May 05, 2008

Survey: How Do Players Create and Customize their Avatars?

The PlayOn group is starting a research project on avatar personalization systems in multiplayer games, including World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Maple Story. As part of this research we would like to invite volunteers to participate in an online survey.

The purpose of this study is to explore how users of massively multiplayer online environments customize the appearance of their virtual body (avatar). During this survey, you will be asked to upload a screenshot of your avatar's appearance to our research website and to answer survey questions related to your gaming experience. The questionnaire should be fun to answer and we estimate it takes only 15 to 20 minutes to complete it.

If you'd like to help, please follow the links below depending on your game of choice:
- World of Warcraft: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=59117&lang=en]
- Maple Story: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=77654&lang=en]
- Second Life: [http://blogs.parc.com/limesurvey/index.php?sid=35489&lang=en]

Note that you will be asked to provide an email address, where we will send you a unique participant code. Your email address will be kept strictly confidential and will be used only used to assign you a unique identifier; we will not sell or otherwise disclose it to any third party. Note also that we will never ask you to download software and/or enter your game account information at any time, we simply ask for a *picture* of your avatar. Due to the recent key-logging epidemic (esp. in WoW) players are understandably worried about clicking on links but you can rest assured we are only interested in research data.

We thank you in advance for your help and look forward to sharing the survey results with you!

Posted by nicolas at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)