Digital gamers: a mixed method study of players, emotion, mood, and moral life

Alexander Ryan Jenkins

doi:10.17918/etd-7374

This dissertation examined the styles of play for players, how they experienced mood and emotion in digital games, and the relationship between morality and gameplay. To do this I used an integrated mixed methods approach that combined qualitative discourse analysis of player journals with statistical analysis of an online questionnaire. For player types, findings indicated that three player type components - immersion, achievement, and socialization - originally found by Yee (2006) in an analysis of MMORPG players are applicable to a sample of players. The player type components also consistently appear in the journals analyzed in this study, with players reporting aspects of immersion, achievement, and socialization while they were playing digital games. There are strong links between player types and genre between Achievement focused players and Adversarial Genres, and Immersion focused players and Narrative Genres. Analysis of the emotional use of digital games indicate a difference in emotional salience between the two methods. In the survey research players responded to an emotional inventory (Hakanen, 2004) of 11 emotions. Players primarily reported positive emotions but significantly fewer and less negative emotions in both number and intensity. In the journals a variety of both positive and negative emotions were reported, but feelings of frustration and anger trumped all other emotions. For mood management, there was relatively little discussion in the journals. In the survey research the the strongest relationships for player type components were between various mood management functions and the Immersion, with players in this type reporting that they often or always used games to perform theses functions. Similar results were found for players of Narrative and Adversarial genres. For morality the most import aspect was Religion was a telling difference in players' experiences, as players that were religious scored high in each of the five moral modules (harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity), while those that reported that they were not religious scored high in only two (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity). Analysis of the journals indicated players' use of morally muted language (Nikolaev & Porpora, 2008) to discuss decisions in digital games. Players often used moral language to discuss decisions that were made for prudential reasons.

Digital gamers: a mixed method study of players, emotion, mood, and moral life

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Digital gamers: a mixed method study of players, emotion, mood, and moral life

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