Last week I blogged about the gratification of online games. I was wondering why people spend a lot of time with playing online games and I wanted to find out the general motivation. Eventually I learned that different gratification dimensions play an important role: Competition, Challenge, Social Interaction, Diversion, Fantasy and Arousal. However, when trying to find reasons for gaming I really had difficulties with that and I realized that there aren’t many surveys that deal with this phenomenon yet. This is why I decided to dig a little bit deeper in today’s blog entry. I decided to focus on the mechanism that can be responsible for the bonds, the engagement with an online game.
When I personally think of things that make a game worth playing I come to the following conclusion: The graphics must bee good and realistic. There should be something like a story line behind it, for example somebody was hijacked and you need to save him. Furthermore I need the characters to be interesting, characters I can either identify myself with; or characters that have characteristics I would like to have in real life.
There have been researches about those questions. Here is what they found out:
There should be a rewarding system, which means that there must be something you can achieve when playing the game. In “World of Warcraft” for example, you can earn special artefacts or objects and the more time you invest the better you are. In conjunction to that the utilization history also plays an important role: How much time and efforts did the player invest in the game. What are his achievements?
At the same time the game should maintain the balance between challenge and success. When it comes to the abilities of the player the game should neither be stressful nor boring – but exactly in between. This status is also known as “the flow”. (1)
Other important mechanisms are immersion and presence. According to scientists Witmer and Singer immersion is “a psychological state characterized by perceiving oneself to be enveloped by, included in, and interacting with an environment that provides a continuous stream of stimuli and experiences.”
Presence on the other hand is “the subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another.” (Witmer/Singer 1998, 227) (2)
I think everyone who has played a computer game has already experienced Immersion and presence so far. You are fully caught in the game and the living room around you seems to vanish and to merge with the virtual world presented in the computer game.
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