Psychological Study of Videogames

Based in personal observation and some psychiatric talks. Most games seems don't reach the low tension spectre of emotions. This low tension area is divided in two areas one negative and another one positive, the first one goes for "miserable" and "sad" to "depressed" the second for "calmness" and "tranquillity" to "serene".

We started a study with real people to find out if this is true. We started the preparation of the experience 2 months ago and it will take us some more months. What we find out in the beginning, when collecting games and asking people their emotional experiences (see below), was that nowadays games seems to reach that low spectre, however these experiences seems to be very "cutscene" dependent (like Final Fantasy series).

So we are thinking in moving the experience from the "best sequence in a game" to "the best interactive part of a game". However we still have doubts about this.

The purpose is to find out problems in games now, to find out new solutions that will permit us develop a prototype with new ideas. So we need to decide, if future games we'll maintain cutscenes or not. If cutscenes will be part of games in the future, or if full time interactivity is the only thing acceptable in games?



Collecting Games Questionnaire, launched in game forums and to gamers friends e-mails
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Research on Emotion Game Sequences

We are performing a research on videogames and looking for their capacity on eliciting emotions in viewers and players.

So we would like to ask some of your time and knowledge in helping me. We need to find out computer/video games or game sequences that in your opinion are capable to elicit in the player each of these emotions:

. Happiness
. Anger
. Disgust
. Fear
. Sadness
. Surprise
. Relaxed

To avoid a too much wide comparison universe, we would like to ask you to limit your game choices to the genre action/adventure or game with story, single-player, preferentially 3d. Choose a game outside this group, only if you can't find anything in there and also if you believe that this other game category is really able to reflect that emotion type without any doubts.
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