Study: Failing at a game can be fun

This explains a lot about MMORPG raiding:

Recently, a team of psychologists led by Niklas Ravaja at MIND Labs in Helsinki, Finland, decided to study precisely what sort of emotions people experience while playing games. So they took a bunch of gamers in their 20s and had them play Super Monkey Ball 2 bowling, competing amongst each other (the top scorer won free movie tickets). While they played, the gamers were wired up to a bunch of biosensors — including skin-conductance meters, cardiac monitors and facial electromyographs. Psychologists have long found that by detecting spikes in one’s physiological activity, they can pinpoint the precise moment you find something fun or frustrating.

As the subjects played Monkey Ball, their pleasure spiked upward when they knocked down a lot of pins. On the other hand, if the ball closely missed the pins and landed in the gutter at the end of the lane, it produced frustration. This is pretty much what you’d expect.

But then something odd happened: When the players aimed really poorly and sent the ball zooming off the edge into space, their brains didn’t register frustration. They registered pleasure. “Although the event in question represents a clear failure,” the researchers wrote, “several physiological indices showed that it elicited positively valenced high-arousal emotion (i.e., joy), rather than disappointment.”

Sucking, it seems, can be fun.

This is a totally counterintuitive result. Gamers are utterly obsessed with success — who’s l33t, who’s the suXX0r. Indeed, much like the Inuit with their 40 different words for snow, gamers have created a sprawling lexicon of slang designed to quantify — with surgical precision — exactly how much you suck or rock. (Dude, I totally pwned that n00b llama in pvp!) In theory, totally failing at a game ought to bring nothing but the sting of defeat, right?

Sure, except in one case: When you’re playing a game so well-designed that it is delightful even when you screw up.

I know my World of Warcraft guild really liked getting spanked like a naughty little girl by Jin’do the Hexxer last week. If you’re going to get beat down, getting beat down in an interesting way is, yeah, kinda fun …

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