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The main aspects of getting pleasure from computer games are related to the regulation of emotions and motives in self-realization. Motivation as in sports – self-realization from achievements, participation in the process, financial component, awards and competitions.
The process of getting pleasure is explained by an emotional boost in anticipation, process, and victory.
A computer game, due to its high concentration on the process and fixation of attention, immerses a person in an altered state of consciousness – trance. Being in a trance state can be one of the unconscious motivations for playing a computer game, since the trance state itself is therapeutic.
It is scientifically proven that the game causes certain chemical reactions in the body through the experience of stress and euphoria. In the moments of winning or losing, a large portion of adrenaline is released into the bloodstream. Gambling increases cortisol levels. The release of cortisol depends on the action of dopamine-a substance that gives rise to a feeling of euphoria. Dopamine is involved in the formation of drug and alcohol dependence. This is how computer gaming addiction is formed.
It should be noted that the aspects of enjoying the game can be divided into intra-game, non-game and non-game. The first group includes all the ways to get pleasure from game actions during the game, the second group – ways to get pleasure from the game already outside its framework, and the third group – those aspects of getting pleasure for which the game, by and large, is not needed. We will be interested mainly in the in-game aspects and a little – in non-game aspects. Let's take a closer look at the in-game aspects of enjoying the game, which we managed to highlight:
Completion of construction
We are talking about the aspect responsible for immersion in the game reality. Completion usually takes the form of adding a variety of non-functional details to the game world. These details are necessary for the player's mind to make what is happening in the game more realistic, complete and consistent. Other players, having learned about these details, also somehow supplement them – and as a result, the world begins to feel like something alive, more than just a set of game rules. This seems to be what Tolkien meant when he spoke of fantasy and its ability to create secondary worlds.
Completion inevitably occurs in a role-playing game, although it can also appear in simpler games. For example, the completion is based on the game of “Danetki” (or “Situation”) – in which guessers try to come up with additional details of events that explain some initially strange situation. It is important that the answer does not follow logically from the initial conditions, which means that players must give their imagination full freedom. Of course, the completion aspect is absent in games where there is basically no game world, for example, in ” What? Where? When?”. However, overly detailed information about the game world can also be harmful to it: in text and word games, the effect of completion can be much stronger than in games with a carefully designed entourage-precisely because of the freedom to imagine visual details.
Competition
At first glance, everything is clear here – success in any competition raises self-esteem and thereby gives pleasure. However, upon closer examination, it turns out that different types of gaming activities are characterized by significantly different types of competition.
a) The first type of competition is a contest with an opponent. This includes all situations in which one player's win means the other's loss, from multiple board games for two to role – playing fencing.
b) However, not every competition requires someone else's loss – often achieving the result brings satisfaction in itself. For example, playing chess is a competition with an opponent, and solving chess problems is about achieving a result. Of course, trying to compare your own result with someone else's immediately puts this category in the previous one.
c) The third option of competition is the pursuit of an ideal. In this case, the best result is known in advance, and the player's task is to minimize the number of errors in the process of approaching this ideal. A typical example is Madagascar Checkers (also known as Freecell or Yoga), a logic puzzle game that requires you to eat all but one of the chips. It is less obvious that this is the point where all sorts of reconstruction attempts fall in most cases. �
Planning
The next aspect of game activity is planning game events and the ability to somehow influence them, i.e. a strategic approach to the game. In other words, a certain set of parameters is important to the player in the game, and he solves the problem of optimizing them. To ensure that this task is not meaningless, the game must have fairly clear rules that are well known to all players and at the same time allow for a large number of significantly different game situations. This aspect is great in games like chess and board games with more complex rules like “Twilight of the Empire” and “Mare Nostrum Civilization”. He also answers questions about character leveling in game systems such as D&D and the selection of a deck of cards in MtG.
�Cooperation
Another significant aspect of enjoying the game is cooperation with other players. Regardless of whether the alliance is set by the game conditions or formed along the way, the process of achieving a goal in the company provides additional positive feelings. Moreover, a player can sacrifice part of their game goals to preserve the union (and the completion aspect is usually included to justify such sacrifices). An example of a game that focuses primarily on this aspect is Mafia. A curious example of cooperation is also the bridge trading system.
If we wanted to include not only participants in the game, but also observers, we would have to add a special version of cooperation to the list of aspects – cooperation with the viewer. Because of its asymmetry, it differs significantly from normal cooperation, because the viewer is not able to influence what is happening in the game, although he shares the goals and emotions of the players-as the reader can share the emotions of the characters in the book.
Research and collection aspect
The next aspect is exploring and collecting “Easter eggs”, interesting game features or features of the game world. Players who tend to prefer this way of enjoying the game. Usually, it's not just about accumulating information , but about moving its quantity into a qualitatively new way of looking at game events. In particular, this aspect is important for detective stories of games. The game of finding 10 differences between two similar images is based on this aspect, and those readers who remember Soviet programmable microcalculators can also remember Eggology, the “science” of their undocumented capabilities – in fact, this was a pure research and collection aspect.
�Feeling your own strength
In this case, in contrast to the competition, it is not about the pleasure of the result obtained , but about the process of obtaining it, even if there are no opponents and such a result has already been obtained repeatedly. For example, this aspect corresponds to repeatedly collecting the same Rubik's Cube. This aspect is almost always present in a less explicit form, but is usually masked by other more pronounced aspects.
Creation
Another aspect is the use of the game as a source of inspiration for a particular form of self-expression. It is he who is responsible for the emergence of fanfiction and role-playing songs. It is quite isolated from other aspects, because, perhaps, it depends more on the characteristics of the player than on the features of the game. However, it is connected with the completion (and with the presence of the game world) – so, “What? Where? When? ” or chess gave rise to a very modest layer of folklore, in contrast to role-playing games.
Virtual activity
We called the last of the in-game aspects virtual activity. The player performs some monotonous actions that do not make sense outside the game , but thanks to the game, they feel the meaningfulness of their activities and, accordingly, not the meaninglessness of their pastime. This aspect sometimes occurs spontaneously in games, but attempts to purposefully introduce it often fail – this is what they mean when they talk about” grazing logs ” in role-playing games.
Of these eight aspects, the first five usually play the most significant role. As for the non-gaming aspects, they are usually tied to getting something from the game that can be appreciated in real life. For example, here you can highlight the following aspects::
Excitement (getting material benefits from the game).�
�Escapism (replacing real problems with simpler problems in the game world).
Position in society (gaining a reputation in the local gaming crowd).
Accumulation of experience, training.
Removal of prohibitions (getting feelings from various types of antisocial activities).