On 12/29/2014 03:53 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
Insisting on experiments that are strictly boolean valued is too harsh if there
are other variables that are hard to measure, but don't completely destroy the
correlation between things that can be measured.
I agree completely. My hope isn't actually for a binary test. I was
initially more interested in a spectrum of willingness to play the game,
where [a]theists would be on one end (won't play the game at all) and
agnostics are on the other end (willing to play any game for an extended
period). But based on our conversation, here, I found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test
which has 4 categories: achievers, killers, socializers, and explorers.
(I mostly fall into the explorer camp.) And the expanded categories
down at the bottom are interesting, too.
Anyway, now I'm thinking [a]theists would show up as relatively small,
relatively well defined, subsets of the 4 (8 or whatever) dimensional
space, whereas agnostics would show up as larger, nebulous subsets.
E.g. I know I dislike FPS and crosswords (though games with mixed play
type are much better... an FPS with an occasional crossword would be way
better ... the only reason I still play GTA, in fact.) But every so
often (perhaps thrice a year), I'll play one just to see if I still
dislike them ... and I almost always have to finish once I start. The
same is true of bad fiction. I often start a novel, get to about page
100 and say to myself, "This book really sucks. I should stop reading
now." But I very rarely do. Sometimes a bad novel will sit on my
nightstand and loom over me until I force my way through it. (The last
novel I quit reading was Atlas Shrugged. I just couldn't take it anymore.)
My guess is that (ardent) [a]theists are quite efficient at a) knowing
the games for which they'll be rewarded and b) avoiding games for which
they won't. ("Reward" being various and often intangible.) Of course,
their [a]theism is probably only one of many effects of [a] deeper
cause[s]. And I care much more about the cause[s] than the effect[s].
--
⇔ glen
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