scholarly journals Shoot at first sight! First person shooter players display reduced reaction time and compromised inhibitory control in comparison to other video game players

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 570-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jory Deleuze ◽  
Maxime Christiaens ◽  
Filip Nuyens ◽  
Joël Billieux
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne Holz Ivory ◽  
James D. Ivory ◽  
Winston Wu ◽  
Anthony M. Limperos ◽  
Nathaniel Andrew ◽  
...  

While the virtual environments of online games can foster healthy relationships and strong communities, some online games are also marred by antisocial and offensive behavior. Such behavior, even when relatively rare, influences the interactions and relationships of users in online communities. Thus, understanding the prevalence and nature of antisocial and offensive behaviors in online games is an important step toward understanding the full spectrum of healthy and unhealthy interactions and relationships in virtual environments. Extensive research has explored video game content produced by game developers, such as violence, profanity, and sexualized portrayals, but much less research has systematically examined potentially problematic content produced by players in online games. While potential effects of antisocial and offensive online game content are not well understood, a first step toward exploring this concern is systematic documentation of offensive user-generated content in online games. To that end, two large-scale content analyses measured a range of offensive user-generated content, including utterances, text, and images, from a total of more than 2,500 users in popular first-person shooter video games. Findings indicated that some content, such as profanity, was frequent among users who spoke during games. More offensive and potentially harmful content, such as racial slurs, was proportionally very rare, but frequent enough to be encountered often by regular players. Results of this initial investigation should be interpreted tentatively, do not suggest that relationships in online shooter games lack healthy elements, and should not be generalized to other online game communities until further research is conducted.* Note: This paper contains strong language which may be offensive to some readers.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krystyna A Mathiak ◽  
Martin Klasen ◽  
René Weber ◽  
Hermann Ackermann ◽  
Sukhwinder S Shergill ◽  
...  

Nordlit ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaroslav Švelch

The article explores the manufacturing of monsters in video games, using the case of the influential 2007 first-person shooter BioShock, and ‘splicers’—its most numerous, zombie-like enemies. I combine two methodological perspectives on the ‘manufacturing’ of splicers by analyzing [a] the title’s developer commentary and other official paratexts to trace the design of splicers, and [b] the game’s embedded narrative to reconstruct the diegetic backstory of splicers. I argue that video game enemies, including splicers, are ‘computational others’, who may appear human on the level of representation, but whose behavior is machinic, and driven by computational algorithms. To justify the paradoxical relationship between their human-like representation and machinic behavior, BioShock includes an elaborate narrative that explains how the citizens of the underwater city of Rapture were dehumanized and transformed into hostile splicers. The narrative of dehumanization, explored following Haslam’s dehumanization theory (2006), includes [a] transforming splicers into atomized creatures by depriving them of political power and social bonds, [b] creating fungible and interchangeable enemies through splicers’ masks and bodily disintegration, [c] justifying splicers’ blindness to context and their simplistic behavior by portraying them as mentally unstable addicts. The article concludes that all video game enemies are inherently monstrous, and that critique of video game representation should focus on how games fail to make monsters human, rather than how games render humans monstrous or dehumanized.


Author(s):  
Helena Pardina Torner ◽  
Xavier Carbonell ◽  
Marcos Castejón

Speed is an essential cognitive skill in our day to day life, as such, it has been extensively studied. The uncertainty of whether the processing speed can be increased with appropriate training-within one individual, across a range of tasks, and without compromising accuracy- remains to this day. The aim of the present study was to analyse the processing speed of video game players and compare it to non-video game players to see if there are any significant differences between these two groups. To this end, a questionnaire on gaming habits and sociodemographic data, and two tests that evaluate the processing speed were administered to a sample of 50 university students from different degrees. The scores were then compared and, taking into account the possible errors, results showed that video game players have a shorter reaction time than non-video game players and that neither of the groups made more mistakes than the other.


2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Elizabeth Andersen

In this article, I argue that the first-person shooter video game, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, reflects the U.S. military‟s transition as it reimagines the soldier‟s role in war. In the age of drone technology, this role shifts from a position of strength to one of relative weakness. Although video games that feature future combat often “function as virtual enactments and endorsements for developing military technologies,” Black Ops II offers a surprisingly complex vision of the future of drones and U.S. soldiers (Smicker 2009: 107). To explore how the game reflects a contemporary vision of the U.S. military, I weave together a close textual reading of two levels in Black Ops II with actual accounts from drone pilots and politicians that illuminate the nature of drone combat. Although there are moments in Black Ops II in which avatars combat enemies with first-hand firepower, the experience of heroic diegetic violence is superseded by a combat experience defined by powerlessness, boredom, and ambiguous pleasure. The shift of the soldier from imposing hero to a banal figure experiences its logical conclusion in Unmanned, an independent video game that foregrounds the mundane, nonviolent nature of drone piloting. Instead of training soldiers to withstand emotionally devastating experiences of death and violence first-hand (or to physically enact such violence), games like Black Ops II and Unmanned train actual and potential soldiers to tolerate monotony and disempowerment.


2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 1286-1293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sijing Wu ◽  
Cho Kin Cheng ◽  
Jing Feng ◽  
Lisa D'Angelo ◽  
Claude Alain ◽  
...  

Playing a first-person shooter (FPS) video game alters the neural processes that support spatial selective attention. Our experiment establishes a causal relationship between playing an FPS game and neuroplastic change. Twenty-five participants completed an attentional visual field task while we measured ERPs before and after playing an FPS video game for a cumulative total of 10 hr. Early visual ERPs sensitive to bottom–up attentional processes were little affected by video game playing for only 10 hr. However, participants who played the FPS video game and also showed the greatest improvement on the attentional visual field task displayed increased amplitudes in the later visual ERPs. These potentials are thought to index top–down enhancement of spatial selective attention via increased inhibition of distractors. Individual variations in learning were observed, and these differences show that not all video game players benefit equally, either behaviorally or in terms of neural change.


2012 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 311-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Stephens ◽  
Claire Allsop

Swearing produces a pain lessening (hypoalgesic) effect for many people; an emotional response may be the underlying mechanism. In this paper, the role of manipulated state aggression on pain tolerance and pain perception is assessed. In a repeated-measures design, pain outcomes were assessed in participants asked to play for 10 minutes a first-person shooter video game vs a golf video game. Sex differences were explored. After playing the first-person shooter video game, aggressive cognitions, aggressive affect, heart rate, and cold pressor latency were increased, and pain perception was decreased. These data indicate that people become more pain tolerant with raised state aggression and support our theory that raised pain tolerance from swearing occurs via an emotional response.


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