My Games

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

An empirical approach to studying GNS

GNS is a theory about tabletop RPGs, and while many people have discussed it in great detail, to the best of my knowledge there has been no attempt to test any aspect of GNS empirically. In order to test the predictive utility of GNS, I have designed the following study. I am primarily looking for a sample that is already aware of GNS, has a broad range of tabletop RPG knowledge and experience, and is active in this or other tabletop RPG communities.

The research topic of the following study is about the (empirical/statistical) predictive utility of GNS. This is a separate question from whether GNS is a valid framework to think of tabletop RPGs from a critical theory or game design perspective per se. At this stage, my hypotheses are the following:
  1. Are certain RPGs reliably labeled as G, N, or S?
  2. Do people's stated preferences for G, N, or S-style games predict their preferences for specific games, assuming we do find an effect in hypothesis 1?
I want to avoid discussing my personal opinions / expectations in order to avoid biasing the study. If I collect enough data to do meaningful analyses, I will report my results in proper APA format and discuss how I analyzed the data and provide interpretations of the results. I'm aiming for planned analyses, but I may do some exploratory analyses as well.

At the risk of sounding adversarial, I have zero interest in getting into a debate. If you think there are serious issues with the design and have suggestions for how to fix them, I can attempt to do so in a followup study. When I report the results, if you have criticisms of how I ran my analyses or how I'm interpreting my results and have suggestions for how to fix them, we can discuss that at that time. If your comment is needlessly confrontational, does not include a suggestion for a practical solution in terms of research methods or experimental design, or is not relevant to the stated research topic or hypotheses (e.g. it's about critical theory or game design per se), I will likely ignore you.

With all of that being said, here is a link to the survey!

Also, I would really appreciate it if people would check out my blog and fill out this survey for my blog as well!

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