Towards a Comprehensive Model of Mediating Frustration in Videogames

Topical Relations

Answering the question of how any topic relates to my own professional career can get a bit mercurial, but is not particularly difficult. I am a software engineer, and the technology director at
the EHS Division of The University of Kentucky. It is a position of many hats. However, even if you cast that aspect for a narrower appellation of “programmer”, you will find it shares an affected relationship with most other fields of study.

For instance, let us draw something entirely at random… HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning). What do compression ratios, British Thermal Units, and humidity have to do with keyboard warriors? Besides a comfy office that is. Easy enough – heat. Modern technophiles do not want to admit it, but at its heart, the semiconductor chips that power every electronic device on the planet are really just glorified abacuses. Binary zero or one values; each represented by a solitary microscopic transistor, itself nothing more than an electric gate. Harness one you and get a light switch. Gather a few billion and you have the kind of calculation potential it takes to run weather patterns, chemical research, or power whatever device opened this writing. You also get vast amounts of waste heat to dispel. Touch a CPU in operation, and your blistered finger will come away as proof. Without powerful, reliable, and very well engineered cooling
systems, everything from phone networks to your local court house green screen would all come to a grinding, acrid halt.

That may seem a bit of a digression, but should convey the idea that interaction of topics is easy to find. In simple terms, the article of choice is relevant to my profession because my profession and interests both include human interface development – but the real reason the topic is relevant is even simpler: With professional synergy in mind, all topics are relevant.

Questioning the Queries

Two primary questions posed during the article’s research phase.

1. How do players react to frustrating situations arising during gameplay?
2. How do players keep themselves motivated during frustrating scenarios?

The overarching topic was questioning how players persist through games during frustrating phases. Or rather, how is it that an activity that costs time and productivity with no evident reward aside from the joy of playing continue to garner interest at times when it may not actually be fun for the player?

By seeking to answer the above questions through a pilot model study,
researches hoped to test a hypothesis that players maintained motivation through desire to restore the effort-reward balance of gameplay.

It was hypothesized that players keep a vague prior interest — or focus of play— intact through the frustrating scenarios. Because videogame play is
inherently intrinsically motivated (Lafrenière et al., 2012, p. 827), it was also hypothesized that players’ persistence is fuelled through contextual intrinsic motivation and their desire to restore their situationally intrinsic state.

Melhart, D. (2018, April). Game Studies. Retrieved September, 30, from http://gamestudies.org/1801/articles/david_melhart p8

Rehashing Researchers

The core research used a peer review model, relying on a focus group of three, and a series of semi-formal interviews with nine male test subjects who all self-identified as gamers.

An obvious problem with this form of research is that data would be highly reliant upon individual experience and description. This is soft, or more properly defined, qualitative data. Reliable or not, it can be resistant to analysis.

To combat the abundance of qualitative data, post data processing relied on the Template analysis method. According to Mr. Melhart, the template model is specifically tailored to extract patterns from a mix of qualitative and partiality qualitative data from interview transcripts.

The method uses any qualitative or quasi-qualitative data — usually interview transcripts (Brooks & King, 2014, p. 4) — to construct a continuously evolving template of codes (King, 2012, p. 426) that are later interpreted by the researcher (King, 2012, p. 446; Brooks & King, 2014, p. 8).

Melhart, D. (2018, April). Game Studies. Retrieved September, 30, from http://gamestudies.org/1801/articles/david_melhart p4

It’s All CRAAP

Passing or failing a set of acronyms does not necessarily mean any given writing is worthy of the press or trashcan. Even so, a basic review rubric gives us a reasonable outline of quality.

• Currency: Barring any truly disruptive breakthroughs in human psychology or interactive entertainment, the study’s subject matter and approach are current to contemporary standards and references.
• Relevance: From a personal standpoint, the study is of little direct interest. However, as mentioned above ALL studies are relevant to all people when they consider how human knowledge interconnects. In the case of someone involved in the fields of psychology or developing applications that interact directly with end users, an argument could be made it is a must read.
• Authority: The article comes from a site dedicated to gaming studies. It is rather difficult to ascertain the authority compared to other articles as the study is unique. Essentially, the study is building a field and by extension creating its own authority. Accuracy: The language appears unbiased and professional. However, the danger of informational bias due to the study group oriented research is still a “danger flag”.
• Purpose: The purpose is to open a new line of research concerning games and player interaction. This may appear frivolous, but has potentially far-reaching consequences for any human interactive applications.

Like, Literary Reviewing

An extensive background summary and framework are included. Mr. Melhart divides his summary into organized sections, providing a basic introduction, purpose outline, methodology, theories examined, and terms use respectively. Any flaws found in this article will not be due to missing facets.

Call Me Biased – Bigger is Better

Put bluntly, no ethical violations exist in the research. Mr. Melhart also appears to maintain a strong neutrality – any researcher bias escapes notice. However, Mr. Melhart’s research does have two very serious flaws. The first is lack of scope. Consider the sample sources:

• Three member focus group
• Nine male players total interviewed

In short, the entirety of the research predicates on twelve interviewees total. Considering the subject matter, this is an unacceptably small sample size. It also lacks any diversity. Note also – All the represented subjects are male. This is the second and arguably more destructive research flaw. Few would argue the majority of game players skew toward the male demographic, but to leave females entirely unrepresented instantly provokes a bias in data. Furthermore, subjects were selected based upon a lose combination of self-identification and suggestion.

The first participant’s criterion was to find a player that frequently plays frustratingly hard games. To ensure the collection of critical data, subjects were asked to nominate other players who routinely played games which were considered hard or on hard difficulty.

Melhart, D. (2018, April). Game Studies. Retrieved September, 30, from http://gamestudies.org/1801/articles/david_melhart p4

Combinations of selective and snowballing were used in an attempt ameliorate selection bias, but with such a small sample size and demographic limitation, there is a severe weakness in representation. Enough to consider the entire data set poisoned.

Know Your Role

Mr. Melhart is quick to address the limitations of his research. Namely, the already cited issues with selection size and potential bias it brings to his dataset. Mr. Melhart also addresses an unspoken limitation – this study is by its very nature a prototype. It results cannot stand alone, but is a potential model for more extensive studies of its kind to follow.

The study presented through this paper has its limitations. The small sample size and inductive nature of the research make it akin to a prototype project. Nevertheless, the results of the study are promising and point towards new directions. Thus, the model is worth further development and research.

Melhart, D. (2018, April). Game Studies. Retrieved September, 30, from http://gamestudies.org/1801/articles/david_melhart p18

Mr. Melhart further notes that his research does not differentiate between varying psychologies of player immersion within the game’s reality – the negentropic psychics states, though he believes it has little effect on the data presented.

In general, Mr. Melhart appears to be fully aware of the various merits and detriments of his research. If there are limits Mr. Melhart missed, they have passed beyond my own notice.

Use It or Lose It

To apply or discount Mr. Melhart in my own works is an easy choice to make. This article is both unique and through. It blazes a trail for others to follow; doing so with full acknowledgment there is plenty of roughage left behind. I would proudly look to Mr. Melhart as a source of data and inspiration.