Tag Archives: GamePro

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The Psychology of Immersion

By far, one of the most widely linked to and discussed articles I’ve written for this site is this one on immersion in video games. A while back I wrote an expanded version of that article for GamePro magazine where I focused more on new video game technologies, and GamePro.com has recently published it for your reading pleasure. Oddly, they put it up as a 25 meg pdf file. I’m …not sure why. But you can download it and see the whole thing for yourself, including nifty sidebars and artwork like this:

If this happens to you, do not panic. Perfectly normal.

Bobo the Quote Monkey was happy to have the work, so he sat through the download and fetched this quote:

The game world also needs to behave as you’d expect it to. “Consistency is the single most important factor in creating a real sense of place,” says Josh Foreman, an experienced designer at ArenaNet who works on the Guild Wars games. “The style can be anything from photo-real to abstract to impressionism, as long as there is an internal logic to what the player perceives.” This means that in-game characters, objects, and other aspects of the world should behave like their real-world counterparts.

…Interestingly, research is incomplete in this area, as it seems we’ll readily ignore some incongruous elements. Even the most engrossing movie is full of artificial jumps in time and cuts to different points of view, but we take these in stride. One researcher looked at what effects subtitles in foreign-language films had on creating presence and found that these words floating conspicuously in space beneath the movie’s characters were such an accepted convention that they didn’t hinder a feeling of presence. Likewise, players accept heads-up displays or damage indicators in video games with little damage to presence.

This article is different than the other GamePro pieces I’d written to date. I played around with the idea of introducing the article with a non sequiter ((Wait, can you START something with a non sequiter? I hope so, because I guess did.)) by talking about Cinerama. For those of you who aren’t movie historians, Cinerama was an early technology aimed at making movies more immersive, and I saw some interesting parallels between that and our modern day wide-screen TVs, surround sound, and motion controls. I think it kind of worked, and it’s an approach that I’m going to try to use more often when I have the space to do it.

Special thanks to Paul Harvey, Dr. Paul Skalski at Cleveland State University and Josh Forman from ArenaNet for providing input on the article. If you’re interested, the current print issue of GamePro on shelves now (the one with Twisted Metal on the cover) has a fun article on the psychology of loot drops. It involves monkeys!

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The Psychology of Fear in Video Games

GamePro.com has published my article about the psychology of horror games, so if you didn’t catch it in the print magazine a while back you can now. IF YOU DARE.

What does this blood spot look like to you? Ink! I mean ink spot.

I sent a moderately frightened Bobo the Quote Monkey to fetch something from this article, and he came back with this:

Researchers say some people just have the right kind of personality for appreciating scares because they’re sensation-seekers attracted to any emotional high, be it from sky diving, shark-punching, or horror films. Other personalities are drawn to situations showing the disruption of social norms in ways that will probably never happen in real life.

But perhaps a more encompassing explanation of horror’s inherent appeal is how it helps us master our fears. This seems to be particularly important for youngsters, who flock to scary media as an ultimately safe way to exercise their emotional chops and deal with real-life scary stuff. “Watching a horror film gives us back some control,” Weaver says. “We can experience an adverse event through film, and we know that it will end. We’ll survive it. We’ll go on with our lives.”

Interestingly, this co-opting of horror only really happens if the player or viewer knows that what they see is fake. In one famous experiment, researchers had subjects watch a movie featuring authentic scenes of live monkeys having their brains scooped out and of children-I kid you not-having their facial skin peeled away in preparation for surgery. Just reading this probably makes you squirm a little, and the vast majority of the study’s participants refused to finish watching the films despite that more grotesque movies playing at the theater down the street could outdo those scenes. We seem to need to know it’s fake.

Bobo is having a lie down right now, but you can read the whole thing here.

By the way, if anyone from Viceral Games or EA is out there, you should totally send me a copy of Dead Space 2. I’ll write about why it’s scary. ((Or why it’s not, if it’s not.))

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The Psychology of Shooters (Online)

As I mentioned a while back I wrote an article for GamePro magazine about the psychology of shooters and why interacting with game worlds through the barrel of a gun is often so appealing. I got some great input from people doing real research in this area and I like how the article turned out.

Now, for those of you allergic to paper, GamePro.com has published the article online where you can read it if you haven’t already. Begin clicking and let me know what you think.

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The Psychology of Horror

If you can get your hands on the new issue of GamePro magazine (#267, December 2010 with Diablo 3 on the cover), check out my article on the psychology of horror. The timing with Halloween was better a week or so ago when the issue first came out.

This is another one of those topics that I was unsure of when the editor at GamePro asked me to tackle it. Not only did I not t really know much about the topic, I’m not even a fan of horror movies or games in particular. I’ve never seen a Saw movie or any other “gore pr0n” in my life, nor do I want to. Still, that’s why they call it “research” so I hit the library and found some more informed experts in the fields of psychology, media studies, and communications to help fill in the blanks. I got some great material, and the article turned out to be a lot of fun to write.

This is the issue to look for if you want to read the article.

I turned Bobo the Quote Monkey loose on the article, and he returned with this:

Bobo want banana.

So I gave him a banana, reminded him about the performance standards in his contract, and sent him back. This time he came up with the following:

A second set of explanations for horror’s delight posits that we hate the horror, but like the proverbial man who bangs his head against the wall because it feels so good when he stops, we love the relief that comes at the end.

Excitation transfer theory, credited earlier with enabling spooky soundtracks to do their job, has also been hypothesized to give us a kind of “thank god that’s over” high. “People become physically aroused due to the fear they experience during the media event –and then when the media event ends, that arousal transfers to the experience of relief and intensifies it,” Sparks says. “They don’t so much enjoy the experience of being afraid –rather, they enjoy the intense positive emotion that may directly follow.”

Other explanations for the appeal of horror are cited, plus I also ruminate on what the research tells us about scary video games in particular. I really don’t have any feedback on how well these GamePro pieces are being received, so if you’re reading them, post a comment and tell me what you think.

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The Psychology of Shooters

The new issue of GamePro magazine (October 2010, #265) is out and features my article on the psychology of shooters. ((Shooters, as in the genre of video games. Not, like, people.)) If you buy the magazine on the store shelf, the cover is the one on the left below. If, however, you’re a subscriber and got yours through the mail, you got the variant cover on the right that features some of the artwork by Andrew Yang that accompanies my article inside:

Oooh, alternate covers!

So, for at least one of the variants, I guess I have the cover story. Which is kind of cool.

The whole issue is themed around the idea of shooters, with previews of a gaggle of upcoming games from that genre plus some articles like mine addressing the theme. Here’s a quote:

Researchers Andrew Przybylski and Scott Rigby, who work with game designers, believe people are motivated to play a particular video game based on how well it satisfies three basic psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Competence deals with a sense of control, mastery, and feeling like you’re making things happen the way you want. A well designed difficulty curve makes us feel an ever-increasing sense of competence, as does appropriate matchmaking in multiplayer games. Games high in autonomy give you the opportunity to make many meaningful decisions about what goals to pursue and how to pursue them. Finally, relatedness is concerned with a feeling that you matter to other players and social interactions with them.

These needs certainly aren’t unique to shooters, but one could argue that many of the qualities inherent to virtual gunplay create well worn paths to satisfying these needs.

This article is actually one of my favorite things that I’ve written on the psychology of games since I started this project, but I didn’t expect it to end up that way at first. In fact, when the folks at GamePro asked me to write something that “explores gamers’ fascination with the genre and why the primary interaction point in the majority of games seems to be through a gun and bullets,” I just blanked out and stared at my computer monitor for a few minutes. I had no idea off the top of my head about how to address that question, and my initial impulse was to turn down the assignment for fear of not being able to deliver on it.

Fortunately I decided instead to push back from the keyboard and ruminate on it a bit first. That gave me time to realize that even if I didn’t know the answer off the top of my head, I did know how to do research and find someone who does –they don’t let you out of graduate school without stuffing that particular skill in your back pocket. So I hit my local university library one evening to browse PsychINFO and was delighted to almost immediately find out about the research program described in the quote above. Those guys are doing some really cool stuff around what motivates us to play video games, and they were even kind enough to talk to me via e-mail for the article.

All that was left to do was to pull together half a dozen or so articles and a couple of books into one narrative for the GamePro piece. Fortunately they also taught us how to do that in school as well. So I guess the lesson is: stay in school, kids. Like, uniil your early thirties. At least.

So if you’re not already a GamePro reader, thumb through a copy the next time you can find one on the store shelf to see if you think it’s worth buying or subscribing to. ((Protip: subscribing is way cheaper.)) I’ve got another article due out in next month’s issue dealing with the psychology of horror games, and I’m currently adapting my article on the psychology of immersion for another feature the month after that.

Speaking of which, if you’re a game developer who has something to say about immersion and what makes games immersive, I’d love to hear from you and maybe quote you in the GamePro article. Drop me a line.

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Psychology of Games: Now Appearing in GamePro Magazine

Back in January 2010 when I launched this site, I laid out the things it could lead to on a continuim from low to high. On the low end was “Nobody likes it, everybody dies.” On the very top of the high end was “Book deal, everyone lives” and close behind that was “Someone hires me to write magazine articles about this stuff.” Well, there’s still no book deal but a few months ago GamePro’s John Davison contacted me saying that he liked the site and wanted to know if I was interested in writing for the GamePro print magazine.

After I finished fist pumping, I said that I most definitely was.

Fast forward to today and if you pick up this issue of GamePro you’ll see my article on the psychology of anonymity starting on page 49 and accompanied by some awesome artwork by Andrew Yang. Here’s the cover of the issue:

Just look for the murderous Alice and you'll find it.

Here’s a snip:

Psychologists actually have models of what anonymity tends to do to people because they’ve been studying its effects long before the first person ever rage quit a game of Pong. While little of that early research involved video games, it did employ painful electric shocks, children in Halloween costumes, and college co-eds dressed up as nurses –sometimes two of those things at the same time.

…But is “antisocial” our default mode when we bring up a web browser or multiplayer menu? Is donning a virtual version of Jack’s face paint by adjusting the “brow height” slider on a character creation tool sufficient in and of itself to make us punt all morals out the window? Psychologists say no, it’s not. According to recent research on the topic, there are additional factors at play, which redefine the whole issue.

I had written a bit on deindividuation and anti-social behavior here, but while conducting actual research for the article I found out that I didn’t know the entire story with the current state of research on deindividuation and anonymity. You can read the GamePro article for the whole thing, and if they ever put ito n GamePro.com I’ll certainly link to it there as well.

All in all it was a fun experience writing the article, with the not unsubstantial bonus that they paid me to do it. When the anonymity piece was done my editor Patrick went on to assign me a second article, which has at this point also been written, turned in, and scheduled to appear in next month’s issue. ((Print scheduling lag is weird.)) And as of this moment I’m working on a third piece, so apparently they like what I’m doing well enough so far. If you like the anonymity piece or have something else interesting to say about it, please let GamePro know at feedback@gamepro.com. If you don’t like it, then write your Senator or something. I dunno.

While we’re on the topic, though, I really like changes that GamePro has made to its print magazine in the last several issues. They seem to realize that they can’t compete with websites for timely content or reviews, so they seem to be going for more in-depth stories that require some actual research and reporting. Stuff like the history of GameStop, the impact of Metacritic on the gaming scene, the nature of bug testing in games, the impact of piracy on the games industry, and more.

I’ve been published in “legitimate” outlets both online and in print before, but I’m still happy to be in the pages of GamePro. Blogging dreams do come true! Plus it’s nice that nobody has to die.