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11 Mar 08

Gamers Get Their Kicks From Dying - Wired Magazine

Via Regine (WMMNA), an article in Wired Magazine by Clive Thompson, "Gamers Get Their Kicks From Dying."

He writes: "In 'The Psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic Emotional Responses to Violent Video Game Events' -- published in this month's edition of the journal Emotion -- [Niklas] Ravaja [a scientist who has done pioneering research into the emotions of gamers as they play] reaches an amazingly counterintuitive conclusion: Gamers don't like shooting their opponents, but they're suffused with pleasure when they themselves are shot dead."

What's also interesting is that this presents some alternative evidence that one doesn't become desensitized to violence just because one plays violent online or computer games.

www.wired.com/...gamesfrontiers_0310 - Preview

clive_thompson death gamers gaming violence wired_magazine

I can't even count the number of ways I've died. Like most gamers, I've been slaughtered by AK-47-wielding terrorists, poisoned by eldritch spiders and blown up with alien frag grenades. I've also been impaled on medieval swords, ripped limb from limb by dinosaurs and impassively stomped by 20-story-tall, walking war machines that barely noticed my existence.

Yet here's the thing: It's possible that these deaths have been among my most enjoyable game experiences.
This is the fascinating argument of a new paper by Niklas Ravaja, a scientist who has done pioneering research into the emotions of gamers as they play. In "The Psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic Emotional Responses to Violent Video Game Events" -- published in this month's edition of the journal Emotion -- Ravaja reaches an amazingly counterintuitive conclusion: Gamers don't like shooting their opponents, but they're suffused with pleasure when they themselves are shot dead.
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- When people killed an opponent, their electrodermal activity shot up, while their faces registered distress. "That is, instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent elicited anxiety, anger or both," Ravajas said. When gamers themselves were killed, in contrast, the sensors detected "positively valenced high-arousal affect," he said.
- Ravajas isn't entirely sure why gamers feel this way, though he has theories. If we feel distress when we kill an in-game opponent, it may be because it violates our ingrained sense of morality; we know killing is bad, even when it's virtual.
- His much weirder experimental result, though, is our thrill at dying. Ravajas thinks this might occur because getting killed is "transient relief from engagement"
- I may not want to die; but for the sake of my mental health, I probably need to.
- Most shooters execute this third-person shift, of course. But Bungie has made it into an experiential tone poem. You could think of it as "the architecture of death," and game designers ought to pay more attention to it. Because one thing's for sure: We're all going to die.

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Gamers Get Their Kicks From Dying - Wired Magazine

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