Hi Steph.

Thanks for stopping by. You've picked a propitious time to visit as I'll be posting a new entry in the next week about an aspect of learning I uncovered occurring in World of Warcraft while analyzing this survey's essays.

I'm not currently looking for any guinea pigs at the moment, although you're the second person to offer today. I think I'd best start a list. It's not inconceivable that I'll need some follow-up data in the future. At the moment, however, the 39 essays are a intriguingly more than a handful.

Now's not the best time to be looking for funded Ph.D. positions around the UK, I hear, although there are some to be found. You may find quite a few games-based learning people are not too keen on the term "gamification". It doesn't have a good reputation given the way it's tossed casually around and applied in all manner of places at the moment. Good luck with your Ph.D. searching process.

Have you already come across the new ALT Games & Learning SIG (http://gamesandlearningsig.ning.com/)? As a learning technologist, you're probably either an institutional member or personal member of ALT and you might find that group's work of interest. We've just really started this year, but we've got some good stuff on the go already.

Again, thanks for stopping by and you can find me on Twitter as @Eingang or on EU-Thunderhorn as Elsheindra.

This was a small-scale survey to work out the kinks, explore the process of doing the analysis, and to generate some motivations for why people play World of Warcraft that could be used for a second, larger scale survey. I therefore do not envision doing follow-up interviews from this survey, but it is not completely out of the question either. I started off by playing with this much smaller question to get my feet wet before tackling the much longer and more articulate responses people gave in their "essays" as to why they played World of Warcraft.

Thanks for commenting, Juanita. A large part of my problem here is the tool I'm trying to use to do the analysis. Having previously used SPSS, I was attempting to do the coding in that, but it's fairly limited. I'm switching to using NVivo (http://www.qsrinternational.com/ formerly NUD*IST), which will make it a lot easier to add as many tags to qualitative data like this as I want.

I agree that philanthropy and helping is really interesting, because I think in here we'll find many examples of informal learning occurring, through people mentoring, giving ad-hoc advice, acting as templates, etc. I'm so excited about this!

Hi Rebecca. Thanks for stopping by.

I could add a category for "multiple purposes", but that wouldn't then say very much, would it, other than to differentiate between, as you say, multifaceted and single-purposed guilds. I'm not set on identifying a single purpose. The only reason I took that approach originally when developing the coding was because the question specifically asked for a primary purpose. As you can see from the responses, though, that's not what I got. That's partially my own fault because of the sample answer given. Mea culpa!

I think I can accomplish your distinction if I allow multiple codes for a given respondent. If there is only one code, then, in the mind of that respondent, their guild for them was primarily for one thing. If there is more than one, then it's more multi-faceted. That would still leave the questions of how many activities to code for (all of them?) and how to decide the order or importance (order they appear)? It has a more practical issue, too: how do I code and analyze multiple ones in SPSS? SPSS for this sort of thing isn't exactly my forté, so I'm not sure how to go about that or if it's possible.

If you've already participated, then thanks a lot! I really appreciate it. I am, however, still looking for participants, so feel free to tell your friends (18+ only, please) who might be interested. If the survey is wildly popular, I will add more prizes to be won. The original pool of pets to be won from the Blizzard Store is 3.

I made a few changes to the original posting today:

1) It lists up front the amount of time I expect it to take;
2) It gives the age restriction of 18+;
3) Details that there is some writing involved in participating in the survey.

I made a few changes to the survey form as well on the last page where optional details are collected about you participating in future surveys or being happy to be contacted. It's clear that this is optional (it wasn't labelled as required, but now it is labelled explicitly as optional) and that you're consenting to being contacted by me for future surveys or about your survey responses, not by SurveyMonkey.

Elsheindra

The link to the downloadable PDF has been fixed.