violent video games: changes in non-verbal behavior and short-term effects on valence and arousal
DESCRIPTION
This is the presentation I made in October/09 in Brazil during Interaction\'09 South America. This work reports a project my group did during USI program.TRANSCRIPT
The many faces of violent games
Violent Video Games Changes in non-verbal behavior and short-term
effects on valence and arousal
Sophia Atzeni | Ting-Ray Chang | Aljosja Jacobs | Paulo Melo | Dirk Verhagen
Sao Paulo, November 2009
Motivation
• Lack of a standard methodology in game research;
• Assessing people’s reaction via non-verbal behavior.
Research question
Is there a difference between students playing a violent video-game
as opposed to those playing a nonviolent video-game?
Study process
• Goal: Which games to use?
pre-test
• Goal: Reactions to video games
experiment 1
• Goal: Observed behaviors
experiment 2
VIDEO CLIPS
2 GAMES
Pre-test
• 6 games• 10 participants• 1 questionnaire
• Goals– (1) Find out which are the most violent and the least
violent games; and– (2) those 2 games should be similar in terms of
(1)excitement, (2)difficulty, (3)aggressiveness, (4)frustration, (5)ease of learning in a 5-point scale.
Pre-test - results
• The least violent game (0.8)Link’s Crossbow Training
• The most violent game (3.4)The House of the Dead
Similar in excitement, difficulty, frustration, ease of learning and user interaction.
Link’s Crossbow Training – Nintendo Wii
The House of the Dead – Nintendo Wii
Experiment 1
• Within subject design• 2 conditions (violent and nonviolent games)• 20 male students of 1st and 2nd years at TU/e• IAPS test
assess participant’s judgment of emotional content
• Aggressiveness questionnaire
Experiment 1 – IAPS test
Experiment 1 - hypothesis
Playing a violent game for short time (10 min.) will change the judgment of emotional pictures.
Experiment 1 - setting
Experiment 1 – results 1
Valence – the dimension between Happy-Unhappy – in a 7-point scale.
We found extremely stable results.
Experiment 1 – results 1
Experiment 1 – results 2
Arousal – the intensity of an emotion (e.g. happiness) – in a 7-point scale.
There is not a significant result, but we found a trend.
Experiment 1 – results 2
Experiment 2
Experiment 2
• 17 participants• 15 pair of video clips• 1 question – is this person playing a violent or
nonviolent game?
Experiment 2 - hypothesis
There is an observable difference in people´s non-verbal behavior when playing violent video games as opposed to when playing non-violent video games.
Experiment 2 - results
Participants could easily recognize the difference between the videos.
200
55
Answers – correctness
RightWrong
Conclusions
• There is a stable level of valence through the 2 games.
• There is a trend showing that people become more aroused from playing the violent game compared to playing the non-violent game.
Conclusions
• Facial expressions aren’t very distinctive.
• Participants weren’t very expressive.
• Reduced exposure to games.
• Reduced sample of participants limited the power of our results.
• Only male participants
Future work
• Increase and diversify the sample of participants
• Standardize game selection procedure
• Run another video experiment
• Correlation between arousal and non-verbal behavior?
