How awesome a Halo: Reach player are you? Are you part of the best Halo team or are you a wicked lone wolf? The University of Colorado at Boulder wants to know. We’re conducting a scientific study of Halo: Reach players and we need your help to do it. In exchange for less than 10 minutes of your time, we’ll show you how you stack up against the universe of Reach players, and you’ll help us do cool science with the 600,000,000+ games of Halo: Reach you’ve generated. SIGN ME UP: https://www.cs.colorado.edu/haloreach/ The Halo:Reach Project Team More about the project: https://www.cs.colorado.edu/haloreach/about
Sounds really interesting, I'm down. Mind if I ask what kind of stuff you're looking to find with this study? By that I mean how far reaching are the conclusions you're looking to draw? I've always thought that it'd be really fascinating to look in to personality and psychological traits of players and how they relate to thins like mental/strategic approach, and particularly how the interaction of these personalities contributes to success or failure as a team even aside from raw skill factors like aim.
It's a legitimate scientific study, meaning that I'm really a university professor and we're really doing science here. The study focuses on team dynamics in competitive environments, and the website mainly asks a few standard demographics questions and some questions about how you play Halo and which gamertags you play with. For instance, we'd like to know whether people play Halo differently based on their age (the conventional wisdom is that younger players have awesome twitch reflexes and so make great lone wolves and older players have to play as a team to compete, but is this really true?), and whether playing with regular teammates (as opposed to random matchmaking teammates) improves your overall performance. And, we're interested in things like leadership, specialization, cooperation, etc. Prof. Aaron Clauset Department of Computer Science University of Colorado Boulder
This sounds really interesting to me as I've already done mathematical models on other parts of video games but never had the resources to work with something like this. Currently I'm really busy with an ozone modeling project, things I get paid for come first, but I would like to talk to you about possibly taking a larger part in this, for free of course.
Sign up here: https://www.cs.colorado.edu/haloreach/ You create an account so that you can return to the website later. This is necessary because if the Halo: Reach Stats API servers are busy, it can take a while to download your game history. Feel free to create an email account just for this, and please don't reuse a password from elsewhere. [br][/br]Edited by merge: @pyro6666, sure, send me an email through my colorado.edu account and we can talk about it. At the very least, it would be great to get some feedback on the stuff we're doing (a low level commitment of time on your part).
This seems like a fantastic idea, I'm in. There's a problem with the Parental Thing, stupid 17 years old, DAMN YOU!
I already finished the survey, there seemed to be some repetitive questions, a lot like on personality quizzes. I suppose the results should be interesting.
So...funny story..I'm actually currently in Colorado for a family vacation...and we drove through the Boulder campus yesterday to just look at it. It's such a beautiful campus. Now for being on topic...this is actually a really cool thing you guys are doing. It'll be interesting to see what kind of statistics and data come out of all of this.
I used to take Halo very seriously, but recently took a long break. I came back 1) played it more for fun, and 2) was terrible in comparison to what I had been. But I guess my point is this; are you looking at our history, or are we participating in a specific game set up by you? If you look at history, my games would likely skew the data because (recently) I have been going in more about joking around, goofing off, annoying my friends, etc than winning and racking up stats. To make it clear, I dropped my K/D from a 2.3 down to a 1.3 in the past month or so. How exactly are you testing it? I am very interested in the science behind player psychology myself, I hope you plan to keep us updated on the results! I've been curious about this one myself.
This is a cool study, Im interested to see what the results are. Which is why I opted in for the email, I suppose. Interestingly, Im in the top 10% for games played and top 13% for Commendation progress. Unsurprisingly though, my top weapon is DMR, with 64.1% of all kills done with it. The closest after that is melee, at 15.9%. You can tell which playlist I stick to, cant you?
The first part of the survey asks you a bunch of questions about how you prefer to play Halo and how you play with your "primary group of friends" (our best effort to describe the group of people you play with most regularly). So, you can choose whether your answers are about how you play now, or how you used to play. The last part of the survey looks at your entire game history and builds a list of gamertags of potential friends, sorted by how often you've played with them. Here, you just mark which ones are online / offline friends. It would be most helpful if you answered based on your entire Halo history rather than just your most recent history. And that's the whole survey. We're aiming to get about 1000 people to participate, but are currently pretty far from that mark. Please help us spread the word by inviting your friends to participate, too. (You can do this either by forwarding them this thread or by using the "Invite friends" feature on the Halo: Reach Project website.)
The ONE time I put my actual age and I get an error after I completed the whole survey. Edit: Its fixed now.
Bump. We're still looking for participants (up to about 350 out of the 1000 we're hoping for). If you've done it already, please consider telling your friends about the project.
I'm just going to bet that teams who use team work probably win Invasion 75%-90% of the time. I'm not so sure about general objective games but I bet it's close. Slayer seems to mostly be Lone Wolves, nobody really teams up that often unless they are on the same TV and Xbox. Although when people do team up (not on same TV, hossibly hard to play that way) or at least stick close to one-another they can be much more effective. It's going to be interesting to get some actual statistics. Also if you're looking for examples in team dynamics you may want to try the Battlefield series if you do a follow-up study. That game and Left 4 Dead are leagues ahead of other games in getting people to form teams. On second thought L4D would probably be the better choice. In battlefield some people will still go Lone Wolf and use their team mates as spawns, in L4D if you don't try team work you all die quickly. BTW: Is there anything about gender in that questionnaire? There's another discussion on here about girl gamers and no one can seem to agree on a statistic.
These are all great ideas and questions, and fairly inline with our own thinking. The objective games should be the best place to see teamwork, but it will still be tricky to quantitatively measure it. In terms of looking at other games entirely (L4D, etc.), the main issue is being able to get access to the underlying data on behavior inside the game itself. With Reach, that data is available (on bungie.net). For the others... not so much, as far as we've seen. And, yes, we do ask participants to tell us M/F, and we're interested to know, for instance, if women and men play Halo differently. Hopefully, we'll be able to figure it out. Thanks for your interest! Please consider taking the survey, and also spreading the word to other folks.