Video Game Study -- Final Fantasy XIII series.

[ResearchStudent]

Hello, everyone.

I am a student at UNO. My professor and I are conducting research over contemporary video games and we decided to discuss and analyze Final Fantasy XIII. I was hoping that you might be interested in filling out a brief survey of FFXIII. It would be a great help. Anyone can fill it out.

Here's the link for the survey.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D8FKYXL

If anyone has any questions feel free to post them here on the thread or contact me directly at [email protected].

Thanks so much you guys!

Also: If you have any friends that are fans of the series as well, feel free to pass this survey along. The more, the merrier!

[loaf]

I stopped at your second question. I have no Gender Preference in a video game. I was unable to continue your survey.

[Alpha]

Yeah I can't say I have a preference either. I clicked male just so I could continue the survey.

[ResearchStudent]

That's totally fine! We won't be using that question in particular within the study; we just thought that question would be interesting.

@loaf, feel free to continue the survey some other time. You can skip any question you want. There will be four lists in the middle of the survey that are the most important parts to the survey. That is the section that we will be using for the study.

[Rowan]

I couldn't answer the gender question either. The pretext behind that question I would consider obvious and quite pointless, honestly.

[ResearchStudent]

I stopped at your second question. I have no Gender Preference in a video game. I was unable to continue your survey.

I couldn't answer the gender question either. The pretext behind that question I would consider obvious and quite pointless, honestly.

Hello; feel free to skip questions you don't wish to answer. Any information you can give will help with the study. Also, we have removed that particular question (do you prefer to play as a female or male character?) -- it was only supposed to prime you for thinking about gender portrayals in videogames. That question was not important. The most important portion of the study is the seven point semantic differential scale for Vanille, Fang, Lightning and Serah. It only takes about 7-10 minutes to complete. We are most interested in the characters' portrayal and the semantic differential scale provides a great way analyze the characters through an objective lens. If you haven't completed this portion of the survey, we hope you might reconsider; it would help a lot. We are relying on Final Fantasy fans to give us their honest answers of how they see the Final Fantasy characters. Thank you so much for participating.

GGS

PS, Rowan: UNO media research team is REALLY excited for Persona 5 to come out!

[Rowan]

yeah I cannot wait for P5 either! I finished your quiz, by the way.
What exactly is this research about anyway?

[LocoColt04]

I helped by helping!~

I'd like to shadow Rowan's question as well; can you give us a little more insight into the topic of the thesis?

[ResearchStudent]

yeah I cannot wait for P5 either! I finished your quiz, by the way.
What exactly is this research about anyway?

Thank you very much! We appreciate your participation.

We are looking for the impact that female portrayals in video games have on people.

I will try and give you a readers' digest version: in the study conducted by Yao et al., Sexual Priming, Gender Stereotyping, and Likelihood to Sexually Harass: Examining the Cognitive Effects of Playing a Sexually-Explicit Video Game they found that when players (in this case, heterosexual men) played Leisure Suit Larry (a game that encourages the players to see women as sexual objects), they were more likely to sexually harass and have overall negative attitudes towards women. They determined this by lexical tasks (not the same as our semantical tasks; their work was much more structured and less organic).

They also had to go through various scenarios and their actions/responses were recorded. The participants who played Leisure Suit self-reported a significantly higher likelihood to sexually harass. In addition, they had a significantly lower attitude of women overall than the other participants who played one of the other control games which were pac man and the Sims 2. Those who played Leisure Suit also reported a significantly lower attitude of women than when they first began the study. So we know that there is at least short-term, cognitive impacts from playing video games.
This is only what sparked the interest in the present study we are conducting.

With this study in mind, we wanted to analyze a contemporary game and see how the game communicates with its participant. Does the game ask its players to challenge female stereotypes we find in previous games? (the incompetent damsel, the mindless sex object, or the infantalized Lolita ... basically the female cast the Dead or alive franchise - but I think Team Ninja is doing a better job, recently. Side-tracked, sorry). We're not expecting dramatic results but we want to be able to gauge it. Also, we'll be analyzing the female characters' nonverbals. Their kinesics, proxemics, and haptics. How does Lightning perform leadership, how do the characters treat her as a leader? Do they give up their personal space when she is in frame etc. etc. We'll be asking those kinds of questions when analyzing the content portion of the study.

Sorry, I've posted so much. All in all, we chose this game because we think that this game would be great for discussion considering how much detail go into the characters.

Hope that helps.

Thanks again for participating in the survey!

[LocoColt04]

I'd definitely be interested in reading the research results and thesis (if applicable) when everything is completed. How large is your sample size thus far? I'm going to see about broadening your pool of participants.

[ResearchStudent]

I'd definitely be interested in reading the research results and thesis (if applicable) when everything is completed. How large is your sample size thus far? I'm going to see about broadening your pool of participants.

That's great! Right now we are at about 50 and we want it to be at least over one-hundred. We also have a Japanese version of the survey but my colleague has that in Japan right now for another study and he's getting live surveys and interviews (the textbox questions) with people. He's very lucky. We will be using both results for data collection and perhaps even comparing the two if we have enough. We won't be combining the two data collections however - we don't want to misrepresent cultural impacts, values etc. etc. It should be interesting if I get enough on my end or not!

The more, the merrier. I would love to see it reach well over 100. We can always accommodate more data. Participants may also retake the survey if they wish to. We will use the most recent submission if someone retakes the survey, just so everyone knows.

[Rowan]

Anymore info on this??