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Appreciation: Levels of Moving/Thought Provoking, Lasting Impression and Artistic Value
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This study seeks to explore the multidimensional nature of audience responses to video games. Specifically, appreciation as an audience response serves as an often overlooked but complimentary reaction to enjoyment. Appreciation describes viewer reactions to serious, meaningful and, in the case of video games, morally challenging media content. Thi...
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... predicted that morally challenging game experiences would result in higher eudaimonic appreciation than non-morally challenging games. Results showed that there was a significant difference in eudaimonic appreciation between the violent, ethically challenging F a l l o u t 3 and the violent, non-ethically challenging H a l f L i f e 2 . P o r t a l , the non-violent, non-ethically challenging condition, was also significantly higher in appreciation than offers players extensive player creation choices, dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of gameplay and the development of non-player character (NPC) relationships. The play experience of the participants in the study was limited to a ...Similar publications
This article appears in Volume 5, Issue 1 of Media Psychology Review; http://mprcenter.org/review/shafermoralchoicegames/
Recent research on the process of enjoyment of violent computer/video games suggests that Klimmt et al’s theoretical perspective of moral management, which incorporates Bandura’s concept of moral disengagement, may play a signif...
Citations
... That said, many works treat appreciation as a primarily overarching concept, with markedly different understandings between papers. For instance, some refer to "eudaimonic appreciation" as an outcome of gameplay (Bowman et al., 2016;Chen, 2017;Elson et al., 2014;Taylor & Shafer, 2019). Others use the terms appreciation, eudaimonia, and eudaimonic entertainment experiences interchangeably when describing gaming outcomes (Possler et al., 2020;Wulf & Baldwin, 2020), with a few suggesting that appreciation is an outcome of having had an (undefined) eudaimonic game experience (Bowman, Wasserman, & Banks, 2018;Cole & Gillies, 2019;Koban & Bowman, 2021;Reer & Quandt, 2020). ...
... Moreover, the reviewed works differ in how they specify game elements eliciting appreciation, which also impacted how those papers conceptualized appreciation itself. Some denote appreciation as an audience response to serious and meaningful content, but also argue that it extends to morally challenging content as games can present players with questions on morality or ethical dilemmas they can think more deeply about (e.g., Taylor & Shafer, 2019). Appreciation has also been understood in terms of a response to games' artistic qualities (Wulf & Baldwin, 2020) or as players' pleasing aesthetic evaluation of a game's setting, music, and character design (Barbara, 2018;Toh & Lim, 2020). ...
Digital games have evolved into a medium that moves beyond basic toys for distraction and pleasure towards platforms capable of and effective at instigating more serious, emotional, and intrapersonal experiences. Along with this evolution, games research has also started to consider more deeply affective and cognitive reactions that resemble the broad notion of eudaimonia, with work already being done in communication studies and media psychology as well as in human-computer interaction. These studies offer a large variety of concepts to describe such eudaimonic reactions—including eudaimonia, meaningfulness, appreciation, and self-transcendence—which are frequently used as synonyms as they represent aspects not captured by the traditional hedonic focus on enjoyment. However, these concepts are potentially confusing to work with as they might represent phenomenological distinct experiences. In this scoping review, we survey 82 publications to identify different concepts used in digital gaming research to represent eudaimonia and map out how these concepts relate to each other. The results of this scoping review revealed four broad conceptual patterns: (1) appreciation as an overarching (yet imprecise) eudaimonic outcome of playing digital games, (2) covariation among meaningful, emotionally moving/challenging, and self-reflective experiences, (3) the unique potential of digital games to afford eudaimonic social connectedness, and (4) other eudaimonia-related concepts (e.g., nostalgia, well-being, elevation). The paper provides a conceptual map of the current research landscape on eudaimonic game entertainment experiences, and outlines recommendations for future scholarship, including how a focus on digital games contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of eudaimonic media experiences.
