Peter Vorderer

Jennings Bryant

From security training simulations to war games to role-playing games, to sports games to gambling, playing video games has become a social phenomena, and the increasing number of players that cross gender, culture, and age is on a dramatic upward trajectory. Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences integrates communication, psychology, and technology to examine the psychological and mediated aspects of playing video games. It is the first volume to delve deeply into these aspects of computer game play. It fits squarely into the media psychology arm of entertainment studies, the next big wave in media studies. The book targets one of the most popular and pervasive media in modern times, and it will serve to define the area of study and provide a theoretical spine for future research. This unique and timely volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, and graduate students in media studies and mass communication, psychology, and marketing.

Motives, Responses, and Consequences

Playing Video Games

Dolf Zillmann

This collection represents a systematic exploration of media entertainment from an academic perspective. Editors Zillmann and Vorderer have assembled scholars from psychology, sociology, and communication to provide a broad examination of the primary function of media entertainment--the attainment of gratification. Chapters included here address vital aspects of media entertainment and summarize pertinent findings, providing an overview of what is presently known about the appeal and function of the essential forms of media entertainment, and offering some degree of integration. Written in a clear, non-technical style, this volume provides a lively and entertaining study of media entertainment for academic study and coursework.

The Psychology of Its Appeal

Media Entertainment

Mike Friedrichsen

Hans Jurgen Wulff

This volume begins with the general assumption that suspense is a major criterion for both an audience's selection and evaluation of entertaining media offerings. This assumption is supported not only by the popularity of suspenseful narratives, but also by the reasons users give for their actual choice of media contents. Despite this, there is no satisfying theory to describe and explain what suspense actually is, how exactly it is caused by films or books, and what kind of effect it has on audiences. This book's main objective is to provide that theory by bringing together scholars from different disciplines who are working on the issue. The editors' goal is to reflect the "state of the art" as much as it is to highlight and encourage further developments in this area. There are two ways of approaching the problem of describing and explaining suspense: an analysis of suspenseful texts or the reception process. Researchers who follow the more text-oriented approach identify the uncertainty of the narrative outcome, the threat or danger for the protagonist, the play with time delay, or other factors as important and necessary for the production of suspense. The more reception-oriented scholar focuses on the cognitive activities of audiences, readers' expectations, the curiosity of onlookers, their emotions, and their relationships with the protagonists. A correspondence between the two seems to be quite difficult, though necessary to determine. Both perspectives are important in order to describe and explain suspense. Thus, the editors utilize the thesis that suspense is an activity of the audience (reader, onlooker, etc.) that is related to specific features and characteristics of the text (books, films, etc.). Their question is: What kind of relation? The answer comes from finding out how, why, and which elements of the text cause effects that are experienced as suspense. Scholars from semiotics, literary criticism, cultural studies, and film theory assess the problem from a text-oriented point of view, dealing primarily with the how and which. Other scholars present the psychological perspective by focusing on the cognitive and emotional processes that underlie viewers' experience of suspense; that is, the reception theory tries to answer the question of why suspenseful texts may be experienced as they are.

Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations

Suspense

Christoph Klimmt

"This chapter offers some historical and conceptual orientation to readers of the Oxford Handbook of Entertainment Theory. Departing from a brief review of ancient roots and 20th century pioneer works, we elaborate on the state and challenges of contemporary entertainment theory and research. This includes the need to develop a more explicit understanding of interrelationships among similar terms and concepts (e.g., presence and transportation), the need to reflect more explicitly on epistemological foundations of entertaiment theories (e.g., neo-behaviorism), and the need to reach back to past, even historical reasoning in communication that may be just as informative as the consideration of recent theoretical innovations from neigboring fields such as social psychology. Finally, we offer some reflections on programmatic perspectives for future entertainment theory, which should try to harmonize views from the social sciences and critical thinking, span cultural differences in entertainment processes, and keep track of the rapid technological progress of entertainment media"--

The Oxford Handbook of Entertainment Theory

Gary Bente

Roland Mangold

Medien bestimmen unseren Alltag heute in einem Maße, das selbst die euphorischsten Prognosen bei der Einführung verschiedener Leitmedien, wie etwa Buchdruck, Telefon oder Fernsehen, weit übersteigt. Nicht zuletzt der Personal Computer und die weltweite Vernetzung über das Internet haben die Mediatisierung unserer Welt noch einmal deutlich beschleunigt. Medienpsychologie beschäftigt sich mit menschlichem Erleben und Verhalten im Umgang mit Medien. Das Lehrbuch bietet eine aktuelle und verständliche Einführung in die verschiedenen Bereiche der Medienpsychologie. Neben den Grundlagen einer Medienpsychologie werden einschlägige Forschungsmethoden vorgestellt. Die spezifischen Anwendungsfelder schließen sowohl Einsatzgebiete der »klassischen« Medien als auch der neuen Medien ein.Im Lehrbuch werden zunächst die Grundlagen einer empirischen Medienpsychologie dargestellt, z.B. die Schlüsselkonzepte der Mediennutzung und Medienwirkung sowie der Medienkompetenz, aber auch kognitions-, emotions-, entwicklungs-, persönlichkeits- und sozialpsychologische Theorien. Weiterhin wird über die für dieses Fachgebiet spezifisch relevanten Forschungsmethoden informiert. Die Breite und Vielschichtigkeit der Forschungsfelder der modernen Medienpsychologie wird im dritten Teil des Lehrbuches deutlich. Hier vermitteln Beiträge aus dem Bereich der »klassischen« Medien als auch der neueren computerbasierten und interaktiven Medien einen umfassenden Eindruck vom breiten Spektrum der Aufgabenfelder. Themen sind z.B. Lesen, Fernsehnutzung und -wirkung, Infotainment und Edutainment, Unterhaltung, Werbung, computervermittelte Kommunikation, E-Learning und netzbasierte Wissenskommunikation, Computer- und Videospiele sowie die sozio-emotionale Dimension des Internet.

Lehrbuch der Medienpsychologie

Ute Ritterfeld

Michael Cody

Serious Games provides a thorough exploration of the claim that playing games can provide learning that is deep, sustained and transferable to the real world. "Serious games" is defined herein as any form of interactive computer-based game software for one or multiple players to be used on any platform and that has been developed to provide more than entertainment to players. With this volume, the editors address the gap in exisiting scholarship on gaming, providing an academic overview on the mechanisms and effects of serious games. Contributors investigate the psychological mechanisms that take place not only during gaming, but also in game selection, persistent play, and gaming impact. The work in this collection focuses on the desirable outcomes of digital game play. The editors distinguish between three possible effects -- learning, development, and change -- covering a broad range of serious games’ potential impact. Contributions from internationally recognized scholars focus on five objectives: Define the area of serious games Elaborate on the underlying theories that explain suggested psychological mechanisms elicited through serious game play, addressing cognitive, affective and social processes Summarize the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of serious games, Introduce innovative research methods as a response to methodological challenges imposed through interactive media Discuss the possibilities and limitations of selected applications for educational purposes. Anchored primarily in social science research, the reader will be introduced to approaches that focus on the gaming process and the users’ experiences. Additional perspectives will be provided in the concluding chapters, written from non-social science approaches by experts in academic game design and representatives of the gaming industry. The editors acknowledge the necessity for a broader interdisciplinary study of the phenomena and work to overcome the methodological divide in games research to look ahead to a more integrated and interdisciplinary study of digital games. This timely and singular volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, and graduate students working in media entertainment and game studies in the areas of education, media, communication, and psychology.

Peter Vorderer

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