Worth Practicum #3

Here are some of the conclusions I made from my social experiment on Runescape.

a.     Information access pattern. 

The data collected made it very clear that appearance and status do, in fact, make a significant difference in social treatment. On average, the novice needed to ask the question 10.55 times before he could elicit a response, where the expert needed to ask the question only 1.55 times on average. The average number of times the novice needed to ask the question was approximately seven times what the high-leveled character needed. The drastic difference in this statistic shows that the treatment is significantly different between the two characters.

After collecting the levels of each responder to the novice and the expert, the averages were 63.9 and 65.55, respectively. These two averages are remarkably close considering how different the number of times asking the question was. The level of the character asking the question affects how they will be treated, but the level of the character responding to the question does not appear to affect how they will treat the inquisitor. The belief that a character’s appearance determines how they should be treated is apparently held across players of all experience levels.

The learning process is very dependent on a player’s access to information. If a player wishes to learn more about the game, they can ask other more experienced players. Since more experienced players have been playing for longer they will have much more knowledge about the game than a new player. The expert can pass the information off to the novice, who then can pass that same information down to an even newer player. It creates a cycle of teaching and learning which has the potential to help everyone. However, if novice players are treated as less significant or are disregarded, this cycle could stop. The novices would not be able to gain the information they need which would prevent them from passing the information down to a newer player. The negative social treatment of less experienced players inhibits their access to information, which in turn affects the learning process of not just these players, but also the players that the current novices would eventually teach.

On average, the novice had to ask the question ten times more than the expert before another player would even respond to the question. That’s not even looking at if they answered the question or not. In one case I had to repeat the question 48 times before another player would even try to help. If a new player had to work this hard for information, they would probably quit soon after starting and almost certainly before they could reach a higher social rank. The common social prejudices inside of the game prevent new players from gaining knowledge and from even wanting to gain knowledge. It becomes frustrating, but beyond pleasantly frustrating (Gee).