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

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt <hhs at cbs.dtu.dk> writes:

> 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)

Yes, this is a possibility, but there are some other problems than
the ones you specify. First of all, graded scales are
unreliable. You and I may feel the same way, yet you might give a 4
where I give a 2. Still, one could probably develop a questionaire
which largely consists of picking alternatives. Second, how do you
scale the different dimensions, or is that of no importance in
principal component analysis? It sounds like interesting approach,
though I probably would have made lots of scatterplots and tried to
see where that would get me first.

> 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.

*grin* Well, who says "other similar studies" are valid?

--
Ola - http://folk.uio.no/olag/

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