Violence in Video Games: Really Not Fun

An interesting article All That Gore Gets in the Way of Gameplay over at Wired, indicates that violence is not necessary to have fun. According to Wired:

In a paper in January’s Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a group of researchers found that violence might be the least compelling part of our favorite videogames. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way of the fun….The results? The amount of violence in a game did not predict how much gamers enjoyed it. When researchers asker players to pick their favorite titles, the highly violent games did not enjoy better word-of-mouth than less-violent ones, nor were they more likely to inspire players to buy a sequel. In fact, for some players rated violent content as “weakly negatively” related to enjoyment: The more gory the game, the less they liked it. (The only exception was a small minority of players who scored high on scales of aggression.)“Violent videogame content adds little or no unique predictive variance to player enjoyment,” as Andrew Przybylski, a doctoral candidate in psychology and clinical social science at the University of Rochester in New York and his colleagues concluded in their paper.

So destroy, crush and mutilate your violent video games…just because they are violent doesn’t mean they are fun.
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