In order to understand the way that the design of games influences the attitiudes of their players we chose to examine several games with in different genres in order to insure a broad picture of videogames as a whole. To this end the games we chose were, Call of Duty, a fast paced first person shooter, League of Legends, a free to play battle arena game, and Starcraft II, an extremely competitive real time strategy game.
To explore the ways in which the design of these games influences the attitudes of their players we not only played them with a critical eye but, looked closely at what the communties were actually saying on forums and other community sites, additionally we observed other individuals playing the games in question in order to closely examine the player.
In playing all three games we played in a manner deliberately designed to evoke frustration in our teammates and opponents so as to examine what most effectively brought on the phenomenon of "CoD rage." In doing so we were able to discover a link between the sources of frustration in all three games. In all cases the most frustrasting strategies were those that most greatly reduced other player's respective senses of agency.
This phenomenon was most evident in SC2 wherein we executed two seperate strategies, both designed to eliminate our opponent approximately ten minutes into the game. the key difference between these strategies for our purposes was that one kills the opponent outright while the other leaves them in a position where they percieve the possibility of a comeback. The former strategy was one of the few ways we were able to evoke a negative response from the normally friendly Starcraft community while the latter evoke friendly banter and compliments on a game well played.
We went on to determine that a similar phenomenon existed in the analogous strategies of our other two games leading us to the conclusion that the sense of agency that we observed was critical to people's enjoyment but that at the same time agency require more focus from the player and therefore can potentially limit the popular appeal of a game. We therefore concluded that games such as league of legends that strike a balance between agency and accesibility are able to reach an extremely broad audience.
The following link provides our complete presentation
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vG91YbjJuf9r-xqN9YkV92q9YjcBNEti...
Our project was an examination of online videogame communities with the intent of determining why certain games have a reputation for being far kinder than others. In our research we found that the sense of agency created by a game is closely linked to the happiness and therefore kindness of its players.