Study Finds Gamers Prefer Control, Competence Over Violence 219
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."
Re:Violence, maybe, but not gore (Score:3, Informative)
Portal.
Re:65% Women? Yeah that's accurate. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Surveying is not the best method (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.
Dupe (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not a bad person, but... (Score:2, Informative)
I, for one, ... (Score:4, Informative)
prefer rows of eliminated blocks in Tetris to explode into blood and gore and fire.
Re:Yet another BS study (Score:5, Informative)
Your high school "probability class" didn't teach you enough.
According to this [census.gov], there are about 228 million adults in the US.
According to this [washingtonpost.com], 40% of US adults play videogames, or about 91.2 million.
According to this [ezsurvey.com], 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.
Re:Control vs. violence (Score:4, Informative)
Rule 6: "If violence wasn't your last resort you failed to resort to enough of it."