This is the presentation I made in October/09 in Brazil during Interaction\'09 South America. This work reports a project my group did during USI program.

1. The many faces of violent games

2. Violent Video Games Changes in non-verbal behavior and short-term effects on valence and arousal Sophia Atzeni | Ting-Ray Chang | Aljosja Jacobs | Paulo Melo |Dirk Verhagen Sao Paulo, November 2009

3. Motivation Lack of a standard methodology in game research; Assessing people’s reaction via non-verbal behavior.

4. Research question Is there a difference between students playing a violent video-game as opposed to those playing a nonviolent video-game?

5. Study process Video clips 2 games

6. Pre-test 6 games 10 participants 1 questionnaire Goals (1) Find out which are the most violent and the least violent games; and (2) those 2 games should be similar in terms of (1)excitement, (2)difficulty, (3)aggressiveness, (4)frustration, (5)ease of learning in a 5-point scale.

7. Pre-test - results The least violent game (0.8) Link’s Crossbow Training The most violent game (3.4) The House of the Dead Similar in excitement, difficulty, frustration, ease of learning and user interaction.

8. Link’s Crossbow Training – Nintendo Wii

9. The House of the Dead – Nintendo Wii

10. Experiment 1 Within subject design 2 conditions (violent and nonviolent games) 20 male students of 1st and 2nd years at TU/e IAPS test assess participant’s judgment of emotional content Aggressiveness questionnaire

11. Experiment 1 – IAPS test

12. Experiment 1 - hypothesis Playing a violent game for short time (10 min.) will change the judgment of emotional pictures.

13. Experiment 1 - setting

14. Experiment 1 – results 1 Valence – the dimension between Happy-Unhappy – in a 7-point scale. We found extremely stable results.

15. Experiment 1 – results 1

16. Experiment 1 – results 2 Arousal – the intensity of an emotion (e.g. happiness) – in a 7-point scale. There is not a significant result, but we found a trend.

17. Experiment 1 – results 2

18. Experiment 2

19. Experiment 2 17 participants 15 pair of video clips 1 question – is this person playing a violent or nonviolent game?

20. Experiment 2 - hypothesis There is an observable difference in people´s non-verbal behavior when playing violent video games as opposed to when playing non-violent video games.

21. Experiment 2 - results Participantscouldeasilyrecognize the differencebetween the videos.

22. Conclusions There is a stable level of valence through the 2 games. There is a trend showing that people become more aroused from playing the violent game compared to playing the non-violent game.

23. Conclusions Facial expressions aren’t very distinctive. Participants weren’t very expressive. Reduced exposure to games. Reduced sample of participants limited the power of our results. Only male participants

24. Future work Increase and diversify the sample of participants Standardize game selection procedure Run another video experiment Correlation between arousal and non-verbal behavior?

25. Obrigado pelasuaatenção!paulomelo@gmail.comp.h.d.fonseca.melo@tue.nl