[digitalhumanist]

A research team at the Pennsylvania State University is studying the communication and play styles of World of Warcraft roleplayers. We would like to invite the roleplayers of Ravenholdt to participate.

Participation in this study is voluntary, and all responses will be confidential. You must be 18 years of age or older to participate. Although you may not benefit personally from the study, the results will help shed light on the unique forms of social interaction that roleplay adds to MMORPGS such as WoW and that are often overlooked by non-gamers.

The study consists of an analysis of text chat logs (in and out of character) volunteered by roleplayers.

If you would like to volunteer chat logs, please submit them in .txt format (yourcharactername.txt) to this secure Box at Penn State link: http://sites.psu.edu/narratingplay/chat ... bmissions/
As many chat logs as possible is preferred, but any and all are appreciated.

**The chat logs will not be shared, and any personally identifying information in them will be removed prior to analysis. (Character names will be replaced with codes.) Please feel free to delete any IRL identifiers and/or search and replace names with codes before submitting the chat logs.**

The deadline for chat log submissions is July 23rd. The collaboration of Ravenholdt roleplayers will be acknowledged in any publications that result from the study.

The Bednar Digital Humanities research team at Penn State appreciates your consideration. Please reply to this post or PM or email us with any questions you may have.

Best wishes,

Bednar Digital Humanities Research Team
The Pennsylvania State University
bednardigitalhumanities@psu.edu
sites.psu.edu/narratingplay

[LEGION]

BTW, I have confirmed the validity of this research with Penn State. The study is legit, if you had any apprehension about contributing to it.

[Xaraphyne]

Here is an update from their forum.

The study is done (we were operating on a 3-month grant with hopes of future studies building on our findings). It’s results have been accepted to an international Digital Humanities conference, DH2016, and will not be submitted for publication in journals until following the presentation there.

And we are very grateful to those who participated or spread the word, and look forward to working with those who would like to contribute in the future. As part of that gratitude, we can tell you that the study found what we were looking for and more.

Essentially, we expected to find quantifiable differences such as sentence length and complexity, with very different (social versus tradespeak) types of conversations in roleplay and out of it. The counts as transmedial narrativity, finding elements of storytelling in non-book forms. But what we found also qualifies as narrativity of the most straight-laced sort, literary narrativity.

Among the roleplay we were given, we found emotional give and take, relationship of characters driving action, and world-building that added something to the pixellated world.