qualitative research
My research question for this project was what people do when you follow them around in the game. In order to answer this question, I entered the world and followed the first people that I saw. I followed a level six player named Coodle while he was trying to accomplish his task. He killed six rockjaws and never stopped running. He protected us from the first couple rockjaws but we helped with the 4th and 5th. We started following him at 2: 43 and ran after him the whole way but he never answered, even though we continued to laugh at him and get in his way. He also refused to talk to us. I gave up on the level six player and went to find other players to interview. I asked countless players on higher levels to answer a few questions but none of them would answer me. Finally, I found a level 1 player named Hexxas and I started to follow her. After following her for a while she stopped and waited for me to say something. I asked her to answer some questions and she agreed. I asked how it felt to have someone follow her and she said “it creeped her out” and made her nervous especially because she was new to the game. She ended up asking me how old I was and how long I had been playing. After a short conversation, other level one players asked to talk to us as well and everyone asked each other questions they had about the game. Then everyone started dancing and laughing. After doing my research, I found out that I did not have to say I was a researcher to talk to other level one players who were new to the game. They were a lot friendlier than higher-level players as well and wanted to talk to me too.
