Dmitri Williams introduced the project and described how researchers have been approaching various game developers over the years. He paraphrased the conversation with Sony as:
"What do you collect?"
"Well, everything—what do you want?"
"Can we have it all?"
"Sure."
Buried among those happy, average players was a small subset of the population—about five percent—who used the game for serious role playing and, according to Williams, "They are psychologically much worse off than the regular players." They belong to marginalized groups, like ethnic and religious minorities and non-heterosexuals, and tended to use the game as a coping mechanism.
For marginalized groups read "Furries"
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." - Ronald Reagan 1987
Damn, that is a big data set. And yeah, most people don't have the expertise to work with a data set that large. Hell, most people don't have the expertise to work with ones that are only a few gigabytes. Isn't that what the SETI and the protein folding projects do - massive distributed analysis of super duper size data sets? Sounds like some fun engineering. Hmmm it would 15 NAS store-bought boxes with 4 1TB drives just to hold it. Hmmm and assuming that it's in some relational format, it would probably take my quad core machine a week just to touch all the rows in the data set. You could keep a room full of machines busy with that much data!
I saw one set of research results in the news a few months ago that I believe was based on that project. I forget what it said but it was a lot of interesting trivia about online gamers, all based on EQ2 of course. I think they said the average age of an EQ2 player was > 30 and other cool trivia which I forget.
Buried among those happy, average players was a small subset of the population—about five percent—who used the game for serious role playing and, according to Williams, "They are psychologically much worse off than the regular players." They belong to marginalized groups, like ethnic and religious minorities and non-heterosexuals, and tended to use the game as a coping mechanism.
For marginalized groups read "Furries"
Isn't that the peeps who wear the giant tails and they make cut-outs in all their pants? That's seriously disturbing. My younger gay-goth brother went through that phase. He was probably 21 and I remember a family gathering where my dad was yelling "take off that fucking tail". My wife thought it was cute.
Buried among those happy, average players was a small subset of the population—about five percent—who used the game for serious role playing and, according to Williams, "They are psychologically much worse off than the regular players." They belong to marginalized groups, like ethnic and religious minorities and non-heterosexuals, and tended to use the game as a coping mechanism.
For marginalized groups read "Furries"
Isn't that the peeps who wear the giant tails and they make cut-outs in all their pants? That's seriously disturbing. My younger gay-goth brother went through that phase. He was probably 21 and I remember a family gathering where my dad was yelling "take off that fucking tail". My wife thought it was cute.
rofl...
Some furry stuff I've seen is pretty disturbing, but I guess I just don't get it. I have a friend that goes moist over anything that has a picture of a fox on it. He has a bunch of pervy old men that indulge it and love buying him fox stuff. He loves it though, so w/e.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
Yeah, he liked foxes and wolves too. He used to wear this t-shirt of furry animals in various sexual positions. I think he was into that stuff more because people found it offensive that for the actual fetish. He stayed with us for a couple years and he grew out of it. I didn't care if he wore tails or t-shirts with animals fucking (although not in front of the little kids) and all of his freakshow friends were really polite and helpful around the house. Really, once he understood that most people would accept him not matter how strange he was, he turned pretty much normal.
And yeah, he played EQ1 for a few months at our house and after a week he was in some furry fetish guild on Brell. They must have some secret handshake or something, even in video games lol.
If you want to appreciate some of the true horror of Furry culture do a Google image search on the word "Yiff"
"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." - Ronald Reagan 1987
Taxious wrote:Some furry stuff I've seen is pretty disturbing, but I guess I just don't get it. I have a friend that goes moist over anything that has a picture of a fox on it. He has a bunch of pervy old men that indulge it and love buying him fox stuff. He loves it though, so w/e.
What the fuck?
Fallakin Kuvari wrote:Because laws that require voters to have an ID (Something they are required to have anyway) are bad....
Taxious wrote:Some furry stuff I've seen is pretty disturbing, but I guess I just don't get it. I have a friend that goes moist over anything that has a picture of a fox on it. He has a bunch of pervy old men that indulge it and love buying him fox stuff. He loves it though, so w/e.
What the fuck?
It's hardly much different then having a sugar momma =p
Freecare Spiritwise wrote:I saw one set of research results in the news a few months ago that I believe was based on that project. I forget what it said but it was a lot of interesting trivia about online gamers, all based on EQ2 of course. I think they said the average age of an EQ2 player was > 30 and other cool trivia which I forget.
Yeah - average age of an EQ2 player was 31, and in slightly better shape than the average American.
[Wed Oct 04 15:47:20 2000] Level of Detail *OFF*
[Wed Oct 04 15:48:19 2000] Welcome to EverQuest!
[Wed Oct 04 15:48:19 2000] You have entered Southern Desert of Ro.
[Wed Oct 04 15:48:23 2000] Friends currently on EverQuest:
[Wed Oct 04 15:48:23 2000] ---------------------------------
[Wed Oct 04 15:48:24 2000] [45 Paladin] Gelador (Human) <The Unity of Justice> ZONE: dreadlands
[Wed Oct 04 15:48:27 2000] You are encumbered!.
[Wed Oct 04 15:48:30 2000] You think you are heading NorthEast.
[Wed Oct 04 15:48:33 2000] You think you are heading North.
[Wed Oct 04 15:48:36 2000] You no longer have a target.
I started playing in Feb of 2000; but I believe they didn't turn persistent logging on until around this time. I could never remember to "/log on" or whatever the command was at the start of every session. Once they made it persistent, I kept it on and somehow managed to transfer the log files from PC to PC until I stopped in 2004.
Abstract
In the current study, 7,000 players of the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) EverQuest 2 were surveyed about their offline characteristics, their motivations and their physical and mental health. These self-report data were then combined with data on participants' actual in-game play behaviors, as collected by the game operator.
...
The main measure derived from Sony's databases was total playing time
..
To answer the research questions, the survey instrument used a variety of standard demographic measures. Players were asked for their age, gender, race, household income, education, and religion.
..
The survey also asked players several questions about their media use, including their hours of television viewed per week, how often they read a newspaper, and their Internet connection speed.
..
their body mass index (BMI), which was calculated from self reports of weight and height
At one point I had Ddrak logging in for the first time at Lv1.