I'm trying to be a little more adventurous in creating a better user-experience - so you'll see the dynamic item-script in this survey, the new "explore what's available" widget, and hopefully a user-aware component starting the next survey (the back-end DB will keep track of sections you've previously filled out and let you skip them).

I’m also trying to be a little more verbose when reporting the stats, mostly in reporting effect-size estimates so that it’s easier to understand the relative importance of contributing factors given that so many factors reach statistical significance with the large sample size. I’m also running multiple regressions using age, gender, motivations and personality traits as the independent variables to sort out the relative contribution of these variables in observed phenomena.

A particularly interesting finding presented in this issue was the multiple regression analysis showing that the personality trait Extraversion (taken from the Big-5 factors) was the best predictor of how players projected their own identities onto their avatars. Introverts are more likely to create characters that were similar to who they were, and in some cases more of “who they really are”, whereas extraverts are more likely to create characters that were different from themselves, perhaps trying out new roles and identities.