In class, we briefly discussed the ways video games affected gamers through their developmental phase and thus on into adulthood. On one hand, failure may make gamers content with not succeeding, or used to replay mechanics when confronted with obstacles, but on the other hand, perhaps they desensitize us to the consequences (and fear?) of failure.
This week, my girlfriend (who has played a total of like two video games ever) ended up playing QWOP with me, and so I started thinking a lot more about this topic. Interestingly enough, she actually ended up spending a significantly longer amount of time on the game than I did. While I played a few rounds and watched some Youtube videos, she was determined to figure the game out and reach the end and ended up playing for ~30 minutes or so.
So why did this happen? Psychologists claim that a lack of exposure to stress leads to a diminished capacity to handle stressors in the future. In a similar way, I thought that perhaps a lack of exposure to failure in video games resulted in my girlfriend’s greater desire to beat the game (compared to me) – perhaps she wasn’t at used to failing in video games and thus couldn’t accept failure as easily. I thought that QWOP, while fun, didn’t propose the challenge that I wanted to take on, and that there were many more interesting (and harder) video games that I could be playing.
Interestingly enough, in psychology there is also a distinction between ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ when it comes to addiction. The incentive-sensitization model of addiction explains that as time goes on, while ‘wanting’ increases rather linearly (or at least much more drastically), ‘liking’ on the other hand remains relatively stable, if not decreases. Thus, we can apply a similar model to video games – failure increases gamers’ ‘wanting’ to play the game, but not necessarily their ‘liking’. And thus, perhaps after a childhood of exposure to this addictive cycle, I’m more capable of cutting off the ‘wanting’ mechanic than my girlfriend (and thus this is independent of my ‘liking’ of games).