Results from the videogame preferences and morals survey

Back in March I asked for volunteers for a survey about videogame preferences and morals. Then I had a baby and I kind of forgot about the results for a while. The blog link to the initial call for responses also has information on what questionnaires we used.

Results

We solicited responses from Twitter and Facebook and a forum I frequent and received 75 responses. About 70% (53) of respondents were between the ages of 25-34. 29% (22) were women.

 Some people complained about how I switched the likert scale halfway through (i.e., 1 became "strongly agree" rather than "strongly disagree"), so after about 50 responses I added a heads-up about that. The reason for this switch was to preserve the wording of the original questionnaires. You can see everyone's responses here (yay for open source social science). There are a few different sheets on the results spreadsheet. We used the most conservative method of converting the videogame preferences to subscales (detailed in this master's thesis).

My friend Michael Davison helped with the data analysis (I have done similar analyses in SPSS, but it's been a long time I don't have access to that software anymore). He used the R project software to compute correlations between the videogame preference subscales and the morals subscales and within the subscales themselves. This was an exploratory study so we didn't try to predict the results, although I kind of thought a preference for shooting games would correlate negatively with harm/care, or possibly positively correlate with in-group loyalty.

Probably the most interesting correlation was that preferences for adventure and puzzle games were correlated with the fairness/reciprocity moral subscale. A preference for adventure games had a .33 correlation (p < .01) and a preference for puzzle games had a .31 correlation (p < .01).

Discussion

I was wondering why there weren't any other interesting correlations between the moral subscales and the videogame preferences. One possible reason is that we had a better range of preferences for adventure and puzzle games (14-100 and 31-93 respectively), whereas the range for Action: shooting was 22-74. It's possible I didn't have enough participants who really liked shooting games, or that there is simply no correlation between liking shooting games and wanting other people to suffer.

As for why a preference for adventure and puzzle games correlates with wanting justice and things to be fair, I'm not sure. Perhaps a desire for fairness and a penchant for puzzle-solving stems from a desire for things to be logical or predictable?

Regrets

I was hoping to be able to learn the R software and figure out how to compute Bayesian t-tests (this article inspired me) or a factor analysis and try it out with these data, but I'm not sure if I'll get around to it. If you would like to, go ahead!

Do your moral values and videogame preferences correlate? Help us find out!

You might have seen this survey about how your political compass results and favorite game genre might be correlated. I found it really interesting, but some of my friends pointed out that the political compass has a lot of weirdly-worded and loaded questions. I was also wondering how they measured a person's favorite videogame genre. A friend of mine suggested that if I wanted to, I could do a similar survey using the Moral Foundations Questionaire. Seeing as how half the work of making a similar survey was already done, I found a videogame preferences survey in a master's thesis about personality and videogame preferences, mashed the two together in a Google form, and started trying to get participants.

BOTTOM LINE: I'd love for you to take this survey on morals and videogame preferences. We have 69 responses so far and I'd love you to make that 70, 75, or even 100. Stay tuned for analysis!

Academic Interlude: Videogames as therapy for mental disorders

Last month I blurbed a study that made a videogame that senses various physical states and treated anger and anxiety. This game has been haunting me with how revolutionary it is. It's not just detecting brain waves like those cool moving cat-ear headbands. The game is connected to a system that measures sweat, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, skin temperature, and breathing. From these data, the game can tell what mood you're in (I think there are also facial and speech recognition tools in the software, but that's an even bigger piece to chew).

The researchers used a system called MobiHealth Mobile. This is what it looks like:

It's a lot less bulky than some biofeedback devices I've seen. Those little sensors probably go on your fingers. 

Okay, so you have data about what the player's mood is. What can you do with that data? Well, you can tell when they're getting frustrated, and send them to meditate until they physically calm down. 

When high undesired emotional and/or physiological reactions (e.g. anger feelings, impulsiveness, non-relaxed reactions, frustration, quick and unplanned responses) are detected by the video game, the game immediately directs the avatar to a relaxed area with the goal to calm down. During the whole game session, higher undesired emotional and/or physiological reactions are coupled with greater difficulty to reach the end goals of the video game (e.g. while diving the fishes are more difficult to catch, more obstacles appear in the mini-games). More relaxed and self-controlled reactions are positively reinforced by the game, making the situations easier to handle and the end goals easier to reach.

In their game PlayMancer, the frustrating minigame is trying to collect things underwater while maintaining their oxygen level. In the calming game, more stars appear based on how relaxed you are.

Now, what if there were a game that undermined these goals? You could make a boss get tougher and tougher based on how frustrated (or how calm) the player was. Or a game where you don't die until your palms are sweating with anger. Or a dating sim that only gives you the suave lines if you're really calm. THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES. Think of how immersive this would be combined with the Oculus Rift.

Here's a short gameplay video of Playmancer, which looks like some kind of a college senior project, but the impressive part about this game is the inputs, which unfortunately you can't see.


Source: "Video games as a complementary therapy tool in mental disorders: PlayMancer, a European multicentre study" by Fernando Fernandez-Aranda et al.

Portal as Postmodern Journey: My never-completed thesis

Of all the current arty things going on, video games seem to replay the journey myth the most. A young, attractive protagonist is called to save the world, descends into the demonic realm, and receives a boon after his dragon-battle. Ocarina of Time seems to follow it the closest, and even has a literal "belly of a whale" dungeon. Link ends triumphant, probably with some sort of princess (I never finished, sadly).

Not all video games are content to replay this classic scenario. In Portal, the game ends with the enemy definitely "still alive," and Chell's continued existence is ambiguous. This along with other elements mark it as a postmodern journey (want to know them all? Go ahead and read it...). 

I dropped out of my graduate school program because I realized that my professors had a completely different vision for my thesis than I did (among other reasons). Here's a link to the last draft of my thesis, which, oddly, has been stripped of most of its citations (I was to "add them back in"). It has many problems right now, and I don't really want to ever look at it again, but suffice to say that I'm painfully aware that it is incomplete. I think I wanted the ideas to be somewhere on the internet, and for my years of work to not go completely to waste.

Alongside Portal, my thesis discusses Danielewski's novel, House of Leaves as another postmodern journey. House of Leaves is both ridiculously pretentious and delightfully experimental (and has some super scary parts), and I recommend it for those interested in ergodic/interactive texts. 

Academic Interlude: Multimedia Storytelling and Language Learning

For this academic interlude, I summarize a research article about multimedia storytelling and then discuss how I'd like to see more user-generated stories in games. I'm still playing around with formatting--I want you to be able to read about the study if you want to, but if you don't, I'd like you to be able to read the discussion on its own and have it make sense.

[Study Background] "Applying a Multimedia Storytelling Website in Foreign Language Learning," by Wenli Tsou, Wichung Wang, and Yenjun Tzeng, looks at how using a storytelling website can help Taiwanese children learn English. The background section references research that found that stories effective with children include "repetitive phrases, unique words, and enticing description." These aspects of a story encourage children to retell parts of the story. Kids like hearing and telling stories, basically.

[Study Nitty-Gritty] The researchers gave two Taiwanese classes storytelling-based English teaching. One group had the teacher trying using visual aids with the story, while the other group had Storytelling Website stories instead of storybooks (it's not clear of the children each had their own computer, or if the story was projected while the teacher read it). Afterwards the children took tests on reading comprehension, sentence complexity, and general language proficiency. In evaluating comprehension, the researchers looked at beginning statement ("once upon a time"), characters, theme, plot, resolution, and sequence. If I understand correctly, the experimental group also used the website to recreate the stories they had heard. I'm not sure how old the students were or how long they got to play around with the website, which is information I would like to have.

[Study Results; My Whining] Both groups understood the stories pretty well, but the children who interacted with the website had better overall language proficiency and sentence complexity. I think it's safe to say that telling a story in a foreign language helps you to understand the language better--which is why I don't understand why we didn't make up more stories in my Japanese classes. We used Japanese the Written Language, which, while excellent in building off of previous vocab, had genuinely terrible practice reading sentences. I would have loved to have a story, especially one with pictures. I think I even made a few, when I wasn't writing some form letter for homework.

this guy took this screen shot, I am not awesome enough, it is from Sleep is Death

[Game Discussion] Multimedia storytelling is good for learning a language, and I think it's good for exercising imagination. I can think of a few games that encourage user-generated storytelling: the Neverwinter Nights mod-maker, Sleep is Death, LittleBigPlanet (to an extent), and whatever that mac program was that let you make your own storybooks (a cross between clipart and paint). I love the level creation in LittleBigPlanet, but... it only allows very simple stories. I would love to see a program/game that lets users tell stories in a friendly way. It could be for children, or for authors who think with images rather than just words, or for foreign language students. It could include archetypes in the character set to get things going. I think it would encourage gamers to be creative not just in their gameplay, but also in the way they use language.

[Call to Action] Should I just go play Sleep is Death and get this storytelling kick over with, or do you think there's room for more picture-book type storytelling in video games? Also tangentially: fanfiction is so easy to make, there is already a world and characters, maybe a storytelling game could capitalize on that?

Academic Interlude: Attributes of Older Gamers

This time in Academic Interludes I'm summarizing and discussing "Never too old to play: The appeal of digital games to an older audience" by Bob De Schutter. It is available online here and I've uploaded the PDF here.

Interesting background: ESA estimated that about 24% of North America's digital game audience is over 50. We don't know much about this elderly game population (but I can tell you my dad is part of it, though I don't think of him as "elderly"). The article discussed "uses and gratifications theory," a theory that argues that we consciously choose what media to consume.

One study the article cited found that preadolescents prefer games that give them social and physical powers they don't have in real life, adolescents preferred games they could use to interact with their peers, and young adults "are troubled by the social unacceptability of the games among their peers and therefore revert to the less social motives" (I'd be interested to know what those motives are--fantasy?). The authors of the article continued to discuss motives, and generalized that females wanted games that appealed to their desires for inclusion, affection, and control (like The Sims?). They hypothesized that older gamers would have these same needs, would feel that video games weren't "socially accepted", and prefer technologically uncomplicated games. Basically, they predicted that elderly gamers would be more likely to fit the "casual" gamer stereotype and play simple browser-based kind of games.

Not actually a game, but a folk dance.

The Survey: The researchers surveyed Flemish residents over 45 who self-identified as gamers. The survey was online. They found that 80% were casual gamers who played puzzle games and games based on board/card games (specifically, Tetris, Spider Solitaire, and Zuma [Zuma came out of nowhere for me]. Oh and "Mahjong games" were most popular of all). Most participants played games on the PC or cell phone. The older people who played "hardcore" games (ones you have to download with a larger file size) were more likely to be male and in the younger set. They found that female casual players played more hours per week than male casual players. Respondents played for the challenge, excitement, and diversion of video games--not really for fantasy or interacting with others. Challenge was a bigger motive for females to play than for males, which the researchers weren't sure how to explain. Hardcore (yes, they used that term) players were more likely to play for fantasy and arousal motives (arousal as in excitement).

My discussion: As the researchers note, there are big limitations to their survey. I know at least two older people prefer the DS, but I wonder if DS players a less likely to web surf than older PC players (I suspect yes). I love playing on my DS, if someone randomly comes by I can just close it and I don't have to look like a huge nerd, but if I'm playing my PS3 suddenly being a gamer has to be like part of my self-identity (not that that's a bad thing, it's just how I feel about it).

I was initially surprised to find that hardly any of the players played for social interaction, but I often play by myself in games that have online modes--it's easier to play by myself, I can quit whenever I want, and no one will laugh at me when I mess up. However, I rarely regret playing with others, and I wonder if games had a better online matchup system if social gaming would be more popular with the 50+ group. We all have heard about the adolescent cursing and penis jokes of online spaces, and I think that scares a lot of people off, even if it's rarer in some spaces. I don't think I've been offended by any Little Big Planet level!

What would a video game aimed at an elderly population look like? I know older people are under-represented in games, but does it really matter if you're playing a puzzle game? Perhaps more games based on already-familiar games? It's hard for me to feel creative about it, since it feels like design-wise, puzzle games are pretty simple, but I know that coming up with a new puzzle game (that is easy to pick up but difficult to master) is actually difficult. Thoughts?

Academic Interlude: Alternate reality games for language learning

I'm starting a series of posts called "academic interludes" where I summarize an academic article on gaming and use it as a launch point for discussion. I'm more excited about discussing than reading, so we'll see how long this lasts. With any of these articles, feel free to e-mail me for a PDF of the article; my e-mail should be under my profile (experimentally, you can download this article from my Google docs. I say experimentally because maybe someone else might not see it as fair use).

This week I'll be discussing "An alternate reality game for language learning: ARGuing for multlingual motivation" by Thomas M Connolly, Mark Stansfield, and Thomas Hainey. The article focuses on the implementation of a language learning ARG in over 300 European high schools.

Previous Research of Note: A small pilot study found that 6 ESL students playing EverQuest II for four hours a week reinforced their learning. A university in Spain has an island in Second Life, assumedly to help with English learning. Tactical Iraqi, a government-made serious game to teach Arabic language and culture, "greatly increased the [experimental] battalion's operational capability."

The background section continues to cite evidence about how many educational video games lack actual research, and how much research on video games lacks an understanding of how video games work (i.e., one cannot generalize a result from one video game to all video games). There are some good studies out there, one of which found that mentally disabled individuals could learn to make decisions faster after playing a game that required a decision to be made within a fixed time limit.

I admit, when I think of ARGs I don't usually think of computer games, but obsessive people on forums and GPS coordinates. Unfortunately, in order to make an ARG that many students could use at once, it sounds like the researchers (?) had to settle for a glorified Blackboard-like interface, without hidden messages in water balloons under park benches. According to the authors, an ARG is not that different from an MMO game, but with ARGs, the player must be able to affect (in multiple ways) an outcome which is uncertain from the outset. One of the diagrams shows how ARGs use multiple ways of interacting with... the internet, mostly, and I couldn't help but think of how Glitch uses a lot of these same mediums--wikis, instant messaging, forums, Facebook, e-mail, etc. So that's how I see ARGs and MMOGs as similar--they both use multiple online formats to help players collaborate.  

With the ARG in this study, they had the usual pre- and post-tests about how effective/confusing participants thought it was. Most students thought it was interesting, and some were disappointed that it was basically Blackboard with assignments to talk to other students and google in their target language (I'm actually not very clear on this. I would have liked to have some of the assignments from the ARG in the Appendix, although the awesome hyperlinking in the article almost makes up for it).

I'm a little disappointed that they couldn't cook up something more awesome for their little study, game-wise, but I'm very excited that this research is happening at all. Something similar to this, like an MMORPG for foreign language learning, is basically my dream game. However, one of the things I would worry about in a language-learning MMO is that there would be a wiki and you could copy and paste your answers (i.e., the collaborative aspect of the game would actually encourage laziness instead of puzzle-solving). Although I suppose the programmers could introduce an element of randomness to quests so they wouldn't all be exactly the same.

I know this post was kind of long, but I plan to do more of them in the future (my goal is once a week). I'll label them all with the Academic Interlude thing, so if you're too busy you can skip over it (or would it help if I included a break, forcing RSS readers to go here to read the whole thing? I can't decide). Have you ever tried playing a foreign-language MMO? Do you think this kind of thing would be best for self-teaching or to augment school learning? I am happy to discuss these things.