Looking for help with a non-profit project

Hello everyone, ☺

Please help support a non-profit project of the German University of Duesseldorf!

With help of the German gamer community the University of Duesseldorf has succeeded in developing a diagnostic questionnaire which does not confuse engaged MMORPG players with so-called “addicts”. This is an important opportunity to break the stereotype of the “pathological gamer”!

After this success, we are striving to expand the project by translating our questionnaire in order to be able to provide standardized diagnostics not only nationwide, but on an international level. Please help us realize our “25QUESTions Project” by filling out our short questionnaire on

http://www.pia-orcs.de/25questions/

and by doing this, participate in eliminating the pathologization of engaged players!

This is NOT a survey: The data will solely be used in order to evaluate the characteristics of our questionnaire, which is later going to be used in clinics. At this point, the questionnaire cannot yet determine whether somebody is addicted to MMORPGs or not.

Here you can get an overview of the (good ☺) characteristics of our German questionnaire (in English):

http://www.piaorcs.uni-duesseldorf.de/25questions_results.pdf

You can contact me through: sabine.breuing at uni-duesseldorf.de ,
for example, if you have any questions about our project, or if you are interested in supporting us by translating our questionnaire into another foreign language… ☺

Thank you very much for your assistance! ☺

Sabine Breuing

Done it and you're welcome

When will the results be ready? I would LOVE to see the results of this one

I think your questions are biased and the results will probably say that gamers are not addicts. At least I found them biasing.

done

and dunno, but i think it's not as biased. Most of these questions I would use myself to determine whether someone is addicted

problem might be maybe to the scale because everyone will bias themselves into putting "less addicted" values, but that's a data input problem, and probably will be used to show and analyze "perceived addictiveness" in contrast to observed addictiveness

Well:

Questionnaire on the Use of Online Role-playing Games
"Every fifth World of Warcraft player is addicted"?? - Not hardly!

Right from the start you are being told what the quiz is about and what conclusion you are expected to reach. Afterward you are bombarded with addiction related questions.

That's why I say they're biased. You shouldn't tell your test subjects what you expect the quiz to show or even what the quiz tests. It will only influence them to conform and maybe answer just a little bit more to the left than they might have otherwise.

yeh sure, but it's not like addicts dont bias their own judgment anyway

Well although the test didn't tell me (obviously) I think I am probably somewhat (Completely...) addicted to Aderan and SGW (Aderan more )

Meh...

-Alex

First of all, thanks for your support and it's nice to see a discussion going on!

It's probably gonna take a while for the results to be ready because we're going to compare the English, German and Spanish version of our questionnaire. So we need data from Germanspeaking, Englishspeaking and Spanishspeaking gamers... My guess is that we'll be done analyzing the results by the end of april.

But the overall point of this questionnaire is not to classify gamers of this community as addicted or non-addicted. That's why, after completing the questionnaire, we don't give you a feedback like "too bad, you're addicted" or "no, you're not". At this point, there are no standardized diagnostic criteria which could professionally separate excessive from non-excessive gamers. Of course I could simply say "Ok, so when someone reaches a score of xy points, I regard him as addicted". But this would be highly subjective and imho not very scientific.

What we are trying to find out (with the help of your data) is, whether the English version of our test items is able to distinguish excessive and non-excessive gamers in the first place. A statistical analysis will show whether this questionnaire has good characteristics or not. For example, we are going to look at the underlying factor structure. Some previous questionnaires have shown two underlying factors: one addiction and one engagement factor. This means that when someone reaches a high score, these questionnaire are not able to distinguish whether this is due to a high engagement or addiction. And so, engaged gamers, who spend a lot of time playing, but do not suffer any serious consequences, might be mistaken for "addicts". This in turn can lead to an overestimation of "addicted gamers" and result in headlines like "omg, xy% per cent of all players are addicted!" And this is just what we are trying to avoid with our questionnaire. As far as the German version goes, we succeeded; the results will show if the same goes for the English and Spanish version.

And some sentences concerning the afore mentioned "bias":
This is going to be a diagnostic questionnaire. Diagnostic questionnaires are simple, obvious and only contain items regarding the main symptoms. It is not the purpose of such a questionnaire to trick someone or measure any underlying, subconcious tendencies that the person completing it does not know about For example, if you look at a questionnaire measuring depression, it also contains very simple and obvious depressive symptoms like "In the last week, I have cried very often". Anybody who fills out such a questionnaire knows it's about depression. Same goes for our questionnaire.
Again, our goal is not to find out how "addicted" each one of you is. Our goal is to find out whether our questionnaire can separate engaged players from "addicts" and whether its characteristics are good enough for it to be used in a clinical setting. My hypothesis is that our questionnaire indeed has good qualities but that's not going to bias the statistical evaluation.

And yes, the problem of self ratings... Well, in the end I think this is the most useful thing to do. Even though self ratings are always at least slightly biased, this is still the most reliable way to measure MMORPG addiction. Having someone else fill out the questionnaire for you is not a better alternative because they're also biased in their own way. And there are no objective measurements for excessive playing. For example, time spent playing is a hint, but not a valid criterion. For example, a 16-year-old could spend 5 hours a day without suffering major consequences and without being "addicted". Then again, the father of a family with a full time job could spend exactly the same amount of time playing and lose his job and family because of the game. Now there's a problem.

But thanks again for your support and your interest!

Whats your name mean?

Pia is short for the ambulance of our psychological institute, which started this project (in German: Psychologische Institutsambulanz).

Orcs is just a play on words. It's also short for the German term "Online- Rollen- und Computerspielsucht", which means "Online roleplay- and computer game addiction".

I just wanted to pick a name that is somehow related to our project and that I can remember easily, so it was an obvious choice, since the links I posted also have this name in them.

Being from the Elven nations, I find all Orcs offensive personally, But i'm not an addict.




Good luck with your survey.