Channels of Communication

The questionnaire was distributed to two different types of potential participants via two channels of communication: gaming forums and emails.

4.1.4.1 Francophone Gaming Forums

The questionnaire was released on three francophone gaming forums: Steam²⁶, Canardpc²⁷, and Gamekult²⁸.

26 https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/25/ [accessed 11 Sep. 2017].

27 See http://forum.canardpc.com/forums/11-Jeux-vid%C3%A9o-sur-PC [accessed 11 Sep. 2017].

28 Available at https://www.gamekult.com/forum/c/discussions-diverses-jeu-video/forum-jeux-video [accessed 11 Sep. 2017].

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In order to select just a few forums among the numerous francophone ones that exist, two criteria were considered: activity and topic of discussion. Indeed, as the aim of releasing a survey online is for it to be seen, and eventually filled in, by as many gamers as possible, it was crucial to select forums whose members were active, i.e. on which there were new posts on a daily basis and a significant amount of answers to most posts (usually in a short time). Second, forums like Jeuxvideo.com were taken out of the selection not because they were not active enough or because they featured forums that were specific to different age categories –the message could very well have been posted on each of them- but because when reviewing the topics discussed, it appeared that people were talking about a wide variety of subjects that had not the slightest link to video games, except for a few occasional posts. We thus decided that it was better to stick with active and game-focused forums where people were deeply interested in discussing aspects related to video games proper. On top of that, a third implicit criterion was taken into account before posting on these forums: compliance with the forum rules. This was ensured by the consultation of the terms of use for each forum prior to the creation of a new thread.

The three selected forums were more precisely subforums: Steam’s francophone subforum, Canardpc’s section dedicated to PC video games and Gamekult’s consoles/PC games subforum. Though the latter also has another subforum dedicated to online games, the consoles/PC one was chosen on the grounds of being more generic and more tailored to our needs, since the research was not focused on online games exclusively but on all games operated on computers. All three subforums met the two criteria stated earlier on. Indeed, they all have a very active community. On May 4^th, 2017, when a posteriori information was gathered about posts and members, all forums featured extremely recent activity since the last message was posted within ten minutes of our checking.

• Canardpc’s video games subforum

Canardpc’s subforum is broken up into five subsections, namely video games (general topics), computer games, online and networked games, console games and fighting games. At the time of access, it featured 13,583 topics and 4,425,910 posts, the last one posted on May 4^th, 2017 at 5.57 p.m.

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• Steam’s francophone subforum

Regarding Steam, the total number of topics reached 20,687, with no way of knowing exactly how many posts there were in total. The last message was posted on May 4^th, 2017 at 6.03 p.m.

• Gamekult’s consoles/PC games subforum

For Gamekult, information was not displayed in the same manner: though information about the last message was available (posted on May 4^th, 2017 at 6 p.m.), there was no way of knowing how many posts and topics there were on the subforum. The data was only available for the all subforums put together, which gives an indication but is not specific to the relevant thread. Still, there were 357,900 topics overall and 16.6 million posts. Yet, a different indicator was available: an average number of new topics per month. The generic video games subforum featured an average of 12 new topics per month, this number reaching 16 for the specific online games one. Still, in the chosen subforum, some topics had more than 10,000 answers and sometimes over 5 or even 10 million views (for example topics about Nintendo, PS Vista and PC games news), a considerable number.

In the same way as the number of posts, the information provided about the number of members grouped together all subparts of the Gamekult forum, totalling 551,400 members, 4,400 of them having been active in the last 30 days. On the other hand, for neither of Steam and Canardpc’s subforums was it possible to access the number of members. Apart from appealing to complete strangers very interested in video games via gaming forums, another channel of communication was used, bringing a more interpersonal dimension to the questionnaire.

4.1.4.2 Acquaintances

Indeed, in addition to online forums, the questionnaire was sent via email to a selected group of acquaintances whose mother tongue was French and who played video games on computers, regardless of their sex and age. Eighteen emails were therefore sent, among which 6 were sent to women and 12 to men. In terms of age, the most represented category was 18 to 24 years old (12 people), followed by 25-34 (4 persons) and 35-44 and 45-54 (1 person each).

The two extremes were not represented. Regarding country of origin, most potential respondents came from France (13 out of 18), 3 from Belgium and 2 from Switzerland.

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This method of attracting potential participants was therefore biased towards young French men, a bias that has been found in the overall results, as will be explained in part 5.2 tackling the results regarding the questionnaire’s background information. Furthermore, this bias may have ricocheted and introduced a bigger bias in the study since these people, just like those on the forums, were encouraged to forward the message to anyone they could think of that would meet the research’s criteria (French mother tongue and playing video games on the computer) and who might be interested in taking part in the study. It is therefore likely that addressees would have sent the message to people in their network that may belong to the same categories as themselves, therefore further increasing the unbalance between categories. Still, there was no way to control for this effect, one that remains a possibility.

To conclude, the choice of combining both communication strategies (forum and acquaintances) relied on several arguments. On the one hand, the idea of leveraging acquaintances stemmed from the assumption that when there is an interpersonal stake, for example answering a questionnaire for someone that potential participants actually know, there is a higher incentive to participate, especially when the questionnaire is quite extensive. Yet, as answers were collected anonymously, there was no way of monitoring how many solicited people actually took part in the questionnaire and how many completed it. On the other hand, the use of both channels of communication, and especially forums, aimed at balancing the potential bias stemming from using one’s network to distribute largely the questionnaire, enabling the researcher to attract some categories that would otherwise have been less represented or missing in the data set.

Another concern that was very important to address prior to the research, as it involved human participants, is ethics. The following subpart will therefore detail the strategy adopted for that matter.

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