Tag Archives: emotions

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Kinecting With Your Emotions

Apparently the Xbox Kinect is a retail success despite the fact that I haven’t personally bought one. Enough people seem to enjoy flailing their extremities about and barking simple commands that Microsoft has sold 1.5 hoojillion of the devices and the holiday shopping season has only just begun. I’ve written before about how motion controls can create more immersion in players by engaging our sense of body location, but there might also be another vector in play. Over on his blog, author Jonah Lehrer has some interesting thoughts about how buttons free controllers like the Kinect affect our emotional reaction to games given that physiological and mental states present psychologists with a bit of a “chicken or the egg” problem:

Let’s say we are playing a shooter on the Kinect. Unlike other game consoles, which leave us stranded on the couch, this console (like the Wii before it) actually makes us move. If we want to kill off the bad guys, we need to run around and break a sweat. We are no longer just twiddling our thumbs.

In order to prepare for all this combat, the brain automatically triggers a wave of changes in our “physical viscera,” such as quickening the pulse, flooding the bloodstream with adrenaline, and contracting our intestines. While even stationary entertainment can lead to corporeal changes – that’s why the heart rate quickens when watching a Hitchcock movie – the physical activity of the Kinect exaggerates these effects. Although we might look a little foolish flailing around the living room, the game has managed to excite our flesh, and that means our emotions aren’t far behind. As a result, we are more scared by the possibility of virtual death (and more thrilled by the virtual victory) because our body is fully engaged with the game.

Lehrer argues that high definition graphics and surround sound offer diminishing returns, so kinetic movement is the next big win for game designers wishing to engage us in their game. This is hardly an unprecedented idea. In his book, The Science of Happiness Stefan Klein ((Klein, S. (2002). The Science of Happiness. De Capo Press.)) notes that “As [neuroscientist Antonio Damasio] reminds us, our mind is, in the true sense of the word, embodied, not ‘embrained.’ A disembodied being would feel neither happiness nor sadness.” ((Lehrer also references this idea from Demasio in the blog post I liked to, but grad school taught me nothing if not how to pad out my references.))

Xbox, dashboard! Xbox, smile! Xbox, love! LOVE, XBOX, LOVE!

In 1993, researchers Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson even studied this question scientifically by testing to see if simply smiling can make you happy. ((Ekman, P. & Davidson, R. (1993). Voluntary Smiling Changes Regional Brain Activity. Psychological Science, 4 342-345.)) All of us can fake a smile of one sort or another even when we’re pissed or bored, but it turns out that “true” smiles –those that erupt whenever we’re genuinely happy– involve a specific muscle: the obicularis oculi. This is the muscle around the eyes that causes us to make that particular, gleeful face during moments of unmitigated merriment. Some people can fake using the obicularis oculi to make apparently genuine smiles ((Stefan Klein seems to think it’s hereditary)) and Ekman and Richardson screened potential subjects for their study based on this criteria and then trained them further on how to do it at will. After taking some baseline measures, the researchers found out that faking a “real” smile led not only to higher self-reports of good moods, but brain activity as measured by EEG ((Or “electroencephalography” for those with more time on their hands to pronounce really long words)) during fake smiles was practically identical to activity measured during genuine amusement.

But it’s important to note that the subjects had to smile the “right” way. Those who didn’t manipulate the obicularis oculi and related muscles didn’t become happier; they just looked a little bit like it. If the Kinect and other motion control game devices are going to trick our bodies into making us feel more engaged or emotional, they’ve got to do it convincingly and really mimic those genuine physiological reactions. They also need to either put out some games that will entice us to play, or offer us $5 and 10 extra credit points for our Psychology 101 class.

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Just One More Level: Decision Making Under Arousal

As gamers, I think we’ve all been there: You’re jamming along, feeling the rush as you shotgun foes in an online shooter or tear your car through the twists and turns of a realistically rendered race track. It’s exciting and in the best cases it may actually get our heart racing and our palms sweating. And when the match is over or the latest “Level Complete” screen pops up, you remember all the other things that you really should be doing. Maybe you have school tomorrow and it’s getting late. Or maybe your laundry is piling up and there are dishes in the sink. Hadn’t you intended to limit yourself to just half an hour of gaming?

And yet, you decide on just one more match, one more level, or one more quest. Why? Why would you do that?

To find out the answer, let us consider pornography. I know, I know. Some of you are thinking “Wait, what?” and the rest of you are probably thinking “Already way ahead of you, dude.” But bear with me.

In his book, Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely discusses research he and George Lowenstein did on the effects of sexual arousal on decision making. ((Ariely, D. & Lowenstein, G. (2006). In The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19 87-98.)) Featuring one of the more interesting experimental designs I’ve seen, the researchers equipped male subjects with …well, you know there’s really no way to describe this without coming out and saying it: They gave a bunch of dudes laptops full of porn. Subjects watched said porn and at the zenith of their arousal, were asked some questions. You guys, THEY EVEN GOT PAID TEN BUCKS TO DO THIS!

Not quite an example of experimental stimulus materials. And apologies to Ariely and Lowenstein.

Included were queries about how likely the subjects would be to engage in behaviors of questionable morality or judgment. Like, “Would you encourage your date to drink to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?” or “Would you always use a condom if you didn’t know the sexual history of a new sexual partner?”Upon comparing the responses to a control group ((Bet those guys were mad when they found out which straw they’d drawn)) Ariely and Lowenstein found that yeah, acute arousal made you more likely to kick thoughts of consequences to the back seat and say you’d do some pretty stupid stuff. It’s the same reason that Nancy’s “Just say no” advice to teens simply doesn’t work.

What does this have to do with staying up late playing games when you know you have to work tomorrow? The study above is kind of unique, but it stems from an entire body of research by psychologists who have shown that emotional arousal and excitement of many kinds can hamper rational decision making. Despite any intentions born of rational thought, you’re just not thinking with the same brain after some infuriating punk has bested you in a shooter or you’re just pulled off some thrilling act of derring-do in some other game. Rationality gets elbowed aside and you look up to realize that it’s a quarter to three on a weekday morning. And yet you’re still muttering “Okay, just one more match…”

Interestingly, marketers use this fact all the time to manipulate you. Let’s say you’ve downloaded the demo for a game and just when a fevered battle is at its most heart poundingly intense, the demo pulls up short and says “That’s it! End of demo! But you know what? You can totally buy the game RIGHT NOW!” The God of War III demo did very kind of thing by having Kratos go through an exhilarating ascent before leaping towards the Titan Perses in a fist pumping display of badassitute and then abruptly ending the demo. More than one pumped up player has probably formed an intention to buy the game right then, despite lacking funds or time to play the huge backlog of games they already bought. And this kind of thing is likely to be even more effective when the game is downloadable and you can purchase and play it immediately.

So how do you protect yourself from this kind of thing? Research shows that the most effective thing to do is not to put yourself in those situations to begin with. Barring that, simply being aware of the phenomenon can help.