the of Game (Derived) : What biometric accounts of player experience revealed (original) (raw)
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Exploring the Cause of Game (Derived) Arousal: What biometric accounts of player experience revealed
Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association
The function of this paper is to present research findings that ordinarily would never see the light of day, not because they have no value or significance, but they might seem marginal and less significant given the main focus of the research conducted. When studying player experience, there is value in widening the focus of research to avoid attributing too much value to one kind of experience over others. The findings presented here come from a much larger three-year research study into player experiences with games containing violence. The broad intent of the study was to query the strong association between effects research and responsive regulation measures (game classification). The research was guided by the idea that exploring “the extent to which the public’s perception of causal links between game playing and various social ills’ might be ‘moderated or even undermined by [knowledge of] how players actually respond to and negotiate their way through the content and charact...
Age-Restriction: Re-Examining the Interactive Experience of ‘Harmful’ Game Content
Similar to the classification rating of films, screen depictions of violence within digital games are issued with an age restriction rating. Such approaches still fail to adequately incorporate players' experience of the screen, confounded by the medium's interactive nature, in their assessments. The current failure to account for, or describe subsequent interactions between player and game text leaves the classification process largely inferential. This paper presents a framework that forms the basis for an empirical assessment of the interactive experience of games. In it, we aim to account for the processes and outcomes of play and the extent to which play relates to the design of the game text. By operationalizing game studies' extensive theorization of the distinct quality of games, a new model of media 'usage' is sought to enhance regulation processes and better inform the public's perception of games (specifically within New Zealand). In this paper we draw specifically on data produced from one part of a mixed methodology research design (Schott & Van Vught 2011). A structured diary method was employed to allow game players to chronicle different elements of their gameplay experience with a single text as they progressed through it. By demonstrating the applied value of game studies' contribution to knowledge, the research project aims to contribute to a new paradigm that is capable of accounting for the 'actual' experience of play and the ways game texts are activated under the agency of players once they enter everyday life and culture.
Violence | Perception | Video Games New Directions in Game Research (excerpt)
Violence | Perception | Video Games. New Directions in Game Research, 2019
This volume compiles papers from the Young Academics Workshop at the Clash of Realities conferences of 2017 and 2018. The 2017 workshop-Perceiving Video Games-explored the video game medium by focusing on perception and meaning-making processes. The 2018 workshop-Reframing the Violence and Video Games Debate-transcended misleading claims that link video games and violent behavior by offering a range of fresh topical perspectives. From BA students to postdoctoral researchers, the young academics of this anthology stem from a spectrum of backgrounds, including game studies, game design, and phenomenology. This volume also features an entry by renowned psychologist Christopher J. Ferguson. ISBN: 978-3-8376-5051-8
Digital Culture & Education (DCE)
Thus far, the bulk of effects research on violent video games demonstrates troubling correlations between playing violent video games and increases in (or primers for) aggressive behavior, which suggests that overall, violent video games may be detrimental to society. However, there may be significant weaknesses in this body of research, concerning not only methodological issues such as study design and the ways in which 'aggression' or 'violence' are conceptualized, but also containing fundamental misunderstandings of games as text, apparatus, or cultural artifact. Because these studies may not have a sophisticated enough understanding of games as objects or gaming as an activity, we must therefore reconsider the conclusions and implications thus far arrived at in this research and look for new ways forward for assessing violence in/and video games.
2013
Although there is a vast and useful body of quantitative social science research dealing with the social role and impact of video games, it is difficult to compare studies dealing with various dimensions of video games because they are informed by different perspectives and assumptions, employ different methodologies, and address different problems. Studies focusing on different social dimensions of video games can produce varied findings about games’ social function that are often difficult to reconcile— or even contradictory. Research is also often categorized by topic area, rendering a comprehensive view of video games’ social role across topic areas difficult. This interpretive review presents a novel typology of four identified approaches that categorize much of the quantitative social science video game research conducted to date: “video games as stimulus,” “video games as avocation,” “video games as skill,” and “video games as social environment.” This typology is useful because it provides an organizational structure within which the large and growing number of studies on video games can be categorized, guiding comparisons between studies on different research topics and aiding a more comprehensive understanding of video games’ social role. Categorizing the different approaches to video game research provides a useful heuristic for those critiquing and expanding that research, as well as an understandable entry point for scholars new to video game research. Further, and perhaps more importantly, the typology indicates when topics should be explored using different approaches than usual to shed new light on the topic areas. Lastly, the typology exposes the conceptual disconnects between the different approaches to video game research, allowing researchers to consider new ways to bridge gaps between the different approaches’ strengths and limitations with novel methods.
2013
Although there is a vast and useful body of quantitative social science research dealing with the social role and impact of video games, it is difficult to compare studies dealing with various dimensions of video games because they are informed by different perspectives and assumptions, employ different methodologies, and address different problems. Studies focusing on different social dimensions of video games can produce varied findings about games’ social function that are often difficult to reconcile— or even contradictory. Research is also often categorized by topic area, rendering a comprehensive view of video games’ social role across topic areas difficult. This interpretive review presents a novel typology of four identified approaches that categorize much of the quantitative social science video game research conducted to date: “video games as stimulus,” “video games as avocation,” “video games as skill,” and “video games as social environment.” This typology is useful because it provides an organizational structure within which the large and growing number of studies on video games can be categorized, guiding comparisons between studies on different research topics and aiding a more comprehensive understanding of video games’ social role. Categorizing the different approaches to video game research provides a useful heuristic for those critiquing and expanding that research, as well as an understandable entry point for scholars new to video game research. Further, and perhaps more importantly, the typology indicates when topics should be explored using different approaches than usual to shed new light on the topic areas. Lastly, the typology exposes the conceptual disconnects between the different approaches to video game research, allowing researchers to consider new ways to bridge gaps between the different approaches’ strengths and limitations with novel methods.
Video Game Data - The Untouched Potential of the Gamer as a Data-Generator
2019
While there has been a wealth of research on video games themselves and on gamers' behaviors within games there has been little scholarship on how researchers can use gamer behavior as a data source for social science outside of simple logic and ethics games. The author's current research project uses video game data as a proxy to study organized criminal behaviors that would be otherwise difficult to observe in the real world. The use of video game data provides researchers with a new way of understanding behavior in controlled and manipulatable environments. Video games, therefore, occupy the space between traditional vignette studies and agent-based modeling. The presentation talks about the benefits and drawbacks encountered when using data sourced in such a way. There are inherent methodological advantages and disadvantages to the data that have been gathered which in turn need to be overcome in the research design. Additionally, there are larger ontological and concept...
CONFRONTING WORLDS OF AFFECT - Who plays whom - Can the effects of violent video games be mediated?
2016
Surrounded by technological mediums competing for attention in realms of virtuality our future is essentially implicated and bound in a hurtling technological advance that continues to grow. For others whilst this brings good and the potential to experience new worlds, perceptions and even more locate the future in a better setting, many see a swamp of effects and consequences we can hardly control. Studying the argued effects of violent video games through a deliberate engagement with ‘affect’ and the affective fields of technology, this study seeks to engage with players to map fields of choice and mediation investigating the potential to play safely in virtuality, encounter technological violence and still persist. It deliberately inquires into our ability to control technology by reassessing the post-human dilemma, affective turn and media effects theory to critically investigate extant premises of choice where subjects encounter and mediate violent media. Collecting data through a cross-sectional interview design, focus group and participant observation of 20 participants from diverse backgrounds and parallel lifestyles, this study uses constructivist grounded theory and phenomenological analyses to uncover spaces of free-will and agency in the experience of violent video games. The gamer as the subject in their specific environment, assists meaning making in a familiar ground where they are likened to McLuhan’s serious artist. This study’s consequent bias for the gamer finds them in their context as master of an already lived-experience cyclically performed between reality and virtuality in a way only understood by the participant
This study explores the various ways in which male young adults engage with violence in videogames. Based on an ethnographic study (N=26) with triangulation of diary reports, focus group interviews and a video commentary model, three conceptual axes are distinguished along which players differ in their enactment of videogame violence: narration vs. action, discovery vs. mission-based play and reaction vs. strategic play. The results suggest that individual playing styles result in exposure to different quantities and a different quality of virtual violence.