The Joy of Sucking

Failure. Ah, my dear old friend. I can't even begin to count the amount of times in which I've become frustrated at losing in a game. Why just yesterday I played some Prey multi online and absolutely got spanked. By the end, I was most certainly not enjoying my loss. So then why has a recent study just been released where it appears that some people still have fun sucking at games?

From the article:

Recently, a team of psychologists led by Niklas Ravaja at MIND Labs in Helsinki, Finland, decided to study precisely what sort of emotions people experience while playing games. So they took a bunch of gamers in their 20s and had them play Super Monkey Ball 2 bowling, competing amongst each other (the top scorer won free movie tickets). While they played, the gamers were wired up to a bunch of biosensors -- including skin-conductance meters, cardiac monitors and facial electromyographs. Psychologists have long found that by detecting spikes in one's physiological activity, they can pinpoint the precise moment you find something fun or frustrating.

As the subjects played Monkey Ball, their pleasure spiked upward when they knocked down a lot of pins. On the other hand, if the ball closely missed the pins and landed in the gutter at the end of the lane, it produced frustration. This is pretty much what you'd expect.

But then something odd happened: When the players aimed really poorly and sent the ball zooming off the edge into space, their brains didn't register frustration. They registered pleasure. "Although the event in question represents a clear failure," the researchers wrote, "several physiological indices showed that it elicited positively valenced high-arousal emotion (i.e., joy), rather than disappointment."

Sucking, it seems, can be fun.

Read the full article over at Wired.com

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