week 6 Flashcards
What are video games?
All play takes place within a magic circle: a temporary world within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performace of an act, within special rules apply. Play within the circle is secluded from the real world.
Games are structured form of play with quantifiable win and loss conditions.
First study on violet video games
Compared aggressive responses after playing a violet game or a non-violet game
No significant differences on three measures of aggression.
Why men play more games?
- Evolutionary psychology: men like killing, women more daily games as Sims
- Skills and abilities: better eye-hand coordination, navigation and orientation
- Socialization theories: peers, gender, cultural
- Identification: lower percentage of female characters in games, identification is higher in men
- Sexualization: sexualized female characters
Effects: can influence perceptions of real-world gender roles, players reportet lower cognitive capabilities od women in general.
In general: it’s long term effect and for only specific genres of games. - Game designers are almost male, making games for males.
Selection of video games
- Escapism: finding empowerment that men lacking in real world
- Self-determination theory: people are intrisically motivated to select entertainment that meets inherent human needs.
Intrinsic needs involved in self-determination:
Competence: seek to control the outcome and experience mastery, can fulful emotional needs that are unique to this medium: pride, dominance, accomplishment.
When: unclear and uncertain, school leads to feelings od incompetence.
Autonomy: desire to be causal agents of one’s own life
When: force them where to be, what to do, what to know, what to become.
Relatedness: desire to interact and experience a connection with others.
When: online contact is easier because of cue management, especially for those who are socially anxious.
MDA model
Mechanics: the actions a player can perform, the effects of these actions on the game world
Dynamics: the interaction between player and mechanics, combination of dynamics provides the gameplay
Affect: the emotional reaction that emerges from the gameplay, Competence – autonomy – relatedness.
Organic learning
Follows the technique: Kishotenketsu
Ki: topic introduction
Sho: follows the introduction
Ten: Twist or new topic
Ketsu: brings story to its conclusion
Intransitive Relations
Allows for interesting choices and strategy since there is no predetermined winning option. Whenever a relation holds between one object and a second and also between that second and a third, the relation fails to hold between the first and the third.
Transitivity can also be countered by asymmetrical balance.
- With asymmetrical balance, the relations are still transitive in one aspect, but reversed in another aspect.
- Asymmetrical balance and intransitivity allow for powerful game experiences because they provide multiple viable strategies (preferably supporting a variety of playstyles and strategies).
Feedback loops
Positive feedback loop
Enlarges the difference between players (snowballing)
Makes it harder for loser to recover
Negative feedback loop
Reduces the difference between players (catch-up, rubber banding)
Encourages loser recovery
Dynamic feedback loop
Automatically adjusts the difficulty to the skills of the player
Pacing
the speed at which events occur. First progress quickly to build up your investment perception, and once you are invested, it starts to get harder and takes longer to achieve rewards.
Endowed progress
when people receive a feeling of advancement towards a distant goal, they’re more likely to try harder and try longer to reach that goal, relative to people who have an equally easy goal but who had no sense of momentrum of the start.
Game flow
Mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involment and enjoyment.
In order to experience flow, the perceived difficulty of a challenge is constantly adjusted to the player.
Increasing difficulty caused a stronger flow experience than lowering or continuous difficulty. experienced stronger when both skill and difficulty are high.
The zeigarnik effect
tendency to experience intrusive thoughts about an objective that was once pursued and left incomplete. We experience dissonanse.
Sunk costs fallacy
escalating commitment by citing prior investments as justification for future ones, even tho these costs are gone, immutable and completely out of picture. The more you invest in game, the less likely you are to quit.
Responses to games
Emotional: playing helps kids discover proper human interaction and control their emotions.
Cognitive & psycological: frequent gamers showed better skills at visual perception
Forbidden Fruit Theory
Children feel attracted to inappropriate media simply
because it is considered inappropriate for them. Children feel a stronger attraction to
trying something due to the fact that it is forbidden.
Similarly, Tainted fruit theory posits that lower age rating labels will decrease interest
because it makes the violent content seem tame.
Theories for Effects of Violent Games
Desensitization
* Repeated exposure to the pain and suffering of other people in violent games will
desensitize you, causing you to feel less empathy for the victims of real-world
violence, and making you possibly more likely to inflict harm upon them (Engelhardt
et al., 2011).
Schema theory
* Aggressive behavior comes from the knowledge structures (schema) that you have
learned through repeated exposure to violent entertainment (Huesmann, 1986)
* If you learn that violence is the (only) solution to conflicts, you are more likely to
interpret real-world situations as aggressive, and more likely to respond violently
when confronted with a conflict.
Dopamine monopoly
necessary but not sufficient
* Dopamine is released while playing a video game. Higher volumes of dopamine are associated with more frequent video game playing.
* Excessive gaming before age of 22 can physically alter dopamine pathways in the
brain
* Game addiction is associated with dopaminergic deficiency which makes such
individuals vulnerable to relapse.
* Only the persistent release of dopamine is not enough for addiction to persist. The
behavior should salve psychological troubles. Addiction occurs when our brain learns
that the behavior is critical to our emotional stability.
Comorbidity
Comorbidity is the presence of a disorder co-occuring with a primary disease or
disorder. The additional disorder may be a behavioral or mental disorder.
Comorbidity is more often the rule than the exception among game addicts.
Clinically, in some patients, gaming excessively can be a way of coping with a
comorbid condition, which may progress into Gaming Disorder.
Money from free games
Advertising
Microtransactions: exchange real money to virtual currency. <- most popular monetization technique.
The Value of Virtual Currencies
- By turning real money into a virtual representation of money, the
psychological value of money is lowered, which makes it easier to spend - Suspension of Judgement is a structural characteristic of gambling that
temporarily disrupts the gambler’s financial value system and potentially
stimulates further gambling - Artificial Scarcity: Products that are limited in supply or hard to get will
be more attractive than products that appear abundant
Popular Microtransactions
Competition. Any in-game item that boost the performance of a player, giving them an
advantage over other players. These goods can enhance the player’s in-game skill by
making the player stronger or providing some other advantage, thus making the player
more efficient in the game.
Benign Envy
If a goal achieved by others seems relatively easy, feelings of benign envy will
motivate us to do what we can to close the gap with our competitors.
Social comperision theory:
The Frog-pond effect describes how individuals evaluate themselves based on comparisons to other people around them. Individuals evaluate themselves as worse when in a group of many higher performing individuals.
Freemium games find ways to cut the data to place players near the top of a
group - for boosting the self-esteem and increasing the incentive of players.
Post-purchase Reinforcement
Information provided post-purchase by a manufacturer that presents favorable aspects
of the product and reassures the buyer that a wise purchase decision has been made.
Activision has a patent on post-purchase reinforcement through multiplayer matchmaking.
For example, if the player purchased (or won) a particular weapon, the microtransaction algorithm can assign the player to a match with an opponent in which that particular weapon is highly effective, giving the player the impression that this particular weapon was a good purchase.
Self-presentation: custumization
Some virtual goods are solely used for customization goals as they give the
player’s character no in-game advantages. These so-called skins are solely
decorative as they contain no functionality that affects game performance
whatsoever.
Customization; personalizing characters or gameplay is an important category
within micro-transactions of virtual goods.
Unobstructed play: Allowing players to smoothly continue playing without
obstructions or distractions.
Many games set artificial timers as to make the player wait. For example, build
a building into the player’s village, or prevent players from continuing the game
sessions. Players can pay to complete this process immediately.
Preventing Satiation
- When we experience nice new things (great song, good food, exciting tv show) we
want to binge on it. Satiation (also referred to as Hedonic adaptation) refers to the
fact that we get used to nice things over time until they are no longer anywhere near
as pleasurable (Nelson & Meyvis, 2009). - While most players are used to the option of binging on a game until they burn out
and move on, most Freemium games force players to avoid that behavior (using
timers) (Hamari et al., 2016)
This forced abstinence either enhances the long-term appeal of the game or entices
players to microtransactions to skip the ‘downtime’
Operant conditioning
Dopamine is not about pleasure; it is about the
anticipation of pleasure. It is about the pursuit of
happiness rather than happiness itself.
The most effective monetisation technique: A loot box
is a consumable virtual item which can be redeemed to receive a randomized selection of virtual items, ranging from simple customization options for a player’s character, to game-changing equipment such as weapons and armor.
