The Process of Prosocial Behavior Between Players/Characters in Digital Games

2022 ◽  
pp. 846-866
Author(s):  
Ji Soo Lim

To understand the influence of video games on the player, several important questions must be answered. First, what accounts for the higher level of engagement in digital games relative to other entertainment media? Furthermore, what kind of experience does the player have during gameplay? Specifically, what does the player think when he or she interacts with other characters in the game? This study examines digital games with a focus on the interaction between the game itself and the person playing it. Among the various social behaviors elicited by digital games, much attention has been given to players' prosocial behavior within the context of a game's virtual world. A multidimensional view of behavior is used to analyze the game's situational contexts and players' interpretation of behavior.

Author(s):  
Theo Plothe

This essay posits two crucial elements for the representation of digital games in film: intertextuality and player control. Cinematically, the notion of player-agency control is influenced greatly by this intertextuality, and player control has been represented in a number of films involving video games and digital worlds. This essay looks at the use and representation of player-agency control in films that focus on action within digital games. There are three elements that are essential to this representation: 1) there is a separation between the virtual and the real; 2) the virtual world is written in code, and this code is impossible for player-agents to change, though they can manipulate it; 3) the relative position of the player to the player-agent, is one of subservience or conflict. I argue that the notion of player-agency control is essential to the cinematic representation of video games' virtual worlds.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Quan-Hoang Vuong ◽  
Manh-Toan Ho ◽  
Viet-Phuong La ◽  
Tam-Tri Le ◽  
Thanh Huyen T. Nguyen ◽  
...  

Abstract Video gaming has been rising rapidly to become one of the primary entertainment media, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Playing video games has been reported to associate with many psychological and behavioral traits. However, little is known about the connections between game players’ behaviors in the virtual environment and environmental perceptions. Thus, the current dataset offers valuable resources regarding environmental worldviews and behaviors in the virtual world of 640 Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) gameplayers from 29 countries around the globe. The dataset consists of six major categories: 1) socio-demographic profile, 2) COVID-19 concern, 3) environmental perception, 4) game-playing habit, 5) in-game behavior, and 6) game-playing feeling. By making this dataset open, we aim to provide policymakers, game producers, and researchers with valuable resources for understanding the interactions between behaviors in the virtual world and environmental perceptions, which could help produce video games in compliance with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quan-Hoang Vuong ◽  
Manh-Toan Ho ◽  
Viet-Phuong La ◽  
Tam-Tri Le ◽  
Nguyen Thanh Thanh Huyen ◽  
...  

Video gaming has been rising rapidly to become one of the primary entertainment media, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Playing video games has been reported to associate with many psychological and behavioral traits. However, little is known about the connections between game players' behaviors in the virtual environment and environmental perceptions. Thus, the current data set offers valuable resources regarding environmental worldviews and behaviors in the virtual world of 640 Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) game players from 29 countries around the globe. The data set consists of six major categories: 1) socio-demographic profile, 2) COVID-19 concern, 3) environmental perception, 4) game-playing habit, 5) in-game behavior, and 6) game-playing feeling. By making this data set open, we aim to provide policymakers, game producers, and researchers with valuable resources for understanding the interactions between behaviors in the virtual world and environmental perceptions, which could help produce video games in compliance with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.


2021 ◽  
pp. 014616722110072
Author(s):  
Jiafang Chen ◽  
Barbara Nevicka ◽  
Astrid C. Homan ◽  
Gerben A. van Kleef

Narcissists have a relatively higher proclivity for displaying antisocial rather than prosocial behaviors, suggesting a comparatively higher tendency for unfavorably impacting societies. However, maintenance of social order also depends on appropriate responses to others’ social behavior. Once we focus on narcissists as observers rather than actors, their impact on social functioning becomes less clear-cut. Theoretical arguments suggest that narcissists could be either hypo-responsive or hyper-responsive to others’ social behavior. Across four studies, we examined narcissists’ responsiveness to variations in others’ antisocial and prosocial behaviors. Results showed that narcissists differentiated less between others’ antisociality/prosociality, as reflected in their subsequent moral character evaluations (Studies 1–4) and reward and punishment (Studies 3 and 4). These results suggest that narcissists are hypo-responsive to others’ social behaviors. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.


Animation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 83-95
Author(s):  
Raz Greenberg

Produced throughout the 1980s using the company’s Adventure Game Interpreter engine, the digital adventure games created by American software publisher Sierra On-Line played an important and largely overlooked role in the development of animation as an integral part of the digital gaming experience. While the little historical and theoretical discussion of the company’s games of the era focuses on their genre, it ignores these games’ contribution to the relationship between the animated avatars and the gamers that control them – a relationship that, as argued in this article, in essence turns gamers into animators. If we consider Chris Pallant’s (2019) argument in ‘Video games and animation’ that animation is essential to the sense of immersion within a digital game, then the great freedom provided to the gamers in animating their avatars within Sierra On-Line’s adventure games paved the way to the same sense of immersion in digital. And, if we refer to Gonzalo Frasca’s (1999) divide of digital games to narrative-led or free-play (ludus versus paidea) in ‘Ludology meets narratology: Similitude and differences between (video) games and narrative’, then the company’s adventure games served as an important early example of balance between the two elements through the gamers’ ability to animate their avatars. Furthermore, Sierra On-Line’s adventure games have tapped into the traditional tension between the animator and the character it animated, as observed by Scott Bukatman in ‘The poetics of Slumberland: Animated spirits and the animated spirit (2012), when he challenged the traditional divide between animators, the characters they animate and the audience. All these contributions, as this articles aims to demonstrate, continue to influence the role of animation in digital games to this very day.


2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob De Schutter ◽  
Steven Malliet

AbstractThe current study aims to integrate the findings of previous research on the use of video games by older adults by applying the Uses & Gratifications (U&GT) paradigm (Blumler and Katz, 1974). A qualitative study was performed with 35 participants aged between 50 and 74, who were selected from a larger sample of 213. Based upon their primary playing motives and the gratifications they obtain from digital game play, a classification was developed, resulting in five categories of older adults who actively play games: “time wasters”, “freedom fighters”, “compensators”, “value seekers” and “ludophiles”.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Fizek

Abstract Automation of play has become an ever more noticeable phenomenon in the domain of video games, expressed by self-playing game worlds, self-acting characters, and non-human agents traversing multiplayer spaces. This article proposes to look at AI-driven non-human play and, what follows, rethink digital games, taking into consideration their cybernetic nature, thus departing from the anthropocentric perspectives dominating the field of Game Studies. A decentralised posthumanist reading, as the author argues, not only allows to rethink digital games and play, but is a necessary condition to critically reflect AI, which due to the fictional character of video games, often plays by very different rules than the so-called “true” AI.


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