Violent Video Games: Changes in non-verbal behavior and short-term effects on valence and arousal

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?

Obrigado pela sua atenção!

paulomelo@gmail.comp.h.d.fonseca.melo@tue.nl