The Players Realm: studies on the culture of video games and gaming edited by J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith

Continued

• Games are immersive, which means they are capable of transporting users into compelling virtual environments. They are intensely engaging, provoking states of intense concentration that can last for hours on end. They foster intense identification between players and game characters, and they are interactive media that dynamically modify content in response to user actions.

• All four of these characteristics are central to the gaming experience. In studies scattered across disciplines, each dimension has been independently linked to attitude change. The combined persuasive strength of these characteristics is potentially multiplied as players compulsively revisit their favourite video games.

Immersion

• One can watch television or listen to the radio in a distracted state, but most video games demand and receive rapt audience attention. This domination of player senses is referred to as immersion.

• we experience the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. -Janet Murray

• The sensory domination experienced from video games is particularly profound. While film and television content enter via two perceptual channels, video games make it possible for communicators to influence sight, sound, touch and even proprioception ( the perception of bodily movement). 

• The individual identifies himself so thoroughly with the plot or looses himself so much in the picture that he is carried away from the usual trend of conduct. His mind becomes fixed on certain imagery, and impulses usually latent or kept under restraint  gain expression.

Intense Engagement

• Focused gamers display many characteristics of a 'flow state'. This state is characterized by focused concentration, time distortion, a sense of control over ones actions and satisfaction derived from factors intrinsic to the activity being practiced. Video games are uniquely well suited to introduce a 'flow state' because they offer clear objectives, precise feedback, immersive material and content that is dynamically adapted to reflect user choices.

• This has important implications for persuasion, because the motivation for an extended engagement is crucial to mastering complex bodies of knowledge. Students learn in a flow state where they are not just passive recipients of knowledge, but active learners who are in control of the learning activity and are challenged to reach certain goals. Motivated learners more readily choose to engage in target activities, they pursue those activities more vigorously, and they persist longer at those activities than do less motivated learners.

Identification

• We identify ourselves bodily with our character in the game world, and psychologically with the broader narrative arc defined by our characters choices.

• Three types of identity are at work when gaming: virtual identity, real world identity and a projective identity that synthesizes both. Unlike the identification experienced with film and literature, video games identification is active (making choices that develop the character) and reactive (responding to conditions that stem from these choices). Players learn, through their projective identities, new identities, new values and new ways of being in the world based on powerful juxtaposition of their real world identities and the virtual identity at stake in the learning.

• The power of video games resides in the ways in which they meld learning and identity.

Interactivity

• Interactivity refers to interaction with virtual objects (what players can do to those objects, the ways those objects can respond and the ability of those objects to act upon avatars without prompting) and with the games underlying narrative. In all of these contexts, there is a cybernetic feedback loop between the user and the machine. Its is the ongoing interaction between these representations and the embodied behavior of the user that makes such images more than images.

• Judgment-behavior-feedback loops are crucial to recognizing any instructional benefits from games. The game cycle focuses attention to a critical chain of dependencies: (a) to elicit desirable behaviors from learners, (b) they first need to experience desirable emotional or cognitive reactions, (c) which result from interaction with and feedback generated from play.

• This loop underpins all video games, from Pac Man to Counter Strike. Players are rewarded for engaging in certain behaviors (eating dots, shooting opponents), and they experience positive feelings when such rewards are given. When players make choices discouraged by the game designers (walking off a cliff or shooting civilians), they are punished.

This part of the book really helped me gain understanding of how a persuasive game works, how each of the four I's works to together with the coherent world to create a play space that allows the player to learn in the way that the game creator directs.