According to this recently released article, studies show that gamers that play first-person-shooters experience as much positive emotional response from the death of their own character as that of their opponent, if not more. If I’m translating the psychobabble correctly, players often feel more anxiety than joy from victory. And when their own character dies, they experience much less anxiety.

This makes quite a bit of sense, if you ask me. I can see is possible that when you kill an opponent or complete an objective, you get anxious about whatever the next mission will be. Heh, or when the guy you just whacked will re-spawn and come hunting you for revenge! Yet, whenever I die, I do kinda feel a brief period of relief since for that moment, I’m free from the pressure of whatever task is at hand. If it’s a death match, the moment I die is when I can quit running around avoiding that very death. It’s just like what they say, it’s waiting for the bomb to drop that’s the worst.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.