What Do Deep Statistical Analysis on Gaming Motivation and Game Characteristics Clusters Reveal about Targeting Demographics when Designing Gamified Contents?

Alireza Tavakkoli, Donald Loffredo, Mark Ward Sr.

This paper presents the comprehensive results of the study of a cohort of college graduate and undergraduate students who participated in playing a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) as a gameplay rich with social interaction as well as intellectual and aesthetic features. We present the full results of the study in the form of inferential statistics and a review of our descriptive statistics previously reported in [46]. Separate one-way independent-measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA)’s were used to analyze the data from several instruments to determine if there were statistically significant differences first by gender, then by age group, and then by degree. Moreover, a one-way repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the clusters in the 5 gaming clusters on the Game Characteristic Survey. Follow-up paired samples t-tests were used to see if there was a statistically significant difference between each of the 10 possible combinations of paired clusters. Our results support the hypotheses and outline the features that may need to be taken into account in support of tailoring gamified educational content targeting a certain demographic. Sections 1, 2, and 3 below from our pervious study [46] are included because this is the second part of the two-part study.

[46] Tavakkoli, A., Loffredo, D., Ward, M., Sr. (2014). “Insights from Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games to Enhance Gamification in Education”, Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, 12(4), 66-78.

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