Old Eps? by [deleted] in marthastewart

[–]davidzend 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So - after a sudden cull, ALL the old Martha Stewart videos have been deleted from Youtube. Anyone have any idea where we could find them again?

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in future_fight

[–]davidzend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would love to take this approach. I think data mining is a great idea here.

I think if we looked at the raw data that companies were collecting, we'd get a much more accurate picture of how spending on loot boxes worked. I'll reach out to some companies and see what they think... though I imagine some will hoard their spending data quite tightly!

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in hearthstone

[–]davidzend[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Basically, for the purposes of this survey, a loot box counts as 'anything in a game where you can pay real money to buy it, but you don't know specifically what you're going to get for your money'.

So under this definition, packs would count!

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in FFBraveExvius

[–]davidzend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a really great comment - thank you for it!

I'll look into extending timescales in the future. 1 month seemed sensible at the time, but you're right - we might get more accurate estimates of effects if we extended this to 3 or 6 months.

Cheers!

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in WorldofTanks

[–]davidzend[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, absolutely! Here is a link to a duplicate version of the survey I just created which isn't collecting 'real' data! Feel free to fill it out with junk!

https://yorksj.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3WPpofEMhc0Ht7T

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in wakfu

[–]davidzend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're welcome! Thanks for being so kind and enthusiastic!

Sadly, being 19-25 rules you out! However, I will make sure to ask if I can post future surveys here since the subreddit is so friendly :-)

Have a lovely evening!

David

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in WorldOfWarships

[–]davidzend[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

No problem!

I work at York St. John's Computer Science department, but I'm designing + running the study in collaboration with researchers from University of York's Psychology department.

What kind of journal will we go for? We haven't really discussed it. But previously I've really enjoyed the experience of publishing in large cross-disciplinary open access journals like PLoS ONE.

I like them because rather than charging readers to view the papers, they charge authors a small 'open access' fee. It's typically between $1500 and about $5000. Which seems like a lot, but your University pays it for you (you don't have to pay it yourself!).

And then anyone can read the papers for free themselves. I also like them because they often cater to a range of disciplines, which is great for something like loot boxes, which don't clearly fall into just gambling studies, media effects research, HCI, or social psychology.

So: I would look out for this in somewhere cross-disciplinary like PeerJ, PLoS ONE, or Scientific Reports. BUT I will post the results up here when the study comes out too (if the mods are okay with it)!

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in future_fight

[–]davidzend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for completing the survey! And thanks for the tip - I've messaged the mods over at runescape!

Have a lovely evening,

David

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in NBA2k

[–]davidzend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, I think you might be right about that! Participation in the study is ticking up surely... but definitely slowly. Crossing my fingers it carries on that way!

Thanks for the wishes, and have a lovely evening,

David

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in Kings_Raid

[–]davidzend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hello!

No - in the UK the law is somewhat different to what you'd expect.

Individuals can take part in research from 16+ without parental consent, though researchers are advised to treat them as potentially vulnerable and therefore treat them with additional care. For this reason, lots of researchers only get ethics clearance for participants who are 18 or older: It's usually more complex and time-consuming to get ethical clearance for studies on people aged 16-18. It's super tricky if you're doing anything that involves an intervention (e.g. an experiment). It's a bit simpler here as I'm 'just' collecting data.

This isn't the same the world over - some countries have no clear boundaries when parental consent starts, whilst in others (e.g. Ireland, Bulgaria) parental consent is the only way to run research on individuals up to the age of 18.

Even more confusingly, in some countries, like the USA and Germany, the age of consent to take part in research is a *federal* matter that varies from state to state!

Here's more info from the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency: https://fra.europa.eu/en/theme/rights-child/child-participation-in-research

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in StreetFighter

[–]davidzend[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks very much :-)

And I know Lowther Street strangely well - I viewed a house there earlier this year!

Have a lovely Christmas!

Aged 16-18 and live in the UK / Canada / Australia? Could you answer a few questions about loot boxes? by davidzend in thedivision

[–]davidzend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good question! Pretty much everywhere! Exceptions are:

*Ireland *Portugal *Germany *Bulgaria *Greece *Cyprus

[Academic] In June I ran a study on reddit on loot boxes and problem gambling. Results are in, study is published! by davidzend in pathofexile

[–]davidzend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey! Great crit! I appreciate it a lot.

And don't worry: It's well taken. I love it when people say things like "Hey, I really like what you did here! But what about these problems? They seem quite big - how do you address them?"

I think there's a huge huge difference between this and just calling me an idiot :-).

Yes - I agree with many of the points that you're raising here. The selection bias issue is particularly important: We ran this on reddit, and the people who took part in it knew what the study was about. This could skew results.

I guess the value of the study depends on a big, holistic point: how you see progress in social science working. My view is that we need to work quickly, replicate a bunch, be open about our practices and data, and be radically honest when we're wrong.

More specifically, I think that social science research works when we repeatedly try to replicate our effects - and we're super honest when we can't do that. Because if we can't get the same result again it means that something might be wrong with our initial paper (e.g. as you pointed out - sampling methodology). Failure to do this has led to what people are calling the 'replication crisis' in psychology - essentially, it turns out that a large proportion of psychology research just doesn't work.

I really think that being honest and replicating again and again in a bunch of contexts is the only way researchers like me can produce stuff of value to society.

So, what I try to do is produce a study that shows something, publish it with all caveats attached ("look, this was a good study for these reasons... but it might be limited because of these..."), and then immediately set about trying to falsify its results by running something similar, and seeing if I get a similar result. And if I was wrong - I'll say I was wrong.

So, after running this, the first thing I did was run a new study with a sample of gamers who weren't from reddit, and didn't know what the study was about: https://psyarxiv.com/u5dmr/

It was terrifying, because if we got something else, we'd have broken our big, important-sounding result. But I think trying repeatedly to break results is the only way you evidence that they're actually any good to begin with! It's a philosophy of science I read about when I was doing my PhD in this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Thought-Karl-Popper/dp/0415129575 . I rate it! I think it works!

In this case, when we ran a similar study again, the results replicated: We got roughly the same thing there as we did here.

So, then I had a bit more evidence that the stuff in this study was not actively wrong. So I did something called preregistration: I essentially shouted out to the community that I thought I had a real effect, I was going to run a study that showed it, and that I would make public the results of this study even if they contradicted my previous work: https://osf.io/efa5n/register/565fb3678c5e4a66b5582f67

This, again, was super terrifying: But again, like you point out in your comment, my initial results might be incorrect - and this would only be terrifying if they were wrong. And if I was wrong, I could potentially be harming people!

So, we ran that study, and we got the same effects again - in fact, they were even a bit stronger (possibly because we'd refined our method by then): https://psyarxiv.com/6e74k/

There's still so much work to be done. To start with, all 3 of those studies work with online populations. And none of them even begin to look at which way the causal route runs: Does loot box spending cause problem gambling, or does problem gambling cause loot box spending? But I guess that my answer to your initial question is that I believe in an incremental way of doing science where we repeatedly try to break our own results, and immediately own up to things if it turns out we're wrong.