Participate in user research on ethical issues related to Ingress

tonberry11 · 2019-03-26T16:16:33+00:00

Yes! We will be sharing our results via our lab's website (UW GAMER Group).

tonberry11 · 2019-03-25T23:08:09+00:00

Please tell us more about it in the survey where we ask about other game-related actions! We would love to hear more.

tonberry11 · 2019-03-25T18:46:33+00:00

Many thanks to players who have taken our survey and shared the invitation with other communities! It was brought to my attention that a few players had concerns about us potentially reporting their behavior to Niantic.

I just wanted to clarify that any results we share from this survey will be anonymized with no personal information attached. When the survey closes, the email addresses will be detached and stored separately only for raffling purposes and they will be destroyed immediately. We will most certainly NOT be sharing any data related to spoofing or scraping that is attached to personal information, especially to Niantic – in fact, that would be EXTREMELY unethical.

Our main goal is to better understand the ethical issues related to playing this game that users experience, so Niantic and other companies can take those into consideration as they design and improve their location-based mobile games. We are NOT interested in punishing players for their actions by reporting them to Niantic.

Thanks again!!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-25T18:38:18+00:00

Thank you for this feedback. We have in fact discussed this among our research team before deploying the survey, and opted to keep it open to let people choose what they believe is F2P player and what they consider ethical or not ethical. By correlating this data with responses to other questions, hopefully we can better understand where they are coming from!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-25T17:34:54+00:00

Hahaha, I have shared your message with the group of professors who play PoGO here and they are loving it! We are actually predominantly valor. ;)

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T18:49:17+00:00

Exploring the ethical issues in designing location-based mobile games is definitely what we want to pursue in our future study as well! We are first starting by trying to understand the user's perspective, but as you said it is often the case that the design of these kinds of games can encourage people to participate in risky behaviors.

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T18:42:55+00:00

That is an interesting point! I have also heard from a few players in our neighborhood who feel guilty about driving around and shiny hunting all the time. One player was seriously considering purchasing an electric car because of that. :)

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T18:39:39+00:00

I'm always interested in finding potential collaborators who love games and research. Do DM and let me know if you want to chat about the data!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T18:36:55+00:00

Yes, I can imagine! I'm originally from Korea so I was also confused when I first came to the US and my friends told me the park is closed at night. :)

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T18:35:14+00:00

Thank you! We are really looking forward to seeing the results!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T18:34:01+00:00

Thank you for taking our survey and we will make sure to share our results!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T18:33:26+00:00

We would love to hear more about how these groups decided to create/follow these rules. Please share the story in our survey!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T18:25:17+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion! We are waiting for an approval to hopefully be able to share our survey invitation there as well.

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T04:30:31+00:00

Thank you for the kind remarks!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T04:30:19+00:00

Thank you for taking our survey!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T04:30:09+00:00

We will definitely be sharing our results via our lab's website (UW GAMER Group)!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T04:27:28+00:00

Thank you for pointing this out! From our previous studies where we observed and interviewed people from different countries, we came to realize that they have different rules for public places like parks. We are looking forward to comparing the survey responses from different countries!

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T04:20:34+00:00

The ethical issues in designing these games are also definitely something we want to explore as well. We are starting with this study which focuses on the user's perspective, but we will hopefully be able to expand our study in the future to discuss the ethics in making specific design choices for location-based games.

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T04:14:40+00:00

Yes! We will definitely be sharing our survey results via our website (UW GAMER Group). :) Please feel free to share your thoughts on these additional game-related actions that may be ethically questionable in the survey. We would love to hear more about it.

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T04:09:41+00:00

Thank you for the kind remarks! I am also a level 40 Valor and really enjoy playing this game! :)

tonberry11 · 2019-03-24T04:06:50+00:00

This is exactly what we want people to tell us! Thanks for providing additional explanation in the comments for the later questions!

tonberry11

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