This week, I did a lot of reading and found out quite a bit of information on video game studies that research the potential benefits that can arise from the virtual media. I ended up reading multiple research papers that looked at the psychology behind video games and how video games could improve one's sense of cooperation. Get ready since this post will probably be pretty long (After writing this post, I'll argue that it is quite long, so prepare yourself... mentally).
In one article, I found that the researcher, Mike Schmierbach (what a fun last name to say!), wanted to see how different game modes affected players' aggression. During his experiment, he had different groups of participants play the game, Halo, in various modes that included single player campaign, co-op campaign, and Slayer mode. After the participants played their respective game modes, Schmierbach gave them a survey that required participants to complete certain words. This particular survey gave a couple of letters to start off with and let the participants fill out the rest of the letters to complete the word. Since Halo is a first-person shooter game, Schmierbach expected the completed words to typically have aggressive denotations and connotations. When comparing the selected words from each group of participants, he found that players who played in the co-op campaign mode were much more likely to make words that were nonviolent in nature. As a result, Schmierbach's experiment showed that there is a social aspect of gaming that can influence a person's point of view.
I also found two other experiments that used Halo as a selected game to test participants' behavior and looked at how a violent game could yield Tit-for-Tat behaviors. Before I discuss the experiments, I will explain what exactly is a Tit-for-Tat behavior. In a nutshell, Tit-for-Tat behaviors are actions that reflect previous actions. In other words, if someone does something to you, you are likely to do the same thing to them. In the first experiment, participants were organized into different groups and played different game modes of Halo with a partner where participants either played cooperatively with or competitively against their selected partner. After participants played Halo, the researchers told them that they would compete in a "reaction time task" against their Halo partner. During the reaction competition, the loser would have to listen to an unpleasant noise as a punishment, where the winner could choose how loud that noise would be. From this experiment, researchers found that participants who played cooperatively with their partner set the noise punishment at a significantly lower level that participants who played competitively against their partner. In the other Halo Tit-for-Tat experiment, the experiment was set up similarly where participants would either play with or against their opponent in Halo. However, the difference between this experiment and the previous one was that when the researchers looked to measure a player's Tit-for-Tat behavior, they gave each participant four dimes and a partner. The researchers told the participants that they could keep their dimes or give some/all of their dimes to their partner where any dime given to a partner would be doubled in value. This process was repeated for nine rounds so that the participants could see how much money they were given, and then decide whether or not they want to give/keep more or less of their dimes in the next round. According to the results, players in the cooperative group exhibited more Tit-for-Tat strategies where each partner tended to give more in order for both of them to receive a larger sum of money at the end of the experiment. I did briefly look at this particular experiment when I was designing my own research and decided to adopt an altered version of the Give/Keep Test since I thought that it would be interesting and useful for my own results.
Besides looking at research papers detailing experiments on video games, I also read articles that discuss more of the social aspects of gaming whether that may be focused on the immediate team that plays a video game or a massive online community that works together in order to help educate other players on the ins-and-outs of a particular game. Since video games encourage and even demand the use of teams, this form of media has helped people improve their skills in communication, leadership, and teamwork with other players that not only exists in video games, but also spreads out into the real world. According to Lakshmi Jagad's paper, teachings in video games can be transferred to real life when the two settings are similar. Jagad quotes another researcher, by the name of Dede, that the transfer can happen since "multi-user virtual environments provide a sense of psychological immersion due to design strategies that 'combine actional, symbolic, and sensory factors in manipulating one's avatar to further the suspense that one is 'inside' a virtual environment'" (Jagad 18).
I also read another paper that discussed video games with a behavioral psychology perspective, which looked at the cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social benefits of video games. However, I will not dive in too deep into that paper since I know that this blog post is already long and intimidating to look at.
In case you have made it this far into the post, congrats! I am planning on doing more reading for next week and I have a book that specifically discusses the elements of video game design. So hopefully I will get a deeper understanding of the elements in play with video games.
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