Play time is very important to the development and emotional well being of a child. Play time is also a necessary tool for adults to be able to unwind and relax in order to relax the body and mind from the excessive daily grind of life. Through the years, play time had moved from board games and physical activities to video games that can be played anytime and anywhere using hand held devices or game consoles. Throughout all of this, there has been a long running discussion regarding the why and how’s effect of video games on the players or participants in the game. Seemingly, nobody seems to get past the superficial top layer of video gaming that provides hours of mindless fun to see that there are deeper psychological needs that are unknowingly addressed by the video games and the developers of these games.
Video games have gone far beyond the early Atari consoles that only required people to shoot things or the early Nintendo Family computers that had games like Mario brothers where players only bumped heads on bricks to score points. These days, a lot of thought is given by game developers and designers as to the storyboard and final outcome of computer games. Without realizing it, psychology has come to the fore front of video game development, art, and design.
These days, game players are surrounded by what I like to call ;”deductive reasoning games” or games that give people choices and allows them to follow through on the decisions until a final outcome is reached. Games like the tremendously popular SIM City prove that video games can be created to not only provide fun to the player, but also make him socially and environmentally conscious and responsible.
As a game designers, my major responsibility is to develop games that will challenge the player in more ways than just making them twiddle their thumbs on a keypad or swing their arms on the Wii controller. Through the help of video games, psychologists have come to realize that there is a way to reconnect with people who seem to have disconnected from the rest of society.
According to Kurt Squire in his article ” Cultural Framing of Video / Computer Games”, game designers have made at least 3 fruitful contributions to education and social science views which have made a direct impact on the psychological aspect of gaming. He indicates that games like SIM City and Civilization teach the players about science, engineering, literature and architecture because it helps the player understand the role these things play in daily life. It gives the player a deeper, psychological understanding of the game and real life in a way. He continues that:
- Studying the role that games like SimCity and Civilization play in people’s lives and how it mediates their understandings of other phenomena;
- Examining how such games can be used to support learning in formal and informal learning contexts;
- Creating and examining new modes of gameplay through games that draw metaphors from other domains.
The above explanation Mr. Squire proves that there is a direct co-relation between my major, which is Game Arts and Design, with the subject of Psychology. One has to understand and realize that as game designers, we get our inspiration from real life. We develop games based upon our observation of people’s characters, lives, wants, needs, likes, and dislikes. The story developments prey on people’s emotional and physical weaknesses and strengths, all of which can only be done properly if we have a proper grasp and understanding of the psyche of a person. Hence, the need for us to study and understand the relationship between psychology and Game Arts and Design.
Game arts and design rely heavily on real life and its symbolic representations in the virtual world of video games. I have personally found that by playing various video games, I have come to develop a new understanding of the world around me and the people I interact with on a daily basis.
A video game is usually seen as a computerized representation of the real world. Nothing is real, nobody really dies because any game can be reset and the only reason a person plays any game is to enjoy himself and take his mind off the real worries he faces. Therefore a video game is a psychological coping mechanism of sorts for the player. As a game designer, I can change the look and feel of a game, I can even change the control buttons, but the one thing that i cannot change is the way each individual mind shall react to the game play scenarios. According to the article Behavioral Game Design by John Hopson, there is a psychological relation between how players respond or react to the game. Such is a given or constant that exists for the game developer or artist has to presume and develop proper game scenarios for. He goes on to mention that there have already been a number of studies regarding how the study of the mind has a direct influence on game design. But game designers are not aware of these studies because:
Most of these have been published in scientific journals and other esoteric formats inaccessible to designers. Ironically, many of these discoveries used simple computer games as tools to explore how people learn and act under different conditions.
Hopson’s article goes on to mention that such relations between game design, development, and art fall under the category of Behavioral Psychology. This is because behavioral psychology, although originally used to observe animals and their behavior when placed in certain environs, this field of science has also come to focus on experiments and observable reactions of human beings. Hopson further explains that:
What behavioral psychologists look for are general “rules” for learning and for how minds respond to their environment. Because of the species- and context-free nature of these rules, they can easily be applied to novel domains such as computer game design.
How can such applications be done to computer game design? We have to understand that thanks to psychology, game designers now have a certain blueprint, a guideline or framework if you will, that will help us give our players a focus while playing the game and understand, expect, and react to the way the players shall respond to the situations presented within the video game. After having done in-depth research into the co-relation between Game Art and Design with Psychology, and presenting my evidence and quotes from experts in the field, it is my hope that I have successfully presented and proven the way my major, which is Game Art and Design, directly relates to the study of Psychology. This relation is something that is only beginning to come to light and I am sure that over the coming years, more and more studies and evidence of this direct relation between the two shall redefine the way video games are developed, created, and presented to the next generation of video game players.
Work Cited
“Wii Fit Will Definitely Get You Moving”. MSNBC.com. 2008. Web.
“Cultural Framing of Computer / Video Games”. Game Studies. 2002. Web.
“People”. Media, Interface, and Network Design Labs. 2008. Web.
“Behavioral Game Design”. Gamasutra.com. 2008. Web.