Why Don't People Play Games - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 58

of this is Nintendo' s “ Brain Age, ” which people play because they are afraid of
“losing their faculties” and not necessarily because they enjoy playing the game.
Note that these two short lists are not mutually exclusive. The casual player
might well be entertained and pleasurably experience escapism while simply passing
the time. Hardcore players might well play games to pass the time but would not
see that as a major reason; rather as a side effect of game playing, perhaps.
Casual players will not, on the whole, be early adopters and will have little
interest in playing a game because it is new. They might play games they like that
they have played for years. Many casual players, for instance, will still be playing
Tetris on the Gameboy they were given by a grandchild many years ago and play
only Tetris because they fi nd the challenges it poses remain entertaining and grip-
ping. Casual players might do the crosswords and/or play Sudoku and have no
interest in fi nding new types of puzzles to solve.
It is important to remember when considering players' expressions of the reasons
why they play games is that they might not be consciously aware of all of them. We
should not be surprised by this because the physicality and participative nature of
games means that many of the more basic physiological and psychological pleasures
may arise quite unconsciously while still contributing to a player's overall sense of
pleasure gained by playing them. It should never be underestimated just how little
of our experience and understanding of the world around us is available to us con-
sciously (Blackmore, 1999; Damasio, 2000). To make this clear it is only necessary
to ask someone to tell you how he or she is able control a bicycle, or what changed
in the moment when the person fi rst learned to swim or even when the person fi rst
found him- or herself able to write computer programs. Such knowledge is expressed
in our unconscious mental maps of bodily coordinations and patterns of knowledge.
They are not consciously available to us; in certain fundamental ways, games are
no different.
So there are different types of people and they are all complicated; they like
different things from their games. But what are these things and what types of people
are there? If we could relate types of people to types of games that would help us
answer the question that is the title of this chapter. But fi rst, what kinds of emotional
rewards do people get from playing games?

EMOTIONAL MODELS OF PLAY

Various groups around the world are looking at the kinds of emotions people experi-
ence when they play games. For instance, Glasgow Caledonian University in Scot-
land has created the eMotion Lab, a facility specifi cally designed to allow researchers
to observe players while they are playing games and to analyze the kinds of physical
and emotional behaviors they display. 1
XEODesign in the United States has undertaken similar studies observing
players in their home environments and used simple equipment such as home video

1

http://www.gcal.ac.uk/creates/centres/emotionlab.html