Boy, age 142
After Doom, 3-D games became mainstream. New generations of consoles, with better and more realistic graphics, followed each other in rapid succession. The release of the Wii U in 2012, PlayStation 4 in 2013, and Xbox One in 2013 reflected what is now the eighth generation of video game consoles. While bloggers often foreshadow an upcoming ninth generation of consoles, most experts believe that the eighth generation will be around for a while. For now, developers seemed to have refocused their efforts on mobile platforms that host other types of games, most notably casual games (for example, Candy Crush) and freemium games such as Clash of Clans.3 Along with this refocusing, game developers seem to have reconsidered their target groups: Video games are no longer the domain of a clearly defined segment of young men. The age of the traditional gamer has been extended in two directions: to toddlers and preschoolers, among whom “edu-apps” are booming, and to seniors, among whom casual and brain games are thriving.
What Is a Game?
Although the history of gaming highlights how digital games came to have a prominent spot in our everyday media landscape, just exactly what constitutes a game continues to be somewhat of an enigma. For example, Tetris, Assassin’s Creed, and SimCity are games, but their playing situations and objectives are wildly different. In classic Tetris, or in one of its countless clones, the idea is to fit geometric figures into each other, leaving as few spaces as possible. Tetris has clear rules and goals. But unlike Assassin’s Creed or SimCity, it has no story line or imaginary world. Assassin’s Creed is an action-adventure stealth game that takes place in a fictitious historical setting in which the main objective is to commit a murder without being observed. In the SimCity franchise, the player must build and manage a city while maintaining the happiness of its citizens and keeping a stable budget.
From the beginning, the industry has attempted to classify games according to genre. Initially, this was relatively simple, since most early games were action games. But along with the technological advancements that characterized gaming in the 1990s came a boom in other game genres. Websites such as Gamespot.com identify more than thirty genres; AllGame (a former databank for games) suggested that there were fifteen main genres, which could be divided into more than 130 subgenres, including action puzzle games (such as Angry Birds), 3-D real-time strategy games (such as Myth), and brain games (such as Mind Quiz).4
Most games released today combine several genres, and therefore genre classification tends to result in an oversimplified representation. We will nonetheless make an attempt to classify games by using the system devised by Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen and colleagues. These researchers claim that the most meaningful classification system should be based on the success criteria of types of games.5 They discuss, for example, the differences between Tetris and Myst. To play Tetris successfully, a player must first and foremost have good spatial awareness and be able to quickly determine the consequences of the decisions he or she has to make. Myst is a first-person adventure in which the gamer must investigate the disappearance of several characters in an unfamiliar world. To play Myst well, a gamer must have good problem-solving abilities and deductive reasoning. On the basis of the analysis of Egenfeldt-Nielsen and colleagues, we distinguish three global game genres: action games, strategy games, and process-based games.
Action Games
The action game is the oldest game genre. Most video games released in the 1970s and ’80s were action games. Classic platform games also belong to this genre, since they usually contain a great deal of action. In platform games, the gamer jumps and fights through different levels (platforms). The aim is to skillfully arrive at the end of each level and, ultimately, the end of the game. The Super Mario game series falls into this category, as do first- and third-person shooter games such as Grand Theft Auto and racing games, which are primarily about evading opponents and surviving hazards such as collapsing bridges and tunnels. In addition, fighting games such as Street Fighter fall into this category. Success in playing action games requires fine motor skills and excellent hand-eye coordination. These are the games in which players must not think for too long, but act quickly.6
Strategy Games
In strategy games, players must use logical and deductive thinking (à la Sherlock Holmes), and strategic insight. Winning at these games requires carefully balancing large amounts of information and signals from various sources. In particular, users must consider the consequences of several potential strategic decisions and then use their knowledge of the system and rules to make their decision. Favorite strategy games include Command & Conquer, Warcraft, and League of Legends. Other examples include Monkey Island and Myst, along with single-player role-playing games that focus heavily on solving puzzles (for example, Fire Emblem).
Process-Based Games
Although researchers have long thought that conflict and competition are essential game elements, process-based games have proved that these elements are not as important as we might have thought. Process-based games provide the player a system to play with rather than a predefined goal to achieve.7 Examples of process-based games include massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, as well as economic and social simulation games in which a player’s task is to construct or manage a city, farm, or household. Process-based games have no consistent criteria for success, although the rewards make it clear which outcomes are positive. Players aim to reach higher levels in World of Warcraft, manage a successful city in SimCity, or play with every aspect of life in The Sims. Simulation games such as Flight Simulator X and Train Simulation, in which the object is to imitate a real situation as well as possible, belong to this genre, too. These simulations differ from economic and social simulation games, in which creatively simulating reality is most important. In simulation games, the object is to mimic reality in detail, for example, by landing a passenger airplane perfectly.
Why Do We Like Games?
Like other entertainment media, gaming has a universal attraction for young and old alike. And as with other entertainment media, research on the attraction to and reasons for gaming is inspired by two theories: selective exposure theory and uses-and-gratifications theory. The foundation of both theories is that people’s dispositions (e.g., beliefs, needs, and motives) lead them to use certain media types or content. Both theories have been used to examine and understand different types of gamers. To date, research by Christopher Klug and Jesse Schell suggests that nine player archetypes can be identified by their primary motives for playing games. The nine archetypes and their main motives for gaming are shown in table 12.1.8
These nine player archetypes are not mutually exclusive. Most gamers seem to be a combination of archetypes and thus have more than one motive for playing games. In addition, the motives of the archetypes may have different emphases in different games. For example, the same person can be a competitor who wants to win in Unreal Tournament 4 as well as a craftsman who enjoys playing Candy Crush. These archetypes can be helpful for trying to understand why games are so appealing. If there are different player archetypes, there must be different needs that gaming can fulfill. In other words, by reflecting on these archetypes, we can obtain a better sense of the motives behind gameplay.
Table 12.1. Nine player archetypes
Archetype
Plays digital games . . .
Competitor
to be better than other players
Explorer
to experience the boundaries of the play world, to discover first what others do not know yet
Collector
to acquire the most stuff through the game
Achiever
to improve, to rise in the rankings over time, to attain the most championships over time
Joker
to have fun, mainly, and to enjoy the social aspects of gaming
Director
to be in charge, to orchestrate events
Storyteller
to create or
live in an alternate world and build a narrative out of that world
Performer
to put on a show
Craftsman
to build, solve puzzles, and engineer constructs
Source: Christopher Klug and Jesse Schell, “Adolescents and the Appeal of Video Games,” in Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses and Consequences, ed. Peter Vorderer and Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2006).
A consideration of the player archetypes makes it clear that there are at least six motives for gaming: competition, overcoming challenges, obtaining control, exploration, social motives, and physiological arousal. Like the player archetypes, these motives are not mutually exclusive, which implies that they can, and do, co-occur. For example, action games may simultaneously meet a gamer’s need to overcome challenges and to achieve physiological arousal, while playing a strategy game may, for some, be motivated by a need to obtain control and to interact with peers.
The motive that most people first think of when it comes to gameplay is competition. The competition motive, frequently espoused by boys, reflects the desire to win, to improve one’s scores, and to measure oneself against other gamers. Digital games often allow for competition against the system itself or against others. The competition motive is no different from motives for many traditional sports, which are also often about competition and winning.
While the competition motive is most focused on the desire to win, gameplay can be motivated as well by a desire to overcome challenges. Most game researchers agree that a good game is one that continually challenges the player within his or her abilities. A good game is one that is neither too hard nor too difficult, but is instead “pleasantly frustrating” (this idea is akin to the moderate discrepancy hypothesis, introduced in chapter 4).9 When a game is pleasantly frustrating, the gamer continues to play as the game increases in difficulty. In doing so, the game offers the player at every level a difficult but not insurmountable challenge. This, in turn, enhances the likelihood of the player entering a state of flow, which can be accompanied by intense feelings of satisfaction.10
Unlike “lean back” entertainment such as movies or television programs, games can fulfill one’s need for control. In some games, players can influence the direction of the narrative, the difficulty of the game, and even the appearance of the game and avatars. Players often indicate that “control” is a key reason for gameplay, emphasizing the possibility of being able to affect gaming outcomes. Among youth, particularly those struggling with their own physical or emotional development, the possibility of games to fulfill their need for control is especially experienced as pleasant.
Somewhat related to control, for some players, the many exploratory opportunities in games are particularly motivational. In this context, games—particularly process-based games—offer players the chance to take on identities and roles and to live out particular fantasies. Games strongly appeal to players’ curiosity. Unlike lean-back entertainment, which stimulates curiosity mainly by temporarily withholding information, games appeal to players’ curiosity by requiring them to answer problems or puzzles that are often indispensable to continued play.
Games can also fulfill important social needs. And while the stereotypical notion of the lonesome nerd may be the first image that comes to mind when thinking about gaming, in fact, gaming has become an important social activity—particularly for teens. Thanks to technological developments, players no longer need to share a couch in order to play games together. Indeed, gamers will often spend extra money on systems that provide multiplayer functionality. In strategy and process-based games, for example, teens often develop a shared reality with other players and form close ties with other gamers, sometimes even communicating in a special language that they have invented together. Games and gaming can have important symbolic functions in teens’ cliques and subcultures, just like fashion and sports. For example, teens often will not purchase games until they have been “approved” in their cliques or subculture. And teens who acquire a game earlier or master it better than others are more likely to have a high status among their peers.11
Finally, games can fulfill physiological needs by providing players a rush of excitement during gameplay. Gamers such as this fifteen-year-old often describe their experiences with games as exciting, explosive, and fun: “The first time I played Dragon Ball, I don’t know what, I was sitting there pushing these buttons . . . I was doing special moves . . . I’m, like, I didn’t know I could do that . . . I don’t know where it came from . . . the adrenaline.”12 The pleasure experienced while gaming is often explained by excitation transfer theory (see chapter 8).13 Several elements of games, such as their speed and obstacles, help ensure that gamers’ excitement and arousal increase. If the tempo slows down or the obstacle is surmounted, the player feels relief. This relief, similar to the relief felt after watching a fearful scene in a horror movie, is experienced intensely because the gamer is still in a heightened state of physical arousal. The enjoyment of games, from the combination of confronting obstacles and not knowing whether they can be overcome, is said to resemble the experience of spectators watching a thrilling competitive sport.14
Do Girls Like Games Too?
Although we have an understanding of why young people in general are motivated to play digital games, the notion exists that girls do not like digital games or, at a minimum, find them less appealing than boys do. And in fact, it has repeatedly been shown that boys and men are the predominant players of games. In the 1980s, for example, data indicated that boys spent three times as much time playing games as girls did—with market data similarly indicating that males purchased about three-fourths of the video games. But these sex differences seem to be shrinking somewhat, with recent estimates suggesting that adolescent boys and men now spend about twice as much time playing games per day as do their female counterparts.15
Why has the gender gap in gaming decreased? The answer can be found, in part, by taking a historical look at the trends in games and gaming. In the 1980s, the video game market was dominated by action games with virile men as main characters. Many games did not have female characters at all; if they did, their female characters were beautiful princesses or helpless victims who had to be saved by the hero. With such offerings, it is not surprising that girls were not attracted to digital games. Even today, the action-game genre clearly appeals less to girls and women than to boys and men.
In the early 1990s, the large differences in game use between boys and girls were considered a serious problem. The ability to work with computers was becoming indispensable at the time, and it was assumed that games were the portal to the adult world. People feared that the gaming gap between boys and girls would continue to grow, threatening to put girls at a disadvantage later in life. In part as a result of these concerns, by the mid-1990s, game manufacturers had begun to make concerted efforts to appeal to girls. Initially, they did this by reversing the traditional role patterns. By the end of the 1990s, for example, female protagonists featured in about 15 percent of games.16
A well-known game with a strong female heroine at the time was Tomb Raider. It featured Lara Croft, an archeologist with a prominent bosom who was able to effortlessly shoot down all manner of bloodthirsty men and monsters. Although the game did seem to appeal to a small group of girls, it was the hearts of boys that the scantily clad Lara Croft won by the millions. Tomb Raider completely reversed the female-as-victim stereotype. The female was the hero. This dichotomy—female as either killer or victim—remained in place for the majority of violent video games on the market in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, both roles offered girls too few opportunities for role-model identification, and so the games experienced little success with the female population.17
In the period when the killer female was introduced, gaming companies also tried to design other sorts of games to entice female players. The industry reasoned that females might be avoiding digital games because of their violence. As a result,
the market soon saw an influx of nonviolent female-headed games that were heavily advertised and brightly packaged in pink and purple. But these nonviolent games fared no better with girls. A likely explanation is that violence and action have always been inextricably linked in games. Once the violence was taken out of the games, the action disappeared as well, and so the games simply became boring.18
Interestingly, one game released in 1996 became extremely popular among female players: Barbie Fashion Designer. The enormous success of this game could not be ascribed to the lack of violence or the presence of a female main character. After all, many other, less successful Barbie games were also female headed and nonviolent. So what might explain the success of this particular game? The success of this game, it seems, lies in its combination of realism, the femininity of the leading character, and the creative tasks it contained. In Barbie Fashion Designer, girls design clothes for Barbie—an activity compatible with the imagination and play themes of elementary school girls. Like adult women, girls prefer meaningful interaction and are less fond of the kind of competition that boys greatly enjoy.
As noted above, sex differences in the amount of time spent gaming are significantly smaller now than they were in the 1980s. The game industry is working to become better at attracting the other half of their target group. For example, some action games seem to have become less gender stereotypical than those from the 1980s and 1990s. Even Lara Croft has changed considerably. She now has more humanlike proportions and is fully clothed, albeit in skintight pants and a tank top. And these initiatives of the industry may have been effective. For example, data we are collecting in the Netherlands indicate that five- to eight-year-old boys on average play only seven minutes more a day than girls (30 versus 23 minutes; see chapter 5). These subtle sex differences in early childhood become larger in early adolescence. In the same study, ten- to fifteen-year-old boys spent more than twice as much time per day as girls on games (105 versus 45 minutes). It is worth noting, though, that teen girls nowadays spend on average much more time gaming than adolescent boys did in the 1980s. Moreover, if we compare the total screen time of boys and girls (including their Internet and social media use), sex differences disappear.19
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