• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Next Media – Play Society D2.2.3.2: Article to be submitted to a journal Levelsofcompetitiveandcooperativeplayindyadicgame experience J.Matias Kivikangas, Simo Järvelä, Niklas Ravaja Aalto University Abstract Dyadic gaming experience was studied in an psychophysiological experiment where the nature of conflict was varied in four different conditions. 41 same-sex dyads were recorded to study how various levels of competition and cooperation would affect their psychophysiological (facial EMG, EDA, and cardiac) activity levels and self-reports of playfulness. It was found that more competitive modes elicit more positive experiences, but that playfulness does not vary in regard to competitiveness. However, differences and conflicting results with preceding similar study might suggest that the variance in competitiveness was not great enough, and therefore some effects might have left unfound. Introduction Grown popularity of digital games has led to many formerly strictly game specific concepts and structures pervading life outside games. This gamification phenomenon (McGonigal, 2011) sees games as powerful motivators in various fields ranging from design of everyday products to politics. The underlying theme is that games are approached differently with certain ludic attitude which differs from the typical mindset (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 80). Playfulness is in this sense a very similar element - our hypothesis is that it is not in the activity itself, or the rules or the features, but in the attitude and approach to the activity or item. In this line of thinking, e.g. certain games or products are more playful than others because they are approached differently (cf. Kallio, Mäyrä, & Kaipainen, 2010). The goal of gamification, therefore, is to apply the same type of playful attitude towards products or services. Certain features can naturally draw out particular attitudes better than others. Competition is an important part of the motivation for playing games (Lazzaro, 2004; Raney, Smith, & Baker, 2006; Vorderer, Hartmann, & Klimmt, 2003) and an essential factor among common playing mentalities (Kallio, Next Media – Play Society D2.2.3.2: Article to be submitted to a journal Mäyrä, & Kaipainen, 2010). While playful attitudes are difficult to operationalize and therefore to study, the level of competition is well adjustable in many games. Furthermore, previous studies lay a groundwork for comparisons and thus a bigger picture on the subject. In another study, we compared cooperative and competitive play with two players playing a classic action game (Bomberman), and found significant differences in tonic physiological activity (Kivikangas & Ravaja, 2012a), which was interpreted as: a) participants experienced more positive emotions during the competitive game mode, and b) this effect was much stronger in males than females (to the point that in some indices, there was no difference between game modes in females at all). Arousal and negative affect did not vary significantly between coiperative and competitive game modes. If this is generalizable to other types of games (and perhaps gamified activities), it would have profound implications to design decisions. However, that study only used two modes of play: cooperative and competitive. As the decision between modes is not binary, we set this new study – not only to test the earlier results in another game type, but also to broaden the view with four different modes varying the level of competitiveness. At the same time we vary the effect of computer players, as it has been shown that the experiences against human and computer players is significantly different (Kivikangas & Ravaja, 2012b; Mandryk, Inkpen, & Calvert, 2006; Ravaja et al., 2006). In one condition, the participants were playing in one team on the same side against one AI team, in other, in two teams on the same side against the two AI teams but competing against each other about the points, in third, both participants were playing against each other with one AI player on their side, and in fourth, the participants played in their own team against each other, without AI teams in the game. The cooperative and competitive modes in Kivikangas and Ravaja (2012a) study correspond to the first and third conditions here, respectively. If we have succeeded in designing the conditions the competitiveness should increase linearly from first to fourth condition, and if we can repeat the results from the earlier study, we would have a strong case to directly draw conclusions on the experinces elicited by competitiveness, and not simply by the particular aspects of the conditions. Thus, in this experiment we seek to test the following hypotheses: Next Media – Play Society D2.2.3.2: Article to be submitted to a journal H1. The competition level affects the player experience the same way as in previous experiment (Kivikangas & Ravaja, 2012a); that is, competition elicits more positive responses, especially for males, and there is no difference in negative responses or arousal. H2. The difference between conditions is linear from first to fourth. In addition, we had aim to answer the research question: assuming the above hypotheses gain support, is the level of competition related to playful attitude? Methods Participants The participants were 100 Finnish university students recruited in 50 dyads. The dyads were always same sex with 29 male and 21 female dyads with age ranging from 18 to 32 (M = 22.9 years). The participants in the same dyad had volunteered for the experiment together so they knew each other and were likely friends. Due to technical difficulties, 9 of the dyads had to be removed from the physiological dataset, which resulted in 82 participants in 41 dyads. Stimuli The participants played Hedgewars (http://hedgewars.org), an open-source clone of a popular commercial game Worms by Team 17. Hedgewars is a turn-based artillery game (two-dimensional map and ballistic shooting, see Figure 1), featuring the pink hedgehogs that are controlled in various game modes. The aim of the game is to be the last team on the map, by reducing the health of the other team’s hedgehogs to zero by shooting, or by blowing them to water. The players had 45 seconds per turn to slowly move the hedgehog, choose any one of the various weapons, and shoot by carefully assessing the needed power and angle to guide the ballistic trajectory near the target. The game provides lots of weapons that have various differences in how they behave, but most of them were turned off, so that the more experienced gamers would not have an unfair edge, and to reduce the variation in action durin a turn. Turn order was randomized by default. Procedure Next Media – Play Society D2.2.3.2: Article to be submitted to a journal The stimuli was run on Kubuntu 11.04 Linux desktop computer and projected to a 150*110 cm white screen with Hitachi CP-X328 LCD video projector with 1024*768 resolution. The participants arrived in dyads and signed informed consent forms before the experiment begun. They could practice the game while the electrodes were attached to them, after which there was a 5 minute baseline recording. The participants played Hedgewars in four different conditions in randomized order, sitting 1,7m in front of the screen and sharing the same mouse and keyboard as the game controllers. The conditions were: 1. The participants were playing in one team on the same side against one AI team (cooperation). 2. The participants were playing in two teams on the same side against the two AI teams but competing against each other who has the most kills (competition). 3. The participants were playing against each other, both with one AI team on their side (versus, with AI players). 4. The participants were playing in their own team against each other, without AI teams in the game (versus, without AI players). Before the experiment the participants filled out a background questionnaire. Before and after each condition the participants filled out a series of self-report questionnaires while their psychophysiological data was recorded for the whole duration of the experiment. Datacollection Physiologicaldataacquisition The physiological signals were recorded from participants with the Varioport-B portable recorder systems (Becker Meditec, Karlsruhe, Germany). Facial EMG activity was recorded from the left corrugator supercilii, zygomaticus major, and orbicularis oculi (CS, ZM, and OO) muscle regions as recommended by Tassinary and Cacioppo (2000), using surface Ag/AgCl electrodes with a contact area of 4 mm diameter (Becker Meditec, Karlsruhe, Germany). Electrodes were filled with Synapse conductive electrode cream (Med-Tek/Synapse, Arcadia, CA). The raw EMG signal was sampled at 1024 Hz, amplified, and frequencies below 57 Hz and above 390 Hz were filtered out, using the analog filter built in the Varioport device. The raw signal was rectified and smoothed implementing a linear phase FIR filter using the Kaiser window method (101 coefficients, low-pass cutoff frequency 40 Hz). EMG signals Next Media – Play Society D2.2.3.2: Article to be submitted to a journal were high pass filtered at 90Hz using 3rd order Buttersworth filter, rectified and smoothed with a 100 ms moving average window. Electrodermal activity (EDA) was recorded with Varioport 16-bit digital skin conductance an amplifier (input range = 0–70 ʅS) that applied a constant 0.5 V across Ag/AgCl electrodes with a contact area of 4 mm diameter (Becker Meditec), sampling at 32 Hz. Electrodes were filled with TD-246 skin conductance electrode paste (Med Assoc. Inc.) and attached to the middle phalanges of the ring and little fingers of the subject’s left hand after hands were washed with soap and water (the ring and little fingers were used to reduce the interference between gaming and EDA recording). EDA signal was downsampled to 4 Hz and smoothed using Ledalab (V.3.2.5) toolbox for Matlab, and divided into phasic and tonic components using the nonnegative deconvolution method (Benedek & Kaernbach, 2010).

Load more

  16

Copy Link