If that’s how you set up the study on purpose, that’d be one thing (and then you’d have to be able to justify that that’s an appropriate measure of where subjects wanted to be). But the proposed idea, as I understood it, was that each different server or segment of the world was to be a different treatment or control group, each getting the local economy slightly tweaked to see how it would change players’ behavior. When you have people switching between groups in a controlled experiment—or even just talking to people in the other groups—you run into problems with validity like treatment diffusion and resentful demoralization. Plus, you need to be able to say in such an experiment that subjects are put into experimental groups randomly; if the players select their own group knowing what the economic differences are, you could see differences in behavior between groups that are caused by a high congregation of a certain player personality type, for example, rather than by your manipulation of the economy.

If I’m alone, I just feel the embarassment that the participants should be feeling.

Personally, if the thing I’m watching hits too close to home, I can be embarrassed no matter what the company. I suspect I have a different experience watching Beauty and the Geek from most (non-geeky) people: To them, it’s like Jerry Springer, an opportunity to laugh at people who are a couple standard deviations from the mean in either direction of ditzy/brainy. To me, it’s like seeing every embarrassing social situation of my life replayed and magnified for a national television audience.

A moose bit my sister once…

No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush….

Wouldn’t that *be* your data? Most popular server wins.

I was non-plussed by the MW “w00t” story, but now that I think about it that’s probably b/c the GF and I have been using that in speech for about a year now.

The Sciencedaily story is interesting. The only time I feel that company makes a difference is when watching something like Jerry Springer. I’m not sure why, but I can laugh *at* someone much easier if someone else is present. If I’m alone, I just feel the embarassment that the participants should be feeling. (And yeah, I know JS is mostly theater.) I’m sure that says something really ugly about either people in general or me in particular.

A moose bit my sister once…