[MUD-Dev] Weaknesses in the HCDS player type model (was: 3rd Axis for Bartle's 2 axis theory of MUD players)

[Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt]

On Saturday 19 October 2002 14:44, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Casbaria <casbaria at pacbell.net> writes:

>> I think the 3rd Axis is a necessary component and can explain
>> quite a bit about the dynamics of your populace.

> NOT REALLY TWO DIMENSIONAL OR 2-AXIS

> HCDS is actually 4 dimensional. [...]

Let us assume that a series of axis is the model space we wish to
let us describe the players.

If one wanted to figure out what kind of psycological axis covers
the active gaming population, you could form a large questionaire
with many different questions about different activities and ask
people to rate them from -5 to 5 (bad to good, covering as many
activities as you can dream up) and then try and do a principal
components analysis to see how the players actually cluster (those
axis that makes the greatest degree of seperation). Then as you
choose the best principal components (mathematically) you can try
and put labels on them by examining the trends in the correlated
results (ie, people who like to find the best weapon also like
numbers and stats). The choises of the _number_ of axis could be
done by minimal description length. You can then discuss at length
how to actually describe the different axis, but it would no longer
be a question of how many or if its really there, and how much the
axis are interdependant, etc, because you would have exact numbers
for that. The weakness of this method is to fomulate enough
questions to cover in general all the activities that you want
evaluation on.

Of course you will suffer under the usual problems about surveys
that there is a bias of who will actually answer such a
questionaire, but its no more than every single other similar study
is suffering under. It does not necsecarily make an entire study
invalid.

--
Hans Henrik Stærfeldt   |    bombman at diku.dk    | work:  hhs at cbs.dtu.dk      |
Address:                |___  +45 40383492    __|__       +45 45252471     __|
DTU, Kemitorvet,        | Scientific programmer at Center for Biological     |
bygn 208, CBS.          |  Sequence Analysis, Technical University of Denmark|


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