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Study Finds Gamers Prefer Control, Competence Over Violence

Posted by Soulskill on from the making-pixels-bleed dept.

Science News reports on a new study which found that the violence in video games was not a significant contributing factor to players' enjoyment. Instead, the feelings of control and competence the games engendered were closely linked to how fun the players found it. Quoting: "... the researchers extensively modified a popular first-person shooter video game called Half-Life 2 to have less gore. Half the people in a group of 36 male and 65 female college students were instructed to dispatch adversaries as the original game intended, 'in a thoroughly bloody manner,' says Ryan. The other half was instructed to tag enemies with a marker. 'Instead of exploding in blood and dismemberment, they floated gently into the air and went back to base,' Ryan describes. An extensive survey of the two groups showed that the exclusion of violence didn't diminish players' enjoyment of the game."

8 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Violence, maybe, but not gore by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Portal.

  2. Re:65% Women? Yeah that's accurate. by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 2, Informative

    Honestly, that comment doesn't make much sense, Thomson would argue the opposite (regardless of the facts). Furthermore, I think sarcism is a bit above him.

    --
    "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
  3. Re:Surveying is not the best method by Vu1turEMaN · · Score: 2, Informative

    I know that any real study would be studying brainwaves during both sessions, and would be videotaping the entire thing, and recording demos of their actions in-game for analysis.

    Hell, the psychological studies at Pitt that I just went through as a class requirement sound more in-depth than this one, which is full of holes. Surveys do very little in this situation.

  4. Dupe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/16/2225215

  5. I'm not a bad person, but... by EZLeeAmused · · Score: 2, Informative

    When I play Half-Life2, in the places where you can set undead with head crabs on fire, I definitely try to do that. But then I do feel wrong when they stagger around on fire, moaning.

    --
    Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
  6. I, for one, ... by Strake · · Score: 4, Informative

    prefer rows of eliminated blocks in Tetris to explode into blood and gore and fire.

  7. Re:Yet another BS study by Atario · · Score: 5, Informative

    Your high school "probability class" didn't teach you enough.

    According to this, there are about 228 million adults in the US.

    According to this, 40% of US adults play videogames, or about 91.2 million.

    According to this, a confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of 10% can be achieved on a population of 91.2 million with a sample size of only 97.

    So, yes, you can draw something useful from that.

    --
    "A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
  8. Re:Control vs. violence by KDR_11k · · Score: 4, Informative

    Rule 6: "If violence wasn't your last resort you failed to resort to enough of it."

    --
    Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.