Brandon Erickson's blog

Can videogames produce scares as effectively as movies? When did scariness become a viable element of game design? Is scariness in videogames relative? What are the scariest videogames ever made? What makes them scary? How does scariness interact with gameplay?

I finally got around to watching The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters at the local theater pub. The movie is a documentary about the efforts of a man named Steve Wiebe to break the decades-old world record on Donkey Kong. Seeing King of Kong was particularly meaningful for me because, in addition to being an avid videogame player, I have been extensively involved in competitive arcade gaming.

A recent article in the journal Computers in Human Behavior describes a study in which a group of college students chatted with a conversation bot (i.e., a computer program capable of engaging in a conversation). Even though the students knew they were talking to a computer, they actually showed general agreement in their perception of the bots personality traits (e.g., friendliness, thoughtfulness, neuroticism, etc.).

It seems that an increasing number of videogames these days are using one or more forms of operant conditioning, and in particular positive reinforcement. Although reward systems have long been a mainstay of the role-playing game genre, their use has been gradually spreading. Why might that be?

The September issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health unveils the results of a large research study on the effects of playing Re-Mission, a third-person shooter designed to help young cancer patients improve their knowledge of cancer and boost their confidence in managing the disease. Now that the results are in, how does Re-Mission fare?

Compared to the more beautiful and elaborate next-generation experiences currently available, most of the games I loved as a kid (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, etc.) seem like mere trifles by comparison. In absolute terms, BioShock is certainly a much better game than Wolfenstein 3D (one of the earliest first-person shooters). Does it follow then that modern gamers get more enjoyment from their videogames than gamers of previous generations did from theirs?

The June issue of Cognitive Systems Research contains a curious article entitled "Employing emotions to drive plot generation in a computer-based storyteller." Using a computer program built on the premise that “a story can be represented as a cluster or group of emotional links and tensions between characters…[and] story-actions work as operators that modify such clusters,” the author took several computer-generated stories along with one that he wrote himself and had them independently rated. The results are intriguing.

What if a videogame could automatically sense when a player is starting to get frustrated? What if, before the player decides to throw down his or her controller in disgust, a game could detect emerging feelings of impatience and provide just enough support to induce the player to continue? Last month’s issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies details the results of a collaborative study between Microsoft Research and MIT in which researchers created a computer program that could successfully predict player frustration (with nearly 80% accuracy) based on purely non-verbal physical data.

What makes Super Paper Mario so significant is the way that it embodies self-critique in its very structure—it doesn't merely contain elements of critique, it is a critique. So what, if anything, does this mean for videogames?

Last month's issue of the respected journal Developmental Psychology
details a study on the possible links between aggression and wishful identification with violent game characters. The study, which involved 112 adolescent boys, concludes that "identifying with violent video game characters makes players more aggressive." While this conclusion is not surprising, and will most likely just confirm most peoples' fears about videogames, I found a couple much more fascinating results buried in the article's discussion section.