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Survey: Academic Research on Game Jams

A topic by NiamhG created Nov 27, 2021 Views: 471 Replies: 11

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Hi there, I’m a game design student from Ireland and I’m writing a dissertation about game jams. (And hoping this research might be useful for running some jams in the future!)

If you’ve ever taken part in, organized or even just are interested in game jams, and have about 5 to 10 minutes to spare then I’d really appreciate it if you could answer a few questions.

Here's the link to the survey!

If all goes well, I'll be able to share the summary of the results in case they're helpful or interesting to anyone else!

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firecat3 years ago

Everyone please do not give out any information, these "students" are often scammers

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Afloof.devModerator3 years ago(+2)

Hey there,

I appreciate the concern, but are you sure about this? In the form OP mentions an e-mail that belongs to a university, and the form itself asks only game-dev questions, and doesn’t ask a single personal question.

Of course it’s always good to be wary when interacting with strangers, but was wondering if you’ve noticed anything I might have missed?

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NiamhG3 years ago

Hi, if there’s anything I can do to help confirm this is a student research project please let me know. If there’s way to privately message it, I could send a picture of my student ID to a mod? (~~Or even my dissertation notes/outline? I don't think scams generally include a few months worth of literature review.~~)

As you mentioned, the survey doesn't ask any personal questions or collect identifying data.

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No Time To PlayModerator3 years ago(+1)

We don't have any reason to suspect you. If needed, we can talk on Discord. I noticed the cross-posted announcement. Good luck with your dissertation!

Thank you!

it lines up with common scams

1) The author is hiding, the email in google forms is randomnumbers@mytudubin.ie while the website teachers do not list mytudubin.ie domain: https://www.tudublin.ie/connect/staff-directory/

It could be that the student get different domain emails but i am unable to confirm.

2) The original url is forms.gle but it redirects to doc.google

3) I am sure anyone doing survey wont ask randomly, the data will be too random even if the author believes to be truth the data isn't going to be correct. Too many basic questions that anyone can answer and too many can be answered in different ways. Now that it is on public, anyone and everyone will answer either truthfully or falsely.

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No Time To PlayModerator3 years ago

I see what you mean, but mytudublin.ie uses the DNS servers of TU Dublin, according to the whois database. Also I'm pretty sure docs.google.com belongs to Google. Sure, anyone can make a poll on Google, but it's not exactly some dubious other website. And the quality of the survey / results is another story. Rest assured that if it was asking for any personal information, like surveys from high profile sources often do, I'd have closed the tab instantly and never returned.

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NiamhG3 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

I understand the worry about scam surveys, hopefully I can clear up some of your concerns:

1) Students do get different domain emails than staff and the random numbers in the email address is my student number. (I’d much rather they used our names but that’s just the way the university assigned emails are.) It says as much on the TU Dublin website in a few places:

https://www.tudublin.ie/for-students/student-login/city-centre/

https://www.tudublin.ie/emailproject/students/

2) When you send a link to a Google survey, it gives you the option to shorten the URL. The (very long) original URL is docs.google but when you shorten it, it becomes forms.gle . You can check this yourself if you have a google account.

3) Posting a survey online like this does of course mean people can answer falsely or inaccurately, it’s one of the major downsides of anonymous surveys! But this method does also have its strengths and isn’t too uncommon for research like mine, and this isn't the only research method I'm using for the project. Either way, that does seem more a question about the validity of my results than whether the survey is a scam.

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firecat3 years ago

If you going to post surveys please next time have some kind of way to confirm it's real, something like teacher email or topic of project and maybe not using google forms as scammers often use those and they install Google Analytics to know more stuff.

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NiamhG3 years ago(+1)

I’m not sure what you mean about the topic of the project, I do explain exactly what the research project is in the first line of the blurb at the top of the form?

I’m also uncertain quite how big an issue this is – you’re the first to raise these sort of concerns and I’ve posted this in a lot of places and gotten a fair amount of respondents by now – but I suppose it’s good to play it safe! I’ll take it into account if there’s a next time, thank you.

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