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This study examined the associations between video gaming, sleep, and neuropsychological functioning. A total of 143 mother-children dyads were included in the study. The children’s neurocognitive functions were measured using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children– Fourth Edition (Hong Kong), the Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch), and the Grooved Pegboard Test. Sleep quality was measured by the Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire (CSHQ) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Problematic behaviors were measured using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). It was found that (1) more video gaming was associated with poorer subjective sleep quality and shorter total bed time, but not any actual reported sleep time or any domains of problematic sleep in children, (2) playing video games before bed was not associated with more sleep problems in children, (3) children with more sleep problems were perceived to have more internalizing and externalizing behaviors, (4) sleep problem was negatively associated with tests of perceptual reasoning abilities, and had a moderating effect on the relationship between video-gaming and a hand-eye coordination task. Results implied video gaming might not be predominantly bad for children, and the use of it as a training tool must target specific cognitive skills in order to be effective. Children’s sleep problems should be part of a clinical computation and adequately addressed. / published_or_final_version / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

The relationships between violent content and aggression have not been fully understood and explained in video game research literature. This study sought to determine if video game players" flow experience--a psychological absorption—explains the aggression that can follow video game playing. Employing a survey, this project sought to determine if relationships existed among degrees of violence portrayed in video games, degrees of flow experience, and subsequent aggressive attitudes after gaming. In this study, it was determined that a player's flow experience is more strongly correlated with aggression than is the violent content of video games. Moreover, contradicting the common belief that the video game companies make more profit by increasing the quantity of violent content, there is actually no significant relationship between violence and purchase of video games. However, along the same lines of Hoffman and Novak (1977), this study discovered an increase in purchasing intent related to flow experiences in video games. / Department of Telecommunications

This thesis identifies and explores the types of communication modes that exist in video games. Different types of communication are identified and discussed based on Frye's audience centered theory of modes. The inferior communication mode, the mimetic communication mode, the leader-centered communication mode, the romantic communication mode, and the mythical communication mode are all explained. A convenience sample of six video game players were interviewed about video games. An analysis of their self-identification statements revealed that players seek a high level of romantic communication when playing video games. The romantic communication mode makes the video game world an idealized place where the players are able to manipulate their circumstances or show more intelligence than the user in reality. Uses of the communication modes are also explained. / Department of Telecommunications

Bibliography: p. 273-300. / xiii, 320 p. : ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Psychology, 2000?

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1985 M36 / Master of Science

This study investigated the relationship between the degree of involvement with video games of 72 male university students with performance on pilot screening tests of psychomotor abilities, perceptual abilities, and cognitive style, and also with several personological variables, school performance, locus of control, sociability, and social presence. Additionally, the effects of experience with a video game on the learning of perceptual and psychomotor skills was examined for different levels of previous computer game involvement. It was found that those students who began playing at earlier ages and who more recently played the most demonstrated increased psychomotor abilities, and those abilities appeared to be enhanced by video game play. Greater amounts of time per week spent with computer games were found to correlate with increased facility in learning perceptual skills on computerized instrumentation, and with relative underachievement in school. No systematic relationship was found between degree of video game involvement and measures of sociability, social presence, and field dependence-independence. The study concluded that computer games may have effects upon those individuals who play them, but the effects may not be as negative as many people believe.

The focus of this research is on the development of a real time application that uses a low cost EEG headset to measure a player's state of mind while they play a video game. Using data collected using the Emotiv EPOC headset, various EEG processing techniques are tested to find ways of measuring a person's engagement and arousal levels. The ability to measure a person's engagement and arousal levels provide an opportunity to develop a model that monitor a person's flow while playing video games. Identifying when certain events occur, like when the player dies, will make it easier to identify when a player has left a state of flow. The real time application Brainwave captures data from the wireless Emotiv EPOC headset. Brainwave converts the raw EEG data into more meaningful brainwave band frequencies. Utilizing the brainwave frequencies the program trains multiple machine learning algorithms with data designed to identify when the player dies. Brainwave runs while the player plays through a video gaming monitoring their engagement and arousal levels for changes that cause the player to leave a state of flow. Brainwave reports to researchers and developers when the player dies along with the identification of the players exit of the state of flow.

The focus of this study was to determine how attribution patterns of children with an internal or external locus of control differ when playing a computer video game. Forty subjects each (twenty internally controlled and twenty externally controlled) were placed in a competitive or non-competitive treatment setting with a successful or unsuccessful outcome. Each subject played a computer video game made by a major manufacturer. At the completion of each session, each subject was asked to rate the four attributes of ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck. The results were then analyzed using analysis of variance with age as a covariate.

When games were first developed for in-home use, they were primarily targeted almost exclusively at children and males. However, today’s marketplace manifests a more diverse population plays Internet-enabled games that can be played virtually anywhere. The average gamer is now 30 years old. Many gamers, obviously, are much older. Yet more strikingly, and more germane to this study’s purpose, 47% of the U.S. gamer population is female, as compared to 40% in 2010. Despite these trends the gaming industry remains a male-dominated culture. The marketer’s job is to facilitate game engagement and to motivate gamers to play. The notion of “engagement” is not new in business. The term was developed in the last decade. Many studies were devoted to understand, explain, and define the term. It suggests that within interactive, dynamic business environments, consumer engagement (CE) represents a strategic position that companies can use to enhance their sales growth, competitive advantage, and profitability. Moreover, there are three levels of engagement in any experiential consumption (i.e., playing video game): presence, flow, and psychological absorption. The findings of this study affirm that consumer engagement, including presence, flow and psychological absorption are explanatory factors that impact gamer’s purchase intentions. Our results show that consumers experience different mental engagement in an interactive environment (i.e., playing video games) compared to passive environments (i.e., visiting a website). These findings change our understanding of consumers’ engagement and flow state. We also found that male and female gamers experience different engagement level. However, we did not find a significant result that masculinity and femininity traits impact gamers’ engagement or intention. We argue that macroeconomic factors results in sales fluctuation may have resulted in reject in this hypothesis. Thus, marketers shed a light into the consumer’s interactive environment and flow states in that environments. Consumers not only determine the value in using a product as Vargo and Lusch suggested, but they also create that value. Also, consumer experience is an ongoing process that does not have a specific point to start, making the value creation a temporally accumulative process that includes past, present, and future experience. Therefore, the value created by consumers is not created while physically interacting with a device to play, but it may include imagined and indirect interaction with the product. Therefore, consumers (i.e., gamers) need to maintain a balance between presence and psychological absorption (i.e., flow) to get the best experience in play video gaming. Empirical evidence suggest that consumers’ flow state engagement is the most important variable in determining their ensuing purchase intention for video games, regardless of game genre.