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.

Comments

Do gamers enjoy kimchi in first person shooters?

[leftie]

The experience of violent death, and the experience of eating kimchi is kinda similar, after all.

Utter bullshit

[sm62704]

I used to be heavily into Quake (the domain the archive.org link was far has long since lapsed; I think it's a porn site now). The games are fun. And "dying" in the game is part of the fun!

The worst part about Quake was when the shambler pisses on you carpet. Ok, that only happened at my site, in the daily updates that were not too unlike my slashdot journals. Today's has a lunatic attempting murder, if you can believe that.

Whoever did this poor excuse for a study needs to fail whatever course he was taking.

-mcgrew

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        If you have a gaming news page, you owe it to yourself to go there. Here are a few tidbits of FPSers:
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        If you're a UO2 fan, The Nethergate opened its "doors" as the newest Ultima Online 2 fan site.
        PC Paradox has another editorial. The article is a little rant about the age old topic of UT vs. Q3. Sure it's been beaten to death, but so what? Get out your whips and flog the dirt where the decomposed horse used to be, and may the best FPS win!
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