First-person Shooter Video Game Research Articles

Women match men when learning a spatial skill.

Meta-analytic studies have concluded that although training improves spatial cognition in both sexes, the male advantage generally persists. However, because some studies run counter to this pattern, a closer examination of the anomaly is warranted. The authors investigated the acquisition of a basic skill (spatial selective attention) using a matched-pair two-wave longitudinal design. Participants were screened with the use of an attentional visual field task, with the objective of selecting and matching 10 male-female pairs, over a wide range (30% to 57% correct). Subsequently, 20 participants 17-23 years of age (selected from 43 screened) were trained for 10 hr (distributed over several sessions) by playing a first-person shooter video game. This genre is known to be highly effective in enhancing spatial skills. All 20 participants improved, with matched members of the male-female pairs achieving very similar gains, independent of starting level. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the learning trajectory of women is not inferior to that of men when acquiring a basic spatial skill. Training methods that develop basic spatial skills may be essential to achieve gender parity in both basic and complex spatial tasks.

The psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic emotional responses to violent video game events.

The authors examined emotional valence- and arousal-related phasic psychophysiological responses to different violent events in the first-person shooter video game "James Bond 007: NightFire" among 36 young adults. Event-related changes in zygomaticus major, corrugator supercilii, and orbicularis oculi electromyographic (EMG) activity and skin conductance level (SCL) were recorded, and the participants rated their emotions and the trait psychoticism based on the Psychoticism dimension of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire--Revised, Short Form. Wounding and killing the opponent elicited an increase in SCL and a decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity. The decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi activity was less pronounced among high Psychoticism scorers compared with low Psychoticism scorers. The wounding and death of the player's own character (James Bond) elicited an increase in SCL and zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity and a decrease in corrugator activity. Instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent may elicit high-arousal negative affect (anxiety), with high Psychoticism scorers experiencing less anxiety than low Psychoticism scorers. Although counterintuitive, the wounding and death of the player's own character may increase some aspect of positive emotion.

Assessing Adolescents Who Threaten Homicide in Schools: A Recent Update

Our paper, following this update on the problem of adolescents who threaten homicide in schools, published in 2002, remains relevant to contemporary discussions of how such problems might be managed. While new five years ago, the ideas expressed in this paper have become widely accepted today. It is by now recognized, for example, that individual psychiatric assessment of a student who is thought to be potentially homicidal, or at least violent to his fellow classmates, is not enough. There also needs to be a clear assessment of the school climate, involvement of law enforcement if medium or high threat, the student’s family and a detailed analysis of the computer the student may have used, to examine Internet activity, ranging from websites frequented to online relationships developed via chat rooms. Since this paper was written, a great deal also has been learned about cyber-bullying. The Internet has become a major new tool for bullying, allowing children to intensify their bullying in various virtual environments and modes of communication. These virtual modes provide a shield of sorts, perhaps empowering the student to say things he would not normally say to someone face to face; this has increased the vitriol of the bullying and has lead to several suicides. We dedicated our Peaceful Schools project to a victim of one such cyber-bullying death. He hanged himself after receiving a relentless stream of threatening instant messages The media of course follows angles that will get readers and viewers. While tragic events such as these suicides received scant media attention, perhaps due to the unwritten media taboo on reporting on suicide. Sexier, as the media might put it, angles on bullying were reported with some zeal There was a fair amount of coverage of the release of a new anti-bullying video game called ‘‘Bully,’’ published by Rockstar Games in October 2006, a game labeled by one attorney (Houston Press, Nov 30–Dec 6, 2006, pp 27–28) as the ‘‘Columbine simulator’’ and legal attempts were made to block the sale of it. Set in the fictional boarding school Bullworth Academy, the game is not particularly shocking: there is no blood, no killing, no automatic weapons. But the protagonist employs negativity, physical violence and trickery to gain control of school bullies. So a sort of bully-at-heart protects the weaker children, a perverse morality tale in many ways. The boy who has a soft spot for losers and geeks and anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of bullying, takes up for them in a variety of violent interactions. He also becomes a sort of makeshift private eye, doing such surveillance work as photographing girls in the act of cheating on their boyfriends. When the final bell rings the bully rewards altruism and punishes other bullies. He is really a bullying non-bully, a role many of us adopt in the adult world. There has also been further research on Columbine, as the diaries of Klebold and Harris were recently made public. The research suggests that both were strongly influenced by first-person shooter video games, including ‘‘Doom’’ and ‘‘Quake.’’ Some have pointed out that their interest approached an addiction. Their parents restricted their computer use after a criminal trespass indictment suggesting that this restriction may have precipitated the immediate attack on Columbine, by denying the ‘‘drug’’ and the sublimatory outlet it provided. S. W. Twemlow Menninger Department Psychiatry, Baylor College Medicine, 2801, Gessner Drive, P.O. 809045, Houston, TX 77280-9045, USA

Death with a Story: How Story Impacts Emotional, Motivational, and Physiological Responses to First-Person Shooter Video Games

Death with a Story: How Story Impacts Emotional, Motivational, and Physiological Responses to First-Person Shooter Video Games

¿Existe influencia del sistema verbal en la 'jugabilidad' de un videojuego?: Registro de movimientos oculares con eye tracker

Esta investigación tuvo como propósito determinar en qué medida la ‘jugabilidad’ de un grupo de jugadores se ve afectada por el grado de atención al sistema verbal de un videojuego de Disparos en Primera Persona. Para ello, se conceptualiza el videojuego como un macrogénero compuesto de rasgos distintivos y agrupables en tres componentes interactuantes: uno computacional, otro de actividad de juego y otro multimodal o multisemiótico. Entre sus géneros se encuentra el de Disparos en Primera Persona, caracterizado por un alto grado de atención en el centro de la pantalla debido al objeto que se manipula en esa área, además de la alta cantidad de estímulos del sistema gráfico. En este estudio, 29 participantes jugaron un segmento del videojuego Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward, 2009) sin sonido, en el que aparecen dos tipos de mensajes: ‘advertencias’ y ‘órdenes’. La atención a dichos mensajes fue grabada por medio de un sistema de seguimiento de movimientos oculares o eye tracker, mientras que el desempeño se registró por medio de un conteo simple de muertes en la sección analizada. Los resultados indican que no existe una correlación positiva entre atención a los mensajes y desempeño; en otras palabras, la atención al sistema verbal no parece conducir a un mejor desempeño. Los hallazgos indican que, al enfrentarse a dos sistemas que son comprendidos por un mismo modo de entrada (visual), los jugadores dividen su atención y optan por la acción. Queda pendiente conocer qué ocurre con el sonido activado.