An article in the February issue of the journal Emotion presents some strange findings regarding players' emotional reactions to killing and being killed in a first-person shooter (FPS). In the experiment, a group of students played James Bond 007: Nightfire (Super Monkey Ball II was used as a control) while their facial expressions and physiological activity were tracked and recorded moment-to-moment via electrodes and various other monitoring equipment. Conventional FPS wisdom would suggest that players like shooting enemies and dislike getting shot. The research findings, however, paint a different picture.

From the article: "instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent elicited anxiety, anger, or both." In addition, "death of the player's own character...appear[s] to increase some aspects of positive emotion." This latter finding the authors believe may result from the temporary "relief from engagement" brought about by character death. Whatever the underlying basis, however, the results seem highly counterintuitive.

My first reaction to the article was that something must have been wrong with the experiment. From what I recall playing Call of Duty 4, I most certainly did not enjoy being wounded and killed and I usually felt pretty satisfied after shooting an enemy. I don't entirely understand the researchers' method for measuring positive and negative emotions, and so I can't pass judgment on it. But suppose for a moment that their methodology is sound? Am I actually experiencing negative feelings on some level when I shoot an enemy in Call of Duty 4? I guess that would speak well for my morals.

The researchers also found that: 1) Players showed no signs of desensitization over the course of multiple play sessions; and 2) Subjects who tested higher for psychoticism (based on a pre-trial psychoticism questionnaire) experienced less anxiety from killing enemies. That higher psychoticism would correlate with lower negative feelings about violence is not surprising. It is interesting, however, that players showed no signs of physiological or emotional desensitization. While this doesn't necessarily disprove that desensitization to videogame violence can occur over long periods of time, it does suggest that brief exposure has little or no desensitizing effect.

Of course, more research would be needed to confirm these findings. This was a small study and the authors' conclusions are mostly tentative. But on the whole, an interesting read.

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These scientists have clearly, never seen me play.

I laugh manically as I kill enemy players, and usually let out a string of curses when I die.

"Relief from engagement" could perhaps apply to players unused to the FPS genre. I however, am always wishing that spawn time limit would count down just a little faster so I can get straight back into the action.

Probably if you sucked at FPS, you will have relief by being kill so you dont have to be stressed about being killed.

Dear Scientists,

I respectfully disagree.

Sincerely,
Alasted

My solution to dying is just to take another sip of my beer and try again. What more is there?

yeah most scientific studies you have to take with a grain of salt. Someone will come up with another study refuting this.

also it could be that you feel relief when you get killed because of the short break you get (even if you want to get back in the action). where as when you kill someone in the game the intensity increases because you know eventually you will die and you get on a role and dont want that to stop

I like being narrowly missed, seeing the bullets hit the walls around me, but surviving.

Super Monkey Ball II was used as a control? To simulate walking/running? Well I would have a big smile on my face if, after I died. When I'm not death I'm a serious gamer. When these games are common, my reaction to death will be ^&%^$*^$&*^%^. SO something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jhagdoKMu8 or just a trackball?

I can tell you its not fun for me dieing in games, back in the day i put my foot through my PSone because i kept on dieing, of course thats not the norm but i'm sure lots of people have broken controllers because they are losing or died.

I can tell you i laugh 50% of the times i die in CoD4, because its either spawned killed or some random grenade being tossed from the other side of the map. The other times i'm just pissed due to lag or some shit like that.