Seasonal EQII Homage: Norm Baites

There is so much homage in EverQuest II, it is almost ridiculous to continue pointing out examples, although it is nice to have some visuals in the blog. Here is one I think is seasonal, given the name of the character, Norm Baites, obviously playing on Norman Bates from the famous film Psycho. I'm not sure the character is usually there. Norm is wearing an EQII Halloween mask (Halloween is renamed "Nights of the Dead") of a nautilus-like creature and ends up looking like something from a Lovecraft novel. Given it's The Nights of the Dead in EverQuest II currently, Norm makes sense as a seasonal homage. You can see his name floating on the top of his head.

Survey Results: Age and Industry Job

A lot gets made of how some modders hope to get a job in the industry. When talking to my friends at Sports Mogul about the survey, they theorized that this might correlate with age, where younger modders have this idea while older modders are more established in career tracks. Indeed that is what we see, although younger modders (at least in this sample) have a range of opinions about it.

"I Told You So"

About five years ago I told a major market research firm the following:

Currently the Zune is too problematic to be part of the digital near-future.

I said that Microsoft had to "fix it." I don't think the market research firm liked that I said that, since they blew me off after that. Something happened earlier this month that was so barely noted I missed it until earlier this week: Microsoft cancelled the Zune. It is actually difficult for me to find a news outlet that I am used to using which reported it (but there is always Wikipedia).

I could say that it feels good to be right, but I've been right the entire last five years and I've always known it. As for the market research firm in question, well, they don't know what they are doing.

Survey Results: Motivations

Here are five of the motivation questions from my game modding survey (not a random sample), re-ordered and shown as a bar chart in percentages. Motivations about the industry in reddish tones on the left of each grouping, green in the middle is other players, and on the right of the groupings is fun and "improve the game for yourself". I know the colors aren't optimal but the chart does a good job of showing that people aren't motivated in relation to the industry. I don't think this says modders are selfish, I think this is a reflection of how people get an idea to improve a game (their own idea), and then make that idea via a mod since they want to improve the game based on their idea, and, it's fun.

Even zoomed out, you can see the pattern (but that could be a fabrication based on the questions, however, I did group the questions and the pattern is the end result, not the other way around). (The image/chart should really have a title, but it isn't meant to stand on its own. "Modder Motivations", perhaps.)

One Quick Result - Modders' Survey

Been busy filtering out spammer entries and trying to get the write-up done for ICA (due Nov. 1st), and I haven't pulled all the numbers but here is one I made a nice little graph for. The nice thing about the graph is the curve, which was unexpected -- I expected a decline, but the "No" response on this question set roughly doubled with each proceeding question, so the curve is rather visually appealing.

Here is the rough table, I haven't formatted it completely. Numbers are % and # of respondents. N=111.

What is also cool is that the numbers are fairly high, although it is possible that I got a lot of pro-community modders in my survey since I advertised for it on mod forums (a form of community) and the respondents may be slightly more helpful than the more general mod population (since they were helping me by taking the survey, although perhaps they were feeling curious).

Interactions with Other Modders

	No	Yes
I have told a modder I liked their mod or thanked them for making it.	7.2 (8)	92.8 (103)
I have made comments in order to help someone improve their mod.	12.6 (14)	87.4 (97)
I have contributed code, scripting, voice, visual elements, or other content to someone else’s mod.	23.4 (26)	76.6 (85)
I have co-authored a mod with others.	43.2 (48)	56.8 (63)
I have taken ownership of a mod someone else stopped working on.	82.9 (92)	17.1 (19)

Sometimes You Feel Like Homage

Another example from EverQuest II. Many don't fit Kaveney's "geek aesthetic"(1) like this one. Geek aesthetic is mostly sci-fi/fantasy nerd/geek culture. If you Google "sometimes you feel like a nut" you'll see why this is homage (although it isn't trademark infringement). This example is from EQII's version of Halloween, going on in-game currently, "Nights of the Dead".

1. Kaveney, R. (2005). From Alien to The Matrix. London, UK: I. B. Tauris.

Survey Drawing Winners!

Ok after weeding out the big fraudulent entry and a few other obvious ones via data cleaning, I was able to...

• Make a list of the valid emails.
• Use NeoOffice's "random" function to choose three numbers.
• The numbers were 66, 75, and 60, which were all a little high and close together but indeed that's random.

The winners are... Well the initial parts of their emails, so they can probably recognize themselves but no one will be able to send them spam (so not even complete to the @ sign), are:

• Rolanxxxxx
• Shirtxxxxxx
• Twilightxxx

Later this afternoon I will be completing the Amazon side of things--I'm a little behind due to the big survey spammer and their 20+ entries, since I really didn't expect that--and then maybe I can do some analysis as well.

THANKS to everyone who actually took the survey for real, there were a lot of you and I am really grateful for your time and your help with this project. Thanks also to Ambrosia Software and Sports Mogul for advertising the survey on their boards (and boo to the three sources that didn't help, you know who you are, your name could have been here!).