PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE: DEVELOPMENT AND DIRECTIONS IN COMPUTER GAMING

ABSTRACT

Effects of Individual/Team Playing and Constructive/Destructive Goal on Players' Scores on the Game and on Social Desirability, Individualism, and Coping Style Scales

The interactivity feature that essentially distinguishes videogames from older non-interactive forms of visual entertainment such as film or television has opened a new area of media effects research: effects on social skills associated with interpersonal and group relationships whose purpose is either to directly enhance people's subjective well-being or carry out tasks (achieve external objectives) that mediate well-being. This is a favorable moment for closing the gap between speech and mediated communication and also for transferring from sociology, administration science, and political science issues and research methodologies.

Our study is an exploration of possible differential effects of two videogame playing conditions: player structure (individual vs. team playing) and goal type (constructive/accumulation of items vs. destructive/elimination of competition).

The project involves a broad within-subjects design (individual playing in the first session and team playing in the second session). The first session allows free choice of goals. The second session involves random assignment of participants to the constructive- and destructive-goal conditions. Game difficulty will be kept constant at a medium-low level so that most if not all players may be able to play and enjoy the playing experience.

A pretest-posttest format will be used for both sessions, in an attempt to capture short-term game effects on the dependent variables under consideration. But measures of videogame experience (years of playing and hours of playing per week) will also be collected (together with basic demographics) and treated in the analysis as possible causes of long-term effects (significant differences in dependent measures across levels of videogame experience associated with insignificant pretest-posttest and session-to-session variations).

The primary dependent measure will be performance on the game (number of points accumulated in one hour of playing). Findings of significant effects in this area would indicate the potential for using videogame playing as a means of cultivating skills that may optimize people's performance in real-life activities with specific goal and staff-structure conditions (e.g., business, military, or political environments). A set of secondary dependent measures includes social desirability, individualism/collectivism, and coping style. These variables were found by social-psychology and management research to be relevant to working style and achievement in real-life situations. They were also found to be relatively stable features, therefore we can expect little short-term (pretest-posttest and session-to-session) variation but significant long-term/cumulative effects (variations across levels of player experience). We selected short tests for the secondary dependent variables (the classical 33-item Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, the 50-item ESF INDCOL for individualism, and the 60-item ESF COPE for coping style, possibly supplemented by the classical 40-item Coping Style Inventory).

The player sample will include 60 college students, all males¹ and all with prior experience with videogames, recruited from the University of Alabama.

The game selected for the study is Age of Empires 2.

References

¹ The videogame literature supports the notion of gender-specific videogame preferences and effects. Given the fact that males were found to spend more time playing videogames, they are generally expected to exhibit stronger effects of playing. Under the circumstances, videogame effects research has a tendency to focus on male players, considered to be at higher risk, and female players have been rather neglected or studied in separate studies that tend to use different ("girls'") games.

Back to Abstracts

Top

CRIC has combined with PREST to form the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR).

New book: Trust in Food, A Comparative and Institutional Analysis by Unni Kjaernes, Mark Harvey & Alan Warde.

CRIC Final Report to ESRC:"Main Report" and "CRIC Performance Indicators 1997-2006".

'Instituted Or Embedded? Legal, Fiscal and Economic Institutionalisation of Markets' by Mark Harvey

'Beyond Efficiency and Market Shares: Competition within the Finnish Games Industry' by Mirva Peltoniemi

'Accounting for Economic Evolution: Fitness and the Population Method' by Stan Metcalfe

'Innovation and Final Consumption: Social Practices, Instituted Modes of Provision and Intermediation' by Andrew McMeekin & Dale Southerton

'Alfred Marshall’s Mecca: Reconciling the Theories of Value and Development' by Stan Metcalfe