Do Gamers Enjoy Dying in First-Person-Shooters?

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Brandon Erickson has an interesting post about an experiment on players' emotional reactions to killing and being killed in a first-person shooters (FPS) with a group of students who played James Bond 007: Nightfire while their facial expressions and physiological activity were tracked and recorded moment-to-moment via electrodes and various other monitoring equipment. The study found that "death of the player's own character...appear[s] to increase some aspects of positive emotion." The authors believe this may result from the temporary "relief from engagement" brought about by character death. "Part of this has to do with the intriguing aesthetic question of precisely how the first-person-shooter represents the player after the moment of death," says Clive Thompson. "This sudden switch in camera angle — from first person to third person — is, in essence, a classic out-of-body experience, of exactly the sort people describe in near-death experiences. And much like real-life near-death experiences, it tends to suffuse me with a curiously zen-like feeling." An abstract of the original article, "The psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic emotional responses to violent video game events" is available on the web." Obnoxiously this alleged scholarly research is not available for free, so we'll just have to speculate wildly what it says based on the abstract.

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Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: ends in hell

[dpbsmith]

The former Walt Disney World attraction, "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride," ended with the car breaking through railroad crossing gates and heading down the railroad tracks, apparently directly toward an oncoming train. In reality, all that is there besides the sound effects is a dazzlingly bright headlight, making it almost impossible to see that you are heading toward a doorway in the black-painted room.

As you emerge after your "collision," the final scene in the ride show numerous devils with tridents.

If Walt Disney, always a good judge of such things, thought that kids would enjoy the virtual experience, not merely of dying, but of being consigned to eternal damnation, it does not seems a far stretch to assume that gamers may enjoy it as well.