Skyrim modding survey

[vwmc]

 

 

 

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.

 

 

If possible, I would like to see the raw data once the survey is closed as well.

[Quarto]

 

 

 

If possible, I would like to see the raw data once the survey is closed as well.

 

 

Just FYI, I'm currently double-checking to make sure the university itself will have no objections. I don't expect any difficulties, since the only situation where they could reasonably object is if the survey contained data that could potentially identify any of the participants, which is not the case here. They just like to be in the know of everything that researchers do :).

 

I'm not sure if you or any of the others here are university students, but if you are, the data collected will definitely be interesting for smaller papers or as background to a larger project. At the moment, I'll only be analysing the data in the direction of my own research hypotheses, which means that other people analysing the same data could show other interesting conclusions.

 

...I just wish there was more data in the first place ;). Clearly I shall need to do some more advertising. But to anyone reading this, if you have not yet filled out the survey, please consider doing it :). I know that thirty minutes is a big chunk of time, but actually from what I can see in the data, most people finish the survey in 15-20 minutes, so it's not as time-consuming as it initially seems.

[Elias555]

Can you post some analytics in the mean time that just shows country, age etc? Can that affect bias? If so, what's something you can post that wouldn't have any effect?

[Aragorn58]

Completed Hope it helps.

[Quarto]

Can you post some analytics in the mean time that just shows country, age etc? Can that affect bias? If so, what's something you can post that wouldn't have any effect?

Yeah, I don't think that showing country or age would affect bias in any way - so sure, I can talk a little about the results (so far) in this area. Though I'm not sure if these particular results are that significant :).

 

With age, we're looking at 10% below 18, 43% are 18-24, and 25% are 25-34. Then you've got 11% in the 35-44 category, 6% in the 45-54 category, and just under 4% for 55 and older. It seems to me that this is probably a slightly older profile than if we were to analyse the broad Skyrim audience (I'd expect more below 18s), but it's also interesting to see what a sharp drop there is after the age of 35 - given that the statistical average gamer is around 34-35 (IIRC), you'd expect more in the 35-44 category. But I think we all know how hard it can be to reconcile modding with family responsibilities :).

 

For country of origin, there are no surprises - the dominant option, by far, is the US. Beyond this, it's pretty much scattergun - a few from Europe (Belgium, Sweden, Germany, UK, Spain, Poland, Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal - most of these have only one respondent per country), a few from Latin America (Brazil and Venezuela), a couple from Australia and New Zealand, and one from Singapore. Oh, yeah, and one from Skyrim :p.

[Elias555]

 

Can you post some analytics in the mean time that just shows country, age etc? Can that affect bias? If so, what's something you can post that wouldn't have any effect?

Yeah, I don't think that showing country or age would affect bias in any way - so sure, I can talk a little about the results (so far) in this area. Though I'm not sure if these particular results are that significant :smile:.

 

With age, we're looking at 10% below 18, 43% are 18-24, and 25% are 25-34. Then you've got 11% in the 35-44 category, 6% in the 45-54 category, and just under 4% for 55 and older. It seems to me that this is probably a slightly older profile than if we were to analyse the broad Skyrim audience (I'd expect more below 18s), but it's also interesting to see what a sharp drop there is after the age of 35 - given that the statistical average gamer is around 34-35 (IIRC), you'd expect more in the 35-44 category. But I think we all know how hard it can be to reconcile modding with family responsibilities :smile:.

 

For country of origin, there are no surprises - the dominant option, by far, is the US. Beyond this, it's pretty much scattergun - a few from Europe (Belgium, Sweden, Germany, UK, Spain, Poland, Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal - most of these have only one respondent per country), a few from Latin America (Brazil and Venezuela), a couple from Australia and New Zealand, and one from Singapore. Oh, yeah, and one from Skyrim :tongue:.

 

Interesting findings on age! I didn't think there would be any under 18.

 

The average gamer age stat is useless without hours, dedication, type of game etc. Just like if 12 year olds read 3 books a day and 35 year olds read 1 book a week doesn't mean 12 year olds dominate the industry. Also, if there are 100 gamers and 50 of them are 50y.o, 50 are 0y.o, saying the average age of the gamers in this group is 25y.o is nonsense.

 

 

I think the numbers would be very different had this taken place 4-5 years ago, the opinions even more so.

[Quarto]

 

Interesting findings on age! I didn't think there would be any under 18.

 

The average gamer age stat is useless without hours, dedication, type of game etc. Just like if 12 year olds read 3 books a day and 35 year olds read 1 book a week doesn't mean 12 year olds dominate the industry. Also, if there are 100 gamers and 50 of them are 50y.o, 50 are 0y.o, saying the average age of the gamers in this group is 25y.o is nonsense.

 

I think the numbers would be very different had this taken place 4-5 years ago, the opinions even more so.

Yes, I would definitely agree that the average gamer age stat is... well, I guess it is almost useless now. It used to be a valuable indicator, but the definition of the term has been diluted to the point where everyone who plays games (at all) is considered a gamer. However, keep in mind that the age of the average gamer crossed 30 early on in the previous decade, which was well before the rise of browser and mobile gaming blew up the statistics.

 

You are also right that the numbers would be very different 4-5 years ago! Timing is everything, and had I somehow been able to time my research in such a way as to be conducting this survey about a year after the game's release, the image would be quite different. I strongly suspect that the stats I'm currently getting are not-so-slightly skewed towards the hardcore end. This isn't a problem as far as my research is concerned, but it's important not to read the stats I reported as representative of the Skyrim modding community as a whole.

 

All in all, I think it would be really interesting to do a similar survey (but more tailored to what the community would like to know, rather than to any particular academic research) in the future - ideally, it should be done a few months after TES6 is released.

 

Edit: Oh, I forgot to comment on the under-18s. I was definitely expecting to get a few of them, because I remember what I was doing as a teenager - I think from about 15+, I was already working on mods for the original Doom, and then for WarCraft II and other games. I certainly didn't make anything releaseable until I was around 19, but there were definitely things happening. It's actually a really productive time to be a modder, because you have lots of time for games. It is interesting that there are still under-18s modding Skyrim this long after the game's release, though! Someone who's now 17 would have been around 11-12 when Skyrim was released.

Edited March 31, 2017 by Quarto

[panurgy]

Yeah, I don't think that showing country or age would affect bias in any way - so sure, I can talk a little about the results (so far) in this area. Though I'm not sure if these particular results are that significant :smile:.

 

With age, we're looking at 10% below 18, 43% are 18-24, and 25% are 25-34. Then you've got 11% in the 35-44 category, 6% in the 45-54 category, and just under 4% for 55 and older. It seems to me that this is probably a slightly older profile than if we were to analyse the broad Skyrim audience (I'd expect more below 18s), but it's also interesting to see what a sharp drop there is after the age of 35 - given that the statistical average gamer is around 34-35 (IIRC), you'd expect more in the 35-44 category. But I think we all know how hard it can be to reconcile modding with family responsibilities :smile:.

I don't know much about the older age gamer population, but I'd suspect that it's harder to nab us online, especially on game forums, though I could be wrong.

 

BTW, have you posted on Steam, reddit, enbdev, Dark Creations, or other sites that have a decent-sized TES population?

 

Also, a few comments on the survey:

- Cheat, Utilities, Tutorials are a bad combination. I don't think I've ever used a cheat in a TES game, I do the opposite and try to make the game harder and resources more scarce. But I, and a large percent of people who install mods, use utilities and tutorials. LOOT/BOSS, Wrye Bash, xEdit. Some people might include ENB, SweetFx, and ReShade in that category, too.

- Number of mods: I use around 250 - 300 mods for Skyrim, and used 450+ mods in Morrowind, Oblivion. You're smearing the whole upper range of mod use. I'm extreme, but I've seen other people talk about using similar numbers of mods.

[TheLadySil]

I rather enjoyed sharing my experience with TES.

 

In most of my daily life, people don't even know what TES is, or what a mod might be. It was pleasant to express my opinion to an entity that actually understood the terminology involved in the field of TES and modding, and that actually wanted to know my opinion.

 

Even if that entity was only a complex HTML script.

 

Lol :laugh:

[Quarto]

 

I don't know much about the older age gamer population, but I'd suspect that it's harder to nab us online, especially on game forums, though I could be wrong.

 

BTW, have you posted on Steam, reddit, enbdev, Dark Creations, or other sites that have a decent-sized TES population?

 

Also, a few comments on the survey:

- Cheat, Utilities, Tutorials are a bad combination. I don't think I've ever used a cheat in a TES game, I do the opposite and try to make the game harder and resources more scarce. But I, and a large percent of people who install mods, use utilities and tutorials. LOOT/BOSS, Wrye Bash, xEdit. Some people might include ENB, SweetFx, and ReShade in that category, too.

- Number of mods: I use around 250 - 300 mods for Skyrim, and used 450+ mods in Morrowind, Oblivion. You're smearing the whole upper range of mod use. I'm extreme, but I've seen other people talk about using similar numbers of mods.

Apologies for being slow to respond lately! When you posted the above, I was in the middle of a long trip.

 

I have been planning to post at the sites you mention, but I had to wait with that. Basically, I somewhat naively assumed initially that posting at Nexus and UESP alone will be enough to get me the amount of users I need - though of course, this was also partially justified by the fact that it is especially members of these two websites that I'm interested in. Because of the way academic research works these days, I had to apply to an ethics committee for clearance to do this survey and specify which sites exactly I'll be posting at. Once I realised I need to go broader, I submitted an update to the ethics committee, but that - like all bureaucratic processes - took a bit of time. It's only now that I can launch this next part. Silly, I know, but universities these days are hyper-sensitive on how human research is conducted, so even utterly non-controversial stuff like this survey has to go through that process.

 

Regarding cheats, I wanted to include this category because some of my friends have mentioned to me that they do use mods to make the game easier for themselves. I think for trying to make the game harder, the other categories (overhauls, economic mods, etc.) will cover this aspect. With this one question, I was already concerned that it's a heck of a long list of responses for people to parse through. Particularly if someone is filling out the survey on a mobile, it doesn't look great ;). Potentially, there's a lot more additional categories I could have broken this up into.

 

Regarding the number of mods, I certainly imagine there's people out there who use higher numbers of mods. Again it's a compromise between usability and precision - I wanted to have enough categories to be able to be able to distinguish between, shall we say, casual mod users and hardcore mod users. I think once you hit the 150+ category, it's no longer so important whether you're using 155 mods or 300 mods - at that point, what matters is that you're using a boatload of them ;). That having been said, in hindsight, I wish I had added a text box to that final response so that people could specify. I'll admit it: I wasn't really expecting to find anyone who uses 450 mods for one game :D. I knew I could expect people with 150-200 mods, but 450 sorta boggles the mind.

 

 

I rather enjoyed sharing my experience with TES.

 

In most of my daily life, people don't even know what TES is, or what a mod might be. It was pleasant to express my opinion to an entity that actually understood the terminology involved in the field of TES and modding, and that actually wanted to know my opinion.

 

Even if that entity was only a complex HTML script.

 

Lol :laugh:

Heh! Well, hey now, that complex HTML script was written by a human being, so think of it as a conversation by proxy :D.