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."
Control vs. violence (Score:4, Insightful)
"They may not be in it for the blood. They're in it for the fun."
Unfortunately, violence is the ultimate form of control.
Surveying is not the best method (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
In related news! (Score:2, Insightful)
Air is what people breathe! Pain hurts! Ice is cold!
Seriously. What a waste of a study - I recognize the value of it, but they're really not trying very hard, huh?
Violence isn't necessary to have fun in games... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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
And who's going to buy the pansy version? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Violence isn't necessary to have fun in games.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Surveying is not the best method (Score:5, Insightful)
Since there's no reason for either group to know what the other group was doing I can't see how that would matter.
The article casts some light on this! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ;-)
Re:Violence, maybe, but not gore (Score:5, Insightful)
Portal has violence, it's just all happening to you instead of your enemies.
Survey != Study (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And who's going to buy the pansy version? (Score:5, Insightful)
In your rush to be offended, you seem have missed a couple of things. First off the OP's original framing of the question in terms of 13 year olds justifies judging things using terms such as 'pansy'. Even assuming that the post had a homophobic element (which I'd dispute), acknowledging that homophobia exists doesn't make you homophobic.
The next thing you're forgetting is the actual history of the term. From wiki [wikipedia.org]: "The word "pansy" has indicated an effeminate male since Elizabethan times and its usage as a disparaging term for a man or boy who is effeminate (as well as for an avowedly homosexual man) is still used." All of this can be discussed in terms of masculinity rather than sexual preference.
So yeah, maybe save your outrage for things that actually matter.
Yet another BS study (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Violent games stopped me from playing (Score:4, Insightful)
You aren't the only one to talk about realism in your response (though the others weren't so polite). It is certainly true that history is bloody and unjust, far more than we usually recognize. Hell, the present is bloody and unjust too, with historically high levels of slavery, for example.
Personally I think realism in games is generally a red herring. Games are no less fantasies than are most Hollywood films. At best, they have only a passing acquaintance with reality. We play games to escape from reality, not to replicate it. It is too easy to pursue "realism" as a design objective, perhaps because it's easier to imitate reality than to come up with original fun.
To take Age of Empires as an example, in a realistic game we might expect to enslave conquered populations (or at least their women and children), commit religious genocide and cope with serious problems of deforestation and soil degradation. I doubt many of us would want to play a game in which our civilization suddenly and unexpectedly got wiped off the map a disease that kills a third of the population (the Black Death) or 90-99% (the Americas following first contact with European smallbox).
Not that I mean to hold up AoE as a terribly violent game. It really isn't. What bothered me is that a small feature, so easily changed, was actually incredibly brutal. Attacking an enemy's productive capacity while building up my own is the sort of approach I am inclined to take, as opposed to frontal attack. Historically, though, I suspect that conscious economic warfare is a recent phenomenon, reflecting more of a WWII mindset than an ancient one. The wars in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda would be more representative: genocidal attacks on other groups not in order to stop them from producing, but to take over their territory and resources. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the people simply went with the land so there was no need to kill them (though that happened anyway) - it wasn't until part way through the Hundred Years War that nationalism started to take root as a consequence of military brutality.
Re:Violence isn't necessary to have fun in games.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sales numbers don't prove fun. You might as well be arguing that Brittney Spears is a great singer because she sells so many albums.
GTA sold the amount it did on name alone.
Why half-life 2? (Score:5, Insightful)
It has never been the gore. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Surveying is not the best method (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Yes, I sure hope they followed the most basic of procedures in their field.
I hope the programmers here didn't drop their laptops in the tub today, or use them outside in heavy rain. I also hope that they remembered to compile the programs that they wrote- trying to run the source code files directly would probably skew the results!
Re:Surveying is not the best method (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you saying that people are not good judges of their own happiness indicies?
Implying that people don't know when they're happy or what makes them happy? I'd call that a safe one, wouldn't you?
Tell that to EA then? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Violence isn't necessary to have fun in games.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Violent games stopped me from playing (Score:4, Insightful)
It also seems as though your gaming experience is lacking. All the things you speak of in terms of a 'realistic game' exist to one degree on another in Firaxis games like Civ IV and Alpha Centauri. Granted, when I play those (and I do excessively) I turn random events that effect population (like disease) off, but otherwise it's all there.
The other posters are correct. It seems to me that you have a hard time with what is a clear difference between games and simulations with real events. The depictions of villagers in AOE aren't real people. They don't have families, goals, lives, etc. They're stupid sprites somebody drew to represent certain abstract capacities in a game that happen to look like people and are easily and intuitively understood in a common context (it takes labor to get resource X to place of use Y).
If you're so sensitive that seeing a depiction of demise in art (these are drawings remember, they just happen to be part of the goal-oriented framework of a game) evokes a reaction on a level with reality, that is the literal definition of confusing fiction and reality.
Re:Violence, maybe, but not gore (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Before the tags come out (Score:4, Insightful)
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.