The Results of the 1999 Survey

Preface

Dear fellow Thieves,
Dear Mass-Murderers, and Sneakers,
Dear interested Reader,

These are the results of the survey about the preference lists for the missions of the game "Thief - the dark project". The data collection of that survey was in April/May 1999. It had the goal to allow us to do more exactly statements about the preferences about the missions of the game of the people who play thief. Its origins were a small data collection in the gameforum in March 1999 - my reasons for the small survey in the gameforum were simple: Curiosity; the wish to add some well founded remarks in the usual "Undead vs. Humans"-debates; my ability and enjoyment to meddle around with statistics. That small survey had some interesting results, but the number of people who joined it was very small, and consisted mostly of the really hardcore fans of the game. I made some data analyses with that small survey, and posted them.

To my sheer surprise one of the designers of Thief entered at that time the debate in the gameforum, and made some very interested comments and suggestions. After telling me that he, and lglass, were also interested in statistics, he proposed that they would be even more interested if the number of subjects was larger.

Because I was at that time so deeply caught in the web of the game and in the community of Thiefs, and because Thief was still a source of enjoyment for me, I developed now the idea to redo the survey in the www. I did it. And I have to admit that I am still caught in the web of the game; not as deeply as before, but still deep enough to keep me in its fan community.

But now enough about the confessions about my addiction to the game Thief, and back to the results of the survey.

I would like to thank all you taffers for filling it out. I had never thought I would get such a huge number of serious responses to the survey.

And I would like to thank the people who helped me in the construction of the survey: GreyMouser for the programming of the cgi for the data collection; Jyre for helping me with the English language; Randy, Digital Nightfall and Ghost for their helpful comments about the structure and appearance of the survey. Thank you, guys and gal. :-)

The survey was made because of fun, not because of scientific goals. And even though the number of people who responded to the survey is amazingly huge, I didn't have the intention to analyse it as deeply as I would do in a scientific essay.

And finally, I should reveal myself as a fan of the really scary missions of the game, and as someone who dislikes the normal human missions. I will nevertheless present the results of the survey as they are, but that won't keep me from adding my own comments here and there - and of course it won't keep me from digging deeper into the possible reasons why many other people do not join my odd preferences for the not very normal missions.

- Lytha


If you should be scared now by the - pretended - seriosity of this page, you can exit here:
[Looking Glass Studios]   [Thief-darkproject.com]   [Lytha's Thief Collection]

"Thief - the dark project" is a trademark of Looking Glass Studios. Thank you for the production of this fine game. :-)