Tag Archives: Shooters

Posted on by

The Psychological Appeal of Violent Shooters

I have a new article up on gamesindustry.biz exploring the psychological appeal of violent shooters via self-determination theory. I draw from work by Scott Rigby, Richard Ryan, and Andrew Przybylski that looks at how this theory of human motivation can explain why violent shooters are so popular.

Remember that skull in one of the Halo games that would make Grunts explode with confetti and a delightful "Yaaaaaay!" when you headshot them? Great indicator of competence.

Remember that skull in one of the Halo games that would make Grunts explode with confetti and a delightful “Yaaaaaay!” when you headshot them? Great indicator of competence.

SPOILER: It’s because good shooter design also happens to satisfy three basic psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Then to take things a step further, I looked at some research that tried to separate the “violent” from the “violent shooter” and see if these needs could still be met without all the gore, guns, and grunts.

I gave our simian friend Bobo The Quote Monkey a helmet, a rifle, and pack of Post-It notes. This is what he came back with:

So while RPGs might nail autonomy, platformers may demand competence, and MMOs may allow the most relatedness, violent shooters fire on all three cylinders.

“[Violent games] are fun not because of the blood and gore,” write Rigby and Ryan, “but because games of war and combat offer so many opportunities to feel autonomy, competence, and the relatedness of camaraderie rolled up into an epic heroic experience.” But, that all said, do shooters satisfy all these motivators so well because they’re violent?

It’s an important question, and Ryan, Rigby, and their colleague Andrew Przybylski published a 2009 study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that addresses it. Part of their research involved a clever experiment where they modified Half-Life 2 to create a high-violence version of the game’s multiplayer and a low-violence version. The high violence version is pretty much what you’d expect. The low violence one, though, was created by changing the bullet-spewing guns into “tag” tools that players would use to zap opponents. Once tagged, foes would freeze and float up into the air for a second before being harmlessly teleported to a “penalty box” where they would wait to respawn into the game.

You can read the whole article to see what the researchers found out.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.