Appreciation, video games, and media effects: Playing, or Pondering?

Video Games Worth Pondering? By Kyle Francis   

Working with a few colleagues on an upcoming literature review/theoretical synthesis article, I started thinking about newer perspectives in video game research - in short, how to move past the "Media Content --> Media Effect" paradigm. [Note: As far back as Schramm, we've been pushing social science research into understanding more importantly the role of mediation and moderation in media effect, but *sigh* we rarely seem to move past it]

In this discussion, I started thinking about the potential for anti-social media content to elicit pro-social media effects. Ian Bogost has a great (albeit short) chapter on "Disinterest" in his book "How To Do Things with Video Games" where he argues that video game content can be every much repulsive as they can be engrossing (he uses The Torture Game as an example; I'll write more on this later. update 03.10.12 - more on this here). From this, I began thinking about Mary Beth Oliver's discussions of appreciation and meaningfulness as media effect and how these constructs explain the paradox of "enjoying" sad or otherwise negatively-valenced media...

And the gears started to spin.

Give this a read - I'm trying to implicate appreciation in the Stimulus --> Response connection. Rough, but a start?

Appreciation. The dominant paradigm in media effect research hinges on the rewards associated with the experience of enjoyment as reinforcing the retention of anti-social models of behavior. Yet, recent theorizing by Oliver and colleagues suggests this to be a myopic view of the entertainment experience that masks an equally prevalent and powerful media effect: appreciation. Understood as truth-seeking behaviors aimed at helping individuals reflect upon truth and purpose in their own life (Oliver & Raney, 2011), such an effect seems plausible in explaining the apparent paradox of experiencing enjoyment from sad or tragic media, such as Schindler’s List or Old Yeller (cf, Oliver, 1993). In short, Oliver argues that a powerful motivation for consuming media is to seek out meaningfulness, and that this experience is orthogonal from the more basal hedonic motivation.

In this vein, video game research might investigate the way in which the interactivity afforded by the virtual environment might encourage or inhibit feelings of appreciation. On one hand, video game technologies are particularly well-suited at increasing feelings of social presence, a known predictor of narrative processing and feelings of connectedness with game characters (Tamborini & Bowman, 2010) that is likely associated with feelings of meaningfulness. Bowman, Schultheiss, and Schumann (2012) found that increased feelings of responsibility for and control over character actions – both dimensions of character attachment (Lewis, Weber, & Bowman, 2008) – were predictive of playing games for pro-social motivations, and this line of argumentation might be extended further to suggest that increased pro-social involvement with a virtual narrative might elicit more powerful meanings of meaningfulness. On the other hand, it could be argued that video games as a form of popular entertainment have been long-established as simple challenge and competition games (Sherry, Lucas, Greenberg, & Lachlan, 2006) that the learned expectations associated with their consumption are firmly rooted in the hedonic model. Atkin (1985) argues that learned expectations are a robust indicator of selective exposure, as they guide the types of media we seek as well as the gratifications sought in them.

From this, it may simply be the case that gamer audiences do not seek meaningfulness in their gaming experience, thus mitigating any potential for the medium to provide reflection and introspection. Moreover, one might wonder whether or not the gameplay elements of a video game might be counter-productive to the reflection elements of the same, as they might compete for the limited cognitive resources of the gamer (cf. Schneider, Lang, Shin, & Bradley, 2004). For example, the highly-regarded first-person shooter Medal of Honor: Allied Assault begins by placing gamers on the beaches of Normandy as part of the Allied invasion forces, but the game quickly shifts from its dramatic, panoramic and retrospective presentation of the invasion to a more narrow, fast-paced and isolated perspective in order to allow the gamer to concentrate on getting from checkpoint to checkpoint; this shift in perspective also brings with it a focus on murdering your opponent rather than reflecting on the historic gravity of the event itself. Related to this, video game play is known to be significantly more cognitively taxing than other forms of media (Bowman & Tamborini, in press; Reinecke, Tamborini, Grizzard, Lewis, Eden, & Bowman, in press), and this increased task demand may interfere with our ability to process more introspective narrative elements, as suggested to some extent by Schneider et al. (2004). To date, no known research has examined the potential for video games to elicit feelings of meaningfulness in players, and as media psychologists continue to focus their attention on the dual outcomes of enjoyment and appreciation, this research should prove to be particularly relevant.

[references forthcoming; still working on getting electronic versions so I can link them into the blog post]