A study about you guys!

[meffer5]

Hello my name is Andrew Shields and I am soon going to begin conducting interviews and taking polls for my upcoming research paper. I will be examining the aspects of internet communities and the social interactions therein. I will not be able to conduct these polls until my letter of intent is approved. I chose the accursed-farms site as one of my samples due to the professional and friendly environment it presents. please leave me a reply here or email me at [email protected] or [email protected] if you are interested. for the most part I will wish to conduct these interview via webcam or voice chat. although im not picky so irc or emails work just as well. This project is for no monetary gain on my part and will follow strict confidentiality guidelines. This paper is for my senior project and is something I am deeply interested in. I am hoping to show in this article that usage of the internet and gaming are not socially isolating as some claim, but are merely different ways to communicate and interact with others. Your names will not be disclosed if you prefer. And whatever you say will be what is shown (as in i wont say you all love porn just because one person made a comment to that effect).

If you made it this far down good for you and thanks for taking this seriously.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Moved to the Misc AF Stuff forum. Don't see this as necessarily gaming related.

[meffer5]

ah well thank you

[HLPrincess]

Looks interesting. I want to take part!

[meffer5]

thanks for your interest. I will make sure to send a pm or email your way when I get my project approved

[HLPrincess]

Sure, I'm waiting then!

[meffer5]

Update: the project is slowly moving but it is progressing. My letter of intent is nearly ready to be sent in for approval.

so as for how this is going to work; I am conducting this poll on many sites both large and small. I will be creating a website as well as part of this project mainly as a place to archive all by interview data and poll statistics (this is meant to be shown as the final "product" and display the learning curve I take). The site will also have open forums based upon the project. In addition to polls and online interviews I will be surveying and interviewing people at random in the real world. Hopefully I can be taken seriously enough to get decent results from this. As always I will post more info when it becomes available. the project will be available in its entirety when its finished and I plan to regularly upload and post data as things progress. On a final note this project is only possible with participation so if you find the time, any data is valuable and I will try to find some way to thank those who help. I plan to be open on this project so I will read any feedback I receive.

[meffer5]

As it turns out I was turned down with my letter of intent based upon the scope of the project being too large. I am rewriting it and the focus will remain on internet/gaming culture. The main concern was the time it would take me to create and entire functioning website in addition to the research. So instead I will use a prefabricated website model and archive data on that. If you have any suggestions as to what sources to use and what hosting to use that would be most helpful. keep in mind I have zero (monetary) sponsorship for this (that's why my request to make a site was turned down) and I have little personal capital to begin with.

[meffer5]

the time-frame on this project is from basically now to some time in late April or very early May.

[HLPrincess]

Nice! I thought the project will be abandoned eventually ;d

[meffer5]

Nice! I thought the project will be abandoned eventually ;d

 

only thing is, if I abandon this then I don't graduate. so ill start interviewing as soon as I get approved and get a mentor to sponsor me. sometime soon hopefully.

[BTGBullseye]

If you want to interview me, I'd be fine with it. Not likely to do it as a video chat or over the phone. IRC is good, as are PMs here. Heck, I'd even do it in a forum thread. (now didn't that sound dirty... )

[meffer5]

thanks for the interest. I just finished the 4th iteration of the letter of intent as the board is unfamiliar with the internet (exactly the point of this whole project) and does not quite understand what im trying to do. hopefully if i get it approved tomorrow I can begin production.

[meffer5]

I have just purchased this laptop and other bits of hardware and software as well. If all goes well I will begin doing interviews sometime this month or early next year. I will be showcasing this site as well as content and sessions of gameplay both on PC and Xbox. I will send a schedule of when i will be online recording so if you want to pop in and add to the conversation you can.

[HLPrincess]

Okay! Let us know

[BTGBullseye]

Okay! Let us know

^^^ This. ^^^

[HLPrincess]

Okay! Let us know

^^^ This. ^^^

 

What again?!

[BTGBullseye]

Again.

[meffer5]

well I did the first test video today and lo and behold

no sound.this is for the irl part of these videos (video camera and webcam).

later on im going to need software to record gameplay and voice chat during gameplay. any ideas?

also my Xbox live gamertag is meffer4 and I have a video capture card for that as well. Expect some questions on the forums in the next week or so and a schedule of interview times as well.

[BTGBullseye]

Fraps. It's one of the best screen capture programs there is. It also shows your screen's framerate, can record just video, video with audio, or just take screenshots.

 

http://www.fraps.com/

 

Beware that your framerate in games drops considerably when recording simply because of the sheer amount of resources it requires to capture, encode, and write to disk what you have on your screen.