A case study over Pathfinder and teaching ethics


Gamer Life General Discussion

Sovereign Court

I am a graduate student at Texas State University and as a part of my Masters of Applied Philosophy and Ethics program I am running a case study over how effective playing Pathfinder can be at teaching and reinforcing ethics!

Here is my campaign for the study.

The study is really quite simple: Participants play Pathfinder for 12 weeks. They take surveys at the beginning, middle, and end of the study testing their ethical sensitivity and at the end of the study we compare the results of those who played Pathfinder to a control group who did not! This should give us a definite indication of whether playing RPGs helps strengthen or develop ethical decision making or sensitivity.

If this interests you, please feel free to ask me more about the study, or check out that webpage to see how you can help us be more successful! And PLEASE feel free to chime in if you have any suggestions or advice! This is a fascinating field of study for me and I absolutely love that I'm getting to combine two of my biggest passions into one awesome project.


I honestly think that in normal young adult the ethics should be already too strongly formed to be shaken in an appreciable manner by 12 weeks of sporadic play. I would venture the guess that you would need at least a year long exposure in a sensitive age period like 11-18 to actually come up with some data worth the paper it's written on.
Not to add the classic "test skew" of people actually knowing they are having a test.

I'll gladly read the result, anyway.

Sovereign Court

Dekalinder wrote:

I honestly think that in normal young adult the ethics should be already too strongly formed to be shaken in an appreciable manner by 12 weeks of sporadic play. I would venture the guess that you would need at least a year long exposure in a sensitive age period like 11-18 to actually come up with some data worth the paper it's written on.

Not to add the classic "test skew" of people actually knowing they are having a test.

I'll gladly read the result, anyway.

You know, I'm inclined to lean towards agreeing with you. Except my university requires an ethics course as part of its core curriculum, so that tells me they at least believe there is some value in undergraduates being exposed to this sort of stuff.

I would agree that younger adolescents are more LIKELY to have a bigger or more noticeable effect, but that does not mean that adults would not also have a noticeable effect. Especially if these are 18-20 year old college students.

However, in order to test that sort of experiment on minors, I'd first need something like this to say "here, look, here's reason to suspect that this might be effective on minors!" So a more manageable (read: experiment where I don't have to go through the hoops of testing on minors) is more feasible for getting that initial data.

I have had LOTS of discussion though about what the results of this study could mean for one day having RPGs in middle schools and high schools as part of an ethics-based curriculum.

Grand Lodge

I would have someone who is more involved with the language of ethics look over your proposal. I think you are using relativism where you should be using relative. But I could be wrong.

Specifically:

Quote:


And then there will be other gods/moral codes/etc that are more Relativism, where they are only wrong within the culture that believes them to be wrong.

I am pretty certain that should be "are more relative." Possibly "are more relativistic" but I don't think that is correct.

Are you using an established benchmark survey for this? Or are you writing your own? Do you have a control group of non roll players you will be surveying on the same interval?

Sovereign Court

FLite wrote:


Are you using an established benchmark survey for this? Or are you writing your own? Do you have a control group of non roll players you will be surveying on the same interval?

I wrote my own survey with the aid of both my faculty sponsor and the chair of my department. There is a control group that will be used to compare the results against.

Basically, half the participants play games and take surveys, the other half just does the surveys, and at the end we compare and publish the results.


FLite wrote:

I would have someone who is more involved with the language of ethics look over your proposal. I think you are using relativism where you should be using relative. But I could be wrong.

Specifically:

Quote:


And then there will be other gods/moral codes/etc that are more Relativism, where they are only wrong within the culture that believes them to be wrong.

I am pretty certain that should be "are more relative." Possibly "are more relativistic" but I don't think that is correct.

Are you using an established benchmark survey for this? Or are you writing your own? Do you have a control group of non roll players you will be surveying on the same interval?

The section quoted by FLite has several problems at the editing level. In this sentence you have: started the sentence with a conjunction, used forward-slashes where commas were needed, did not punctuate the abbreviation of "et cetera", capitalized a non-proper noun in the middle of the sentence, used the noun form "relativism," when you needed the adjective form "relative", comma splice, and changed tense.

This does not live up to the standards needed for serious academic consideration. TSU has a writing center located in ASBN 101. They have free one-on-one tutoring/editing sessions available to students by appointment.


Are the people playing Pathfinder new to RPGs? Or have they been playing for years?

Are the GMs taking the survey?

I am curious about the results.


Sounds like an interesting idea - I hope you'll share your findings assuming it works out.

On a side note, it seems like surveys would be far too subjective to accurately measure any change in ethics (emotional intelligence?)

It seems like a test of some type might work better. See how everyone scores on the ethics test before they start playing, then half way through, then at the end, without revealing correct or incorrect answers to the test takers until the entire project is finished.

Best of luck.


How many different groups are you running? Because a study sample size of 4 is too small for any statistical analysis. Also if you're specifically testing Pathfinder's affect on ethical decision making you should be testing it against groups playing (predominately) other RPGs. Conversely if you're looking at the effect playing RPGs has on ethical development you'd need to look at people playing a wide range of RPG systems.

For that matter what is your study even doing? I mean you'll get much better results from sampling the thousands of people who play RPGs than those willing to play in your campaign for however long.

If you're running enough different groups for a meaningful sample size you'd need other people GMing for you; how do you plan to account for variance in GMing capacity?

Maybe it would be more accurate to say you're testing your ability to mold people's ethical decision making processes through games (using Pathfinder as the specific rules set in the case study)?

Sovereign Court RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32

I'm also really uncertain of your ability to get a statistically significant result from the study you propose. I gather your hypothesis is something like "Playing RPGs help strengthen ethical decision making," or something similar? Playing only Pathfinder also means it's iffy to extrapolate to "all RPGs" - I'd be interested if you'd get the same results after 12 weeks of playing World of Darkness, or HOL, or FATAL(eww).

This isn't a dissertation so it can be a somewhat small study - but I'd be concerned that you are using a sample of convenience, which is a terrible way to sample a population. Also with such a small n your ability to truly analyze the results or extrapolate to a population will be compromised. If you don't intend to do a statistical analysis due to it being a case study, you might dispense with the survey and do interviews to be able to probe responses more deeply.

Is your goal to simply demonstrate that you can design and perform a study as part of an assignment or Master's thesis? Or are you trying to actually do a study that has real scientific merit and could be worthy of publication in a peer-reviewed journal? -Because your construction seems more like the former than the latter. I'm sure your advisors are aware of this and would let you know if you were choosing a wrong path.

Please don't take this as criticism of you; I'm just trying to help you think in ways that will ensure your study gets at the concepts you want it to.


This does sound interesting. I have heard of studies that show people who read more have greater empathy, and empathy tends to lead to ethical behavior. Meanwhile, people who play RPGs are more likely to read. Thus, playing RPGs is likely correlated with ethical behavior, but it is probably not causative.

Sovereign Court

Lots to address here!

So the study itself, the sample size is going to be 50 with the $3300 goal. If we can break that we really want the sample size to be more like 100 or even 200.

I agree that we need to play multiple game systems to really judge the effectiveness of RPGs as a whole, but the problem is we have to start somewhere and unless we can get massive funding, we have to start small. The idea is to do a smaller, less-inclusive study to get SOME results on the table and from there we can expand to much larger studies that do incorporate multiple game systems, more in-depth testing procedures for determine change in ethical sensitivity, and that sort.

In short, the problem is a catch-22 of nobody wanting to support a big study of RPGs without some numbers to back up that there's a reason to, and we can't get those numbers unless we do a study. The compromise is this smaller, less fully-formed study that focuses on just Pathfinder.

I do agree with most criticisms here. Don't get me wrong, most of what y'all say is technically accurate. The problem is working with what we have and with what my advisor believes is most feasible. What they think is most feasible is recruiting undergraduate students of all sorts of educations background with little concern whether they have played RPGs before and to what extent (other than to have it be marked on the results as to which subjects had experience and which didn't).

Hopefully we can get a huge surge in funding and make it to where this can be 200 people sample size, which is consider large enough that it should still give us some good data. At the very least it would give us good enough data that we can start getting more traditional funding from places that want us to replicate the results or refine them. From there we can have a lot more control over the finer details!


If your concern is limited funding have you considered creating a free-ware computer game designed to test your ability to affect people's ethical decision making capability? Or a crowd-source funding option?

Sovereign Court

Did you see the link in the first post? That IS a crowd source funding option. It's crowdfunding for science experiments basically.


Try to find a way to cut the DM fees by having someone volunteer? maybe one of you guys? 2 guy's sharing the allotted time can do it without distrupting their work routine, and we are still talking about something that the vast majority of people already do for free.
Honestly, that budget distribuition makes it stink a little, especially among the enthusiast that would be the vast majority of your foundraiser target. A token compensation for like travel expenses or food during the session could sound ok, but 40$ per session looks a bit of a stretch.


Pathfinder, as a game where ethics is not only built into the system but also the game world, seems like a pretty good choice to use for this test.

For those doubting that a 12 week once per week event could contribute to an individual's ethical outlook, that would also discount nearly every college course. From a purely anecdotal standpoint, I can say that I've seen a college course affect someone's ethical outlook.

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