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Study Finds Gamers Prefer Control, Competence Over Violence
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."
"They may not be in it for the blood. They're in it for the fun."
Unfortunately, violence is the ultimate form of control.
An extensive survey of the two groups showed that the exclusion of violence didn't diminish players' enjoyment of the game.
I hope they did more then just ask them how much they enjoyed themselves. People can be unreliable when asked such questions, for any number of reasons, such as not wanting to appear like bloodthirsty savages when questioned by authority figures.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Researchers have also have discovered that Laura Croft's breast size does not significantly change the appeal of the character, Animal Crossing is just as fun as GTA, and female night elves are rarely created in WoW.
City of Heroes and City of Villains make extensive use of PhysX to impliment ragdoll physics for humanoid characters. When you, as a super-powered character knock the tar out of an enemy, they can go flying across the room or high into the air.
With some skill, it's possible to use knockback as the ultimate crowd control device. You keep your enemies knocked down or penned into a corner where they can't hurt you.
In my opinion, this is far more entertaining and far more visually stimulating than any other method of defeating your enemies.
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...but in combat situations in Half-Life 2, Fallout 3, or Metal Gear Solid 4......it is.
The mood of Half-Life 2 is a doom and gloom apocalyptic atmosphere where soldiers and aliens are enslaving mankind. In Fallout 3 the world is a desert of death and nuclear radiation, violence, chaos, it's part of the atmosphere, part of the immersion. In Metal Gear Solid 4 you are dropped off in the middle of a bloody war between private soldiers for hire and nationalists guerrillas, violence, gunfire, explosions, nanobots and killbots (with preset kill limits), are part of the world that is the turmoil enveloped earth.
If was playing any of those games and there was no violence, no blood, no swearing, no aggression of any kind, I would probably not even play the games in the first place. They are rated M, they are adult games, made by adults for adults. No need to strip them down and make them for children.
Are they honestly trying to say that something like Grand Theft Auto would be fun without in game crime, violence, or swearing? Maybe it would be...but that's not the point of GTA. It aims to be violent to create an atmosphere of crime. Just like crime movies and TV shows, Training Day, The Sopranos, also portray violence. It's realistic within the context of portraying criminal behavior with a reasonable creative license.
Why not conduct a study to say that all R-Rated movies are unnecessary? Or that violent TV shows should be toned down to exclude violence? Surely Saving Private Ryan (Rated R for graphic violence) and Band of Brothers (rated TV-MA for the same) could have been just as effective as cinema with a complete lack of violence and cursing. Is violence necessary in those movies? No. It is necessary to make the movies compelling and also historically accurate? Yes.
"A common belief held by many gamers and many in the video game industry -- that violence is what makes a game fun -- is strongly contradicted by these studies," comments Craig Anderson, a psychologist who directs the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University in Ames.
What empirical data is he possibly referring to? I have yet to see the survey where significance testing was passed that conclusively shows that 'many' gamers think violence is solely what makes games fun.
This is just another barely scientific study where the researcher wants to get water cooler points with his colleagues and say "hey I got published about video-game violence!" and while in the short term this research might turn a few heads, another book like Grand Theft Childhood will put this study in the negative in the history books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Childhood
So, then, you're 13 years old and in the video game shop in the mall with your buds... gee, let's see, which game do I want to buy here, think the guys would be impressed by some flag-football where the most dexterous player wins, or chainsaw arena football.... hmmmm.... tough one, right?
Are they honestly trying to say that something like Grand Theft Auto would be fun without in game crime, violence, or swearing? Maybe it would be...but that's not the point of GTA. It aims to be violent to create an atmosphere of crime. Just like crime movies and TV shows, Training Day, The Sopranos, also portray violence. It's realistic within the context of portraying criminal behavior with a reasonable creative license.
I think it would just be a different type of fun. Take a look at the The Simpsons Hit & Run game. It uses the same engine as GTA 3 and you more or less do the same thing: do quests, get into cars and drive around, talk to people, etc. However, you can't kill anyone, there's no swearing, etc. And yet, it's still a fun game.
My studies showed that my tetris addiction was directly linked to the violence of the game, I'm now going to have to go back and look over that paper, see where I went wrong.
Blazing Spiders
Portal.
I stopped playing first-person shooters at Quake II. I had enjoyed previous FPS games quite a lot, and I gave Quake II a good try, but the bloody chunks with the flies buzzing around them were the limit for me. Similarly, I didn't like that in Age of Empires II committing war crimes - killing enemy peasants to take out productive capacity - was the best way to win. Nor that an apparent flaw with uprisings in CivIII meant that the best way to take over cities was a bit of ethnic cleansing by way of starvation. I still played those games, but it bugged me. I never traded slaves in Elite.
This is why I liked Tony Hawk and Jet Set Radio so much. They are about being cool instead killing things.
I won't make grand claims about the effects on anyone else, but I know I don't want my 3-year old son playing violent games. I am kind of pissed off that many games I might otherwise enjoy are effectively wrecked by violence. Who knows who else is put off by violence? The people like me who are put off don't play, so they don't figure into many statistics.
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
I can't speak for anyone else but I play video games so I can shoot people in the nutsack.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
FTFA:
In a different study of avid gamers, a group of 39 males who were, on average, 19.5 years old and played video games for 7.5 hours a week were asked to play the game The House of the Dead III with a low violence or high violence setting. [...] As before, violence did not affect playersâ(TM) enjoyment of the games.
Even if we're talking about males-only, and the fairly young variety, violence seems to not matter.
Chipping in with my own anecdote: my (by far) most violent wii game, Mortal Kombat Armageddon, is the one I find the least fun. The one with no violence at all, Guitar Hero III, is the one I find the most fun. The second-most violent is probably Twilight Princess, almost-tied with GH3 for fun. So there's no clear relationship. By the way, I'm male and 25.5 years old on average ;-)
Portal has violence, it's just all happening to you instead of your enemies.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Yes, most people prefer control to violence, but if I'm playing Call of Duty when I'm in a war, I don't want people to just "faint" get transported back to base, etc. People die in wars, people bleed in wars, heck, people even swear in wars. I don't want to hit someone with a grenade and them just to be transported somewhere. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I would like it if whenever Mario stomps on an enemy for blood to be gushing out of it because it doesn't fit the mood.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
prefer rows of eliminated blocks in Tetris to explode into blood and gore and fire.
I think there is something like "enough" of the naughty stuff, and it applies both to gore and the Lara Croft example in GP's post. Beyond that, more just means less believable and it gets old fast.
Personally, one of my favorite games is Day Of Defeat with moderate "blood effects". I find that removing them completely would detract from the game, but excessive gore would not improve it. The same goes for breast size of female MMORPG characters, I like those but don't push the settings for boob size to the maximum.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Portal is not an FPS, it's a puzzle game played from a first-person perspective and with traditional FPS controls.
For an FPS without violence, digital paintball comes to mind.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
They surveyed 101 people and expect to draw a useful conclusion from that? In my high school probability class we did surveys with more people than that. Besides the flawed sample, choosing more women than men in a hobby hugely dominated by males. The sample size is smaller than my recently removed left testicle.
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Half-Life 2 is hardly violent. There is a bit of blood and people dieing and that's it. There is no such thing as "Exploding in dismemberment" in that franchise. So they took a low violence game and made it even less violent. Big deal.
One time, a friend and I tried to actually be helpful in a World of Warcraft battleground (Arathi Basin) without doing a single point of direct damage to anyone on the opposing team, with a level 31 Undead Warlock and a level 32 Undead Priest. Lowest level toons for the ranked Battleground(think "cannon-fodder").
Short of fearing everyone repeatedly(just pissed everyone off, and the first guy with a trinket would kill us) or simply kiting them around to waste their time, we only found ONE method of actually killing someone without doing direct damage.
I'd park my succubus right next to the flag at the lumbermill, have her go invisible and then just stand there. Then I'd go and hide behind this rock real far away, but close enough to see the flag. The Priest would do the same, but closer in.
I'd wait for some unsuspecting soul to walk up, start to take the flag, then seduce them with the succubus(WTF!?........), then have my buddy the Priest come out of hiding, race up to them, cast mind control, then run the poor slob right off the towering cliff next to the flag. I could usually run up to the edge of the cliff just in time to see them hit, far below.
It wasn't us that killed them, it was the landing!
But seriously, MOST games are based on doing damage to something. This study just says that MOST game developers are simply ignoring a possible playerbase-- the ones that don't really care about doing damage to something.
Think Portal.
82,000 years ago I was a cat! In time: solid ball became hollow one – concomitant changes in the correlation structure were mitigated and I forgot what this meant. Never condition on the future.
FUCK
Betwixt me! Against me! Forlorn antipathy, against which a lurgid bee doth protest unkindly.
Pie crust: kneading moist dough causes proteins to entangle (not applicable) = unpleasant mouthfeel. Moisturizing the dough to workability with high proof vodka (and the usual buttering/short) instead of water, thus gives superior results! Just ask Vivaldi and the late lobster-murdering Julia^H^H^H^Hesus Child^H^H^Hrist savour of the tulip factory.
THIS IS WORSE THAN SOMETHING BUT I DON'T REMEMBER YET WHAT IT WAS
Mustard is made from mustard seeds and is more properly called "prepared mustard". It's hard to know when to stop, though.
(so see if I don't)
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Half the people in a group of 36 male and 65 female college students were instructed... An extensive survey of the two groups showed that the exclusion of violence didn't diminish players' enjoyment of the game
Yeah, OK. But only because they had so many women in the mix. Put some 12 year old boys in there and the map will be covered in blood.
People who are outside of the gaming social faction get hooked on this stigma. Violence in games isn't violence. The point of gore in a game rarely has anything to do with violence. Blood splatter in games has a purpose, and it's not to attract the vampire demographic.
Here's an overly simplified run-down for the unaware:
- Games are structured activities with achievable goals.
- Goals in games come with rewards (simple psychology).
- The better the reward system, the more rewarding/entertaining the game.
- Rewards come in many forms, audible and visual are among the most prevalent in audio-visual products such as video games.
- An example of a visual reward is a firework. It's a visually appealing que signifying success.
- Games also often have themes. This imbues the game with 'Mimesis', the fun of role playing and make believe.
- Themes often involve living things because we(humans) find relevant topics more interesting, and living things (including humans) more relevant. Also, living things imply intelligence. Implied intelligence in opponents increases the sense of competition, or 'Agon'.
- When the theme dictates that you should defeat a living thing, and the reward system dictates that you should que success with a visual explosion, common sense leads to blood splatter.
Note: how some themes will use a more science fiction based approach, applying artificial intelligence to robots, and using combustion explosions or sparks as rewards.
The prosperity of violence in games is not, for the most part, due to gratuity, but solid evolutionary success. The game industry is heavily driven by an evolutionary process. Game producers cling to what has worked in previous propogations, while intermittently making random variations to successful formulas.
--So, thank you again scientists for attempting to give empirical evidence for something that was clearly logical.
Remember postal? big hit. Remember Postal 2? Anyone? Anyyone? Once Postal hit and took the "OMG BLOOD AND GORE" away, the next game in the series sucked. Hardcore. Since then nobody has really cared about the stupid blood and gore games.
Well, I'm sure that'll be news to EA, who has been making more money with their sports games than with any other genre. In fact, nowadays the average game doesn't even break even, and EA effectively subsidizes the duds out of their sports games income.
I'm sure it'll also be news to all the console manufacturers who've been courting EA for those games. Or to Sega who thought that they _need_ their own sports games to survive without EA sports, back in the Dreamcast days when they got in a pissing contest with EA.
So yes, "some flag-football where the most dexterous player wins", and in fact is often little more than a re-release of last year's game in higher resolution and the list of players updated, routinely outsells games mindless blood and guts.
I'm sure it'll also be news to Sony, where the Gran Turismo series and Final Fantasy helped sell more Playstations than all gory games combined.
It seems to me that:
1. Taking an arbitrary 13 year old male segment is a non-sequitur anyway, in an age where the average gamer age is in the 30's. There are more female gamers over 20 than male gamers under 18, and the numbers look even more bleak if you restrict yourself to 13 years olds. So what's really the point? That you can pick an irrelevant minority for your example?
2. Even there, don't underestimate a culture where masculinity and aggression are basically channelled into "my sports team beat your team, sucker". You could maybe make your point about some other dexterity game. But football? In half the world it's the modern gladiators and _the_ way to channel us-vs-them willy-waving. People learn early that being a mindless football drone is actually _expected_ if you're male. And aspiring to be a football superstar is actually one of the very acceptable and popular puberty aspirations for males. In this culture it's not a case of "some fag-football", but rather the opposite: people might wonder if you're gay if you _don't_ like football.
So, yes, if that 13 years old wants to not look gay to his peers, picking "some flag-football where the most dexterous player wins" is actually one of the easy ways to do so.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Taking in account their old games, the Simpsons had a TERRIBLE reputation among video game players.
Circumcision is child abuse.
It is interesting to note that the original Fallout games both had Bloody Mess as a "trait" (similar to perks except they could only be selected at character creation and you get to choose up to 3 out of maybe a dozen choices). It differed from Fallout 3 in that it was purely the cosmetic effect, not the extra damage that Fallout 3's perk allowed. However, a lot of work was put into making the original Bloody Mess more... if not realistic, then at least sensical, than Fallout 3's, and it included many unique effects (unique to injury types, that is). This trait is/was easily the most popular trait in the games. When asked about it, however, few people say that they select it for the added violence, while many will say that it's interesting because of the creativity involved, seeing all of the different ways the devs made it work.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
This really just seems to be just bad science to me. For starters, just asking people what they like more as they did in the 2,500 person study is no way to determine anything like this. Next, the sample size is entirely too small on the game play tests for them to mean anything. Finally, why on earth are they using a sample group that is disproportionately female in a study about game violence when it is males that a)generally spend far more time playing games and b) are generally more attracted to violence?
Now just as a disclaimer, I'm not promoting any viewpoint in regards to video game violence. I just think the studies in question here are bullshit (at least as they are described in the article).
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Then again. I've never seen the difference between:
Paintball, Airsoft, Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike. All activities are me attempting to hit an oposing player with projectiles to eliminate them from play or gain a point.
I also don't see any difference between Doom and Super Soakers. They're all equally "violent" in my mind. Just because blood comes out when I hit them doesn't make it more violent to me. Now on the other hand a game in which the goal is to mame or inflict 'pain' on an opponent I would view as violent. But those games are very rare and probably not very entertaining. I don't even twitch or cower away at Fallout 3's gore with heads popping off and lots of blood. But I can't stand the idea of someone's fingers getting smashed in a door. One is painful and one is just theatrics.
What's fun is competition and challenge. The study is correct. But I don't think disabling gore makes Half Life 2 less violent. Just less gory. And while some gore is incidental to a game. Some Gore greatly enhances the enjoyment of the game. Usually good gore is comedic gore. Getting blown up in Team Fortress 2 is usually a hillarious experience as you watch your head fly across the map 200 feet in the air. It's gory. It's your own death. And it's really funny.
Monty Python Search for the Holy Grail has some of the most hillarious gore on film. If the knight hadn't bled when his arm was cut off I think it would have been less enjoyable.
I think you're confused. I could do a completely randomised survey which concludes there is a statistically significant link between people who have long hair, and people who have given birth. However, growing your hair long does not make you more likely to give birth. That is the correlation is not causation argument.
This experiment actually showed _no_ correlation between violence and enjoyment. That was the result. So there's nothing to cause in the first place. The correlation is not causation argument is completely irrelevant to the results of this experiment.