Skyrim modding survey

[Quarto]

Hi Everyone!

I’m a long-time TES fan (but only a lurker here), and currently a PhD student at Bond University in Australia. I’m really amazed by how much TES fans do around the series, in terms of modding, compiling data in wikis, producing fan films and more. More broadly, my research is actually about what cultural heritage organisations can learn from commercial RPGs in order to produce great culture-oriented RPGs themselves. A part of that argument is looking at Skyrim and showing just how much world-building detail is involved in its world, but then I’m also arguing that it’s crucial to collaborate with fans – to give them the necessary means to produce mods and other works around a given game, in order to push it even further.

To show this, I want to document who the TES fans are, and how they work. I’m limiting myself to two particular groups – the lore-oriented folks at the UESP and the modders who publish mods on Nexus Mods (yes, yes, I know some people do both :smile: ). Myself being a modder (not TES, though – Wing Commander) and game developer in past lives, I have a pretty good idea about how much work is involved in fan projects of any kind, and how much effort fans put into learning all the skills needed for these projects. Not to mention the time devoted to better understanding the lore of the TES universe!

My anonymous survey asks you to help document this by answering a bunch of questions about your experience as a TES fan, particularly in regards to Skyrim. If you have fifteen minutes to spare, please, pretty please answer my survey, and let others know about it, too! The more responses I get, the more interesting the results will be. And to thank everyone for their efforts, I will later on write a report from the survey for the UESP, so that as the TES community, we all know a little bit more about what makes us tick.

tl;dr – got 15-30 minutes to spare? Please answer an anonymous survey about what you as a TES fan do with the games, particularly in regards to modding (at Nexus) and lore-related activities (at the UESP).

If you agree to take part in this survey, please click the link here. The survey page is mobile-friendly, so you can also do it on your phone. Needless to say, should you change your mind, you can close the survey any time you like. Oh, and feel free to contact me at jmajewsk (at) bond.edu.au (or just post here) with any other questions or comments about the survey!

Thanks in advance to everyone who decides to give it a go!

Jakub Majewski

[SirSalami]

This post is being pinned for a short while to help bring some awareness to this educational effort. I've taken the survey myself and I think many of us might find the results interesting.

 

Jakub, perhaps you can provide everyone with some info about how the results of your (anonymous) research will be provided to the public for consumption later? Thanks!

[Quarto]

Thanks a lot for pinning the post! When I checked the survey this morning, I could immediately see a boost in the number of incoming responses just in the last couple of hours.

 

This post is being pinned for a short while to help bring some awareness to this educational effort. I've taken the survey myself and I think many of us might find the results interesting.

 

Jakub, perhaps you can provide everyone with some info about how the results of your (anonymous) research will be provided to the public for consumption later? Thanks!

Certainly! After the survey is done, I will be writing an analysis of the results for the purposes of my thesis, which will be illustrated with many graphs (you'll notice most of the questions are multiple-choice, and so are really good for displaying in graphical form). I will post most of this analysis in some form on the UESP wiki, but because this is likely to be a somewhat tedious read, I also want to produce an easy-to-digest infographic image that summarises all the most interesting findings.

 

Of course, once my thesis as a whole is complete and accepted (which should happen some time around the end of this year - so a while yet), it will also be available in some form.

 

 

By the way, everyone, SirSalami also pointed out to me that one of my questions is not quite clear. Specifically, when I ask:

 

 

Have you ever tried giving users the option of donating you money for your efforts?

Yes, through Nexus

Yes, through Patreon

Yes, through other means (e.g. PayPal donate button on a website)

No, never

...In fact, Nexus just points you to a PayPal button, like option 3 suggests. However, the point here is slightly different - it's not so much about whether you're using PayPal or a similar alternative, but about whether the option you're using is connected to your mod through Nexus or through another website. In other words, it's really the "where", not the "how" that's important here. It would be a really bad idea to alter they survey while it's already collecting responses, so I'm not going to make alterations to clarify this, so please keep this in mind when answering the question.

 

(In retrospect, it might have been interesting to allow text entry for people who want to specify what the "other means" are, but then again, there are so many other questions that could be interesting, and the survey was already long enough with just the questions I needed to ask, that if I had even more questions, a lot of people would be turned off by the time needed)

Edited March 8, 2017 by Quarto

[Jokerine]

I'll get to answer this one tonight! :)

[Quarto]

I'll get to answer this one tonight! :smile:

Thanks! FYI, I currently have just over 60 responses, which is good for a survey that's only been up for about a week, but definitely far from enough. I definitely need to figure out more ways to boost the visibility of the survey to get more people filling it out. At the same time, it has always been my intention to focus specifically on active modders and people who actively edit the UESP wiki, so while the total number of Skyrim players may be in the millions, the total number of people who are of interest for this survey is in the thousands (and of those, many would no longer be active, having moved on to other things).

[vwmc]

Answering now and looking forward to seeing results. Thanks for putting it together

[vannt93]

bump! up!

[Quarto]

bump! up!

Bump indeed! I hate to be whining for publicity constantly, but please, everyone if at all possible, spread the word among other Skyrim modders! I would really like to get at least 200 responses from this survey, and that number is a long way off still. If you have friends who also mod Skyrim or edit the UESP, tell them about this - pretty, pretty, pretty please!

 

 

Also, thank you again, to everyone who has already filled out the survey! I don't want to talk about the results until the data collection is all done, but the results so fare are definitely looking very interesting. From this community's perspective, I think especially the parts related to whether people are interested in being able to earn money from modding and how they go about doing so, will be very interesting. Any time you do a survey like this, of course you have some expectations for what kind of responses you will get. For the most part, the survey has confirmed these expectations, but the answers from these particular questions have been something of a surprise.

[Elias555]

 

bump! up!

Bump indeed! I hate to be whining for publicity constantly, but please, everyone if at all possible, spread the word among other Skyrim modders! I would really like to get at least 200 responses from this survey, and that number is a long way off still. If you have friends who also mod Skyrim or edit the UESP, tell them about this - pretty, pretty, pretty please!

 

 

Also, thank you again, to everyone who has already filled out the survey! I don't want to talk about the results until the data collection is all done, but the results so fare are definitely looking very interesting. From this community's perspective, I think especially the parts related to whether people are interested in being able to earn money from modding and how they go about doing so, will be very interesting. Any time you do a survey like this, of course you have some expectations for what kind of responses you will get. For the most part, the survey has confirmed these expectations, but the answers from these particular questions have been something of a surprise.

 

Bumping a pinned thread is definitely a good sign of things to come.

 

When does the survey close? Will you be posting the raw data? Will you mention your hypothesis?

[Quarto]

 

 

When does the survey close? Will you be posting the raw data? Will you mention your hypothesis?

 

 

The survey will close by the end of April, but I may also close it earlier if I see that I have enough data to go on, and/or I see that there simply aren't any more responses flowing in. The timeline is mainly determined by the fact that in May at the latest, I need to be sitting down and actually writing up the results, particularly because this survey is only one part of my thesis, and the thesis as a whole must be finished by the end of this year (not as much time as it might sound).

 

Regarding raw data, I didn't have any intention of posting raw data, because I didn't think that anybody would be interested in it. But I certainly *can* do it, if there is demand for it. And yes, when presenting my results to you guys, I will also discuss my hypotheses. Needless to say, I can't discuss the hypotheses now, because it might potentially influence how people respond to the survey. I mean, it probably wouldn't, but it's just bad practice to do so.