Podcast 16: The Qualities of Online Relationships
In this episode we discuss friendships and other relationships formed in online games. Can they substitute for offline relationships? Are they better or worse in some ways?
In this episode we discuss friendships and other relationships formed in online games. Can they substitute for offline relationships? Are they better or worse in some ways?
I talk with Ben Lewis Evans, a psychologist and UX researcher at Epic Games, about simulation sickness in VR and how developers work around it.
Nick Yee from Quantic Foundry talks about their research on what motivates different kinds of people to play different kinds of games.
This episode I talk to Dr. Emily Collins about how video games can be used to recover from a stressful day.
In this episode I talk to Dr. Christopher J. Ferguson about research on the effects of video game violence.
How do video games affect our health –both physical and mental– for better or worse?
I talk to Dr. C. Shawn Green from the University of Wisconsin-Madison about whether brain training programs work and if regular old action games can make you smarter –and what that really means.
I talk to Dr. Nick Bowman from West Virginia University about how video games differ from other media in terms of the demands they place on players and thus how our approaches to studying them should differ. It turns out that video games ARE special and something new.
How can envy can drive us to make in-game purchases and microtransactions? But also, what do we think of others who just buy things we chose to grind out? Let’s see what the research suggests.
What’s the popular topics and state of academic research on psychology and video games? And how can academics package that information for the media and everyone else?
If the users of games are humans, then a little psychology should help a lot in user research, right? Celia Hodent from Epic Games explains why in this episode.
How can a little psychology make NPCs and other artificial intelligence agents in games seem more like real humans?
I talk to Dr. Jeffrey Lin about using psychology to curb toxic behavior in online games.
I talk to Dr. Linda Kaye about psychological flow in video games, including the new topic of group flow in multiplayer gaming.
We talk to Dr. Nick Yee about game companies’ use of big data and how he became a video game psychologist.
I talk to Dr. Andrew Przybylski from Oxford about video game aggression, frustration, rage quitting, and motivation.