EVE General Discussion

Apologies for the slow reply.
As it happens, my dissertation and survey are specifically related to those games, and no others.
Although I would have thought you could tick a few boxes considering the forum you're posting on

As far as "other" goes though, in reference to your sig, I'm fairly sure mind games don't have a user interface that I'm aware of, and I'm always having difficulty with the controls!

Please don't do that:



Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do to help. I have never actually seen a survey get stickied or plugged for visibility. Sorry! Ed: This is actually wrong.

I have filled the survey with only nonsense. The EVE player in me told me to do it.

*** DISSERTATION GANKING ***

And suddenly dissertations just got harder.

It appears I was wrong, as another survey is actually currently stickied in GD. Sorry about that!

I'd recommend petitioning under the "Other Issues > Community" section and asking someone from the CCP Community Team that way about it. Good luck!

Not much to be done - in the interests of efficiency, and being able to sort the data I get at the end of all this, I was forced to limit my survey to three very rough "groups", based on which games I had access to for heuristic analysis.

In this, as with most dissertations (especially undergraduate ones), what you see here is the trade-off between time efficiency, and thoroughness.
I was forced to settle for picking the games with larger populations, and games I had access to/could afford to play/test.
The dissertation itself is due for the 19th, and between now and then I'm also going to have to create a testable single-player game of some sort, and run a proper analysis of ~that~ with focus groups and such.

Not counting the three courseworks due this month alone

True - but this was a review of UIs, rather than game types.

Group 1:

WoW
TOR
STO
Non-diegetic interface, classic MMORPG style of play, generally also inspired from Everquest and earlier (including UO I think? I never played that one, sadly )

Group 2:
WoT
MWO
PS2

These are "MMOs" of a sort, but they're also more Multiplayer games, with MMO elements, and hence are in a seperate group.
We see a combination of "Meta" and "non-diegetic".
We could argue that the MWO interface is Diegetic, and ditto for PS2, but we can just as easily class them as meta.

Group 3:
EVE
AO

These are MMOs for sure, but they both tend to defy the classic conventions, and yet have been successful (and in EVE's case, continues to do so, if we accept the constant increase in subs as a measure of success for the sake of discussion).
AO is pretty much non-diegetic, almost to an extreme, although that's just my opinion.

EVE, on the other hand could be non-diegetic, or "Meta" (ha!).
Some might argue that it's diegetic in that we see our ships through a "camera drone", and that the interface we see, is what a pod pilot would actually see.
On the other hand, the counter argument could be that the interface the pod pilot "sees", is an in-universe meta interface designed into the pod "software" (for as much as it can be called that, at any rate).

Suffice it to say, the focus is purely on the UI/GUI itself, rather than the game or universe as a whole, although I appreciate the point

Perhaps if I ever get around to a Master's degree, I can do a wider survey (or a deeper one) as a pure research project, rather than having to create an "artifact" as the marking scheme would call it.