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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.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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This one really brought a smile to my face. I could have - and have for some folks out there - told you this a long time ago. I used to describe it as "positive anxiety" when I was a younger designer and I was trying to use jargon as a way to lend legitimacy to what I do. ;) Jokes aside, the idea that a game (I will glaze over the erroneous assumption the study makes about this being FPS only phenomena) generates this type of anxiety/relief loop is a very old one to any designer - hell any gamer - that's ever bothered to analyze his or her own feelings while playing...

As you trade bullets - or spells or whatever - with an opponent, the anxiety mounts, and you begin to wonder if you're going to win, if you're going to lose, etc. If the opponent is a real human being, you add in the some anxiety about how that person is going to react, whether or not you're a dick for doing it, etc. etc. This more than just some hackneyed revelation that games are anxiety inducing though - this is a positive effect. That anxiety makes the release of victory sweeter and at the same time softens the blow of losing, because - as the study rightly points out - dying is a release valve for that mounting anxiety.

Now, since I'm big on NOT claiming to be an authority or expert, rather than say this is obvious, I'll say that early in my career it occurred to me that this effect is core to the fundamental feeling of success/reward we craft in games. Sometimes you have to feel "bad" for the "good" to feel "Great" in perspective. Mind you, that's not what the study is saying exactly, but it's a related and, I think, important thought that is often lost in the race to "make games accessible" for the modern market.

We have a tendency to make games easier and easier in a quest to get more people to play them, but the reality is that this makes the experience of completing the game shallow and undoes the compelling reward mechanism that brought games to the place they're at now.

I'll say it again, I'm not an expert - NO ONE in this industry is - but it seems to me that we're trying to stamp out this anxiety in games as a general trend and I think that's bad. I think that part of what makes games compelling is the sense that you can lose. (which is different from actually being able to lose, but that's a separate conversation)

Perhaps this study will lead folks from the industry to the same conclusions I came to, over a decade ago. I think games would be better off if the concept that "some anxiety can make things better" was first and foremost in the minds of game developers. Of course, I hope they'll glaze over the stupidity that is the study's other implication: "enjoying winning in a FPS is the same as being psychotic."

That's, pardon the cheap shot, crazy talk.

Enjoying an FPS game is not the same as enjoying real killing. As "graphic" as FPS games are they are not at all "realistic" and thus I'd be suspect of any sort of thought process that included the thought that enjoying one means you must be simultaneously enjoying the other. Game killing != real killing and likely never will. It's not about technology, it's about taste and common sense. There are reasons beyond "we can't do it yet" that preclude us ever making game gore realistic. Take it from a guy that's spent a lot of time in hospitals and who lived with a vet tech for years - real life gore is gross.

A psycho killer might also like star trek, that doesn't mean that star trek is only for psychotics. It's a non sequitur. It does not follow.

- Snipehunter