New Thesis Idea

So it turns out my teacher isn't too keen on me interviewing people I know for my thesis.

I kind of figured that'd be the case anyway, so I have a back-up plan for handling my research. What I'm going to do is use the people who I was going to interview as launching points for finding people who are connected to the online gaming world. Rather than interviewing those people directly, I'm going to send them open surveys (roughly 20 questions) on their experience in online gaming world, and ask them in the survey to participate in interviews.

This way, I'll be able to gather preemptive information on each subject around which to frame the interviews, and from that frame my thesis. It'll also give me the best chance to plan out my interview schedule around my participants availability without invading into their lives too closely, and avoid the bias of interviewing my friends and family.

The only problem with this is the reliability of finding people through other people, and the time it'll take to hear back from those people. I'll have to schedule the survey carefully to make sure that I can include the interviews in my research without stretching too close to the deadline.

That solves that problem. However, another issue that I'm facing with this paper is the research question that I'm actually trying to answer. Right now, it's simply a matter of "how does this affect people, what does that mean, and why do they do it?", which might be considered too vague by my teacher. So I might need to come up with a more specific question to ask.

That's a bit of a problem, because I don't really have any specific questions I want answered other than those three things. I don't want to connect it to education or medical research, and while I wouldn't mind connecting it to the status of people's social or economic position, that's nto really my goal. What I want in the end is a paper that someone could pick up, read, and say "Ah, I understand this phenomenon now, and I can use this as a reference in answering my scholarly, medical, or socioeconomic questions about online gaming". Maybe even just shed some light on the effects it has on people, and the way people relate to one another in these online games.

I know, for example, that my Aunt has received friend requests from people that she has never met before or even heard of, just so they could get an extra person to join their guild or get their virtual item, and narrowly avoided being part of an online flame war by declining that request. That sort of interaction is what I want to research - the way people function in the online gaming world. I know for a fact that there is a dark side to it, but I also know that people keep going back to it and enjoy it anyway.

I could probably go on with the ways I want to research this topic *hence why I AM researching this topic*, but my main point is that I think I have a way in which I want to do it, and now I just need to know exactly where I'm going to go with that method.

Creative post tomorrow. I think I'll try to make it a fanfic of sorts.