yee, N. (2006). Motivations for Play in Online Games. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 9, 772-775.
http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee%20-%...s%20(2006).pdf
http://nickyee.com/cpb-supp.html
http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/game%20m...%20version.pdf
Williams' scale: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00029.x

[Gralna]

Interesting information, will be spending some time going over it.

Know the post limit can be quite annoying, but you're able to bypass it by editing your original post.

[Zenier]

Interesting information, will be spending some time going over it.

Know the post limit can be quite annoying, but you're able to bypass it by editing your original post.

Ah, yes! I was thinking that I might have forgotten something related to that... Well, post is in pieces now and maybe a bit easier to digest. I will write down that tip down.