Quick Review:

Madigan, J. (2016). Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on the People Who Play Them. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Getting Gamers offers a thorough overview of research in psychology as it connects to gamers, game design, and game marketing. Much of the book consists of Madigan walking the reader through psychological concepts and deploying them in answer to certain big questions surrounding games. I would say this works well, with a couple of caveats–those already very well-versed in psychology may find these descriptions tedious, while the complete lay-person may still find themselves lost. Madigan’s tone is largely casual and entertaining, making this a more interesting read for students than a psychology textbook, but a bit of background with the subject matter remains useful (particularly some basic knowledge of modern video games and some ability to process and retain the occasional academic jargon). The book is mostly valuable as a departure point to further research, but it would be unfair to say this is nothing more than a review of literature. While the book contains no studies in game psychology such as you might find in Nick Yee’s work, there are many points where Madigan goes beyond simply connecting x research to y issue/game and actually puts forth some interesting arguments. One particularly original and culturally relevant section of the book deals with nostalgia among gamers and its ties to both personal and social development.

More interesting to my personal research are Madigan’s descriptions of various experiential states of play. While his section on presence and immersion is a good review of literature, I was more drawn to his discussion of “compulsion loops” in loot-based games such as the Diablo series (though we might just as well apply it to many different games where loot collection is integral throughout). The randomness of the loot drop is key, Madigan argues, to the dopamine release, and what he describes is very much the gambler’s chase for the action of gambling above the actual material (or in this case digital) gains. My own research heavily involves the interaction, sometimes beneficial, sometimes at odds, between states of reflection and states of flow. These compulsion loops Madigan discusses, which in many respects are similar to flow in terms of losing oneself in an activity or system, seem even more antithetical to reflection. Some games utilize these loops interspersed with other states of play, while others (Diablo being a notable example) seek to spread it across the entirety of the game and minimize any break from it. In the latter type of game I would argue there is little room for reflection or moral consideration. While we might see a flow experience as productive to other aspects of the gamer’s experience, these compulsion loops seem only to feed back into themselves.

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Another section discusses how to give choices weight in video games. Scholars often point out that in an age where most games feature extremely powerful avatars, and frequent saves to reload when those avatars fail, the burden of decision making on the player is light, taking away from any emotional or moral impact that might otherwise occur. Many scholars offer as a solution to this games (mostly independent games) that deliberately place the player in a weakened avatar or inhibit the player’s actions in the game in any number of ways. Madigan does not take his argument there, and I found this quite refreshing. Instead, Madigan points to the way that narrative branches can cut players off from an entire line of content to experience in the game can also have a powerful effect. The loss of access to a character one has grown attached to, or an area/mode of play one is familiar with, can give choices weight. Certainly, we could always reload a save and try the path not taken, but such games usually take another set of experiences away from us down the other path. We can experience both, but at the cost of playing the game over again (which in a 100+ hour RPG can be a steep cost). The argument here suggests that players can be made to feel loss, and to feel the weight of their actions, by manipulating their attachment to various types of experiences in the game rather than by hindering the avatars or the more extreme permadeath options some games are experimenting with.

All in all, for the cognitively inclined at least, Getting Gamers is worth the read. It will be more useful to scholars as a jumping off point to further research, but I could also see it being useful for readings in a class on either video games or psychology.