“We won” vs. “They lost”: Exploring ego-enhancement and self-preservation tendencies in the context of video game play
Highlights
► People are known to engage in ego-enhancement and self-preservation behaviors in the context of sports fandom. ► We examined if these same tendencies would be present in the context of team video game play. ► Results indicate that both tendencies do occur in relation to team video game play. ► In addition, a relationship between perceived avatar resemblance and emotions was also discovered.
Introduction
Recently, a group of students gathered at a Media Lab for an impromptu Madden NFL tournament. The two-on-two match-up resulted in a lop-sided victory for one of the teams. “We won!” exclaimed one of the winning players. As the losing pair walked out of the room, a student not yet privy to the outcome, asked one of the members of the losing team how they did. “They lost” said the gamer, gesturing to the score of his defeated football team, still onscreen.
This type of reaction is not uncommon. Video game players will often take ownership of their winning actions when appropriate, but will distance themselves from their own actions when they have lost. Anecdotally, video game players are known to engage in this type of “blame it on the game” response, in spite of the fact that they themselves were controlling and manipulating the action onscreen at the time of the loss.
The following paragraphs will examine literature on the theoretical underpinnings of ego-enhancement and self-preservation behaviors, and demonstrate how these concepts are relevant to video game play. An experiment will then be reported to empirically test whether or not participants exhibit ego-enhancement and self-preservation behaviors, which can occur in the context of a team-based, video game competition.
Section snippets
Literature review
The tendency to affiliate with those who are successful has been studied in social science and is referred to as “basking in reflected glory” or BIRGing [5]. Cialdini et al. [5] define BIRGing as the: “tendency for people to publicize a connection with another person who has been successful” (p. 366, italics in original). Others [1] have included the apparent motive element by defining it as “the tendency to publicize one’s association with a successful or other group, even when that
Method
A 2 × 2, fully-crossed factorial experiment was conducted to test the hypotheses, with game outcome (win vs. loss) and unrelated task performance (better than average vs. less than average) as the manipulated independent variables. After completing the unrelated trivia exam and playing the experimental video game, participants filled out a pencil-and-paper questionnaire which measured avatar resemblance, ego-enhancement and self-preservation tendencies, as well as game enjoyment. Subsequent to
Results
To test H1 and H2, two factorial ANOVAs were run to examine the main effects and potential interactions between the two independent variables on the 5-item ego-enhancement scale and the 3-item Self-preservation scale separately. To test H3, separate bivariate correlation analyses were conducted between the 5-item enhancement measure and videogame enjoyment, and the 3-item self-preservation measure and videogame enjoyment. To test H4, a bivariate correlation was computed examining the
Discussion
This study was designed to determine if ego-enhancement and self-preservation behaviors occur in the context of video game play. Overall, the pattern of results suggests evidence that the study of these two constructs is viable in the arena of video game play. The following paragraphs will explore theoretical and practical implications of this study’s findings, as well as identify limitations and avenues for future research.
The first hypothesis proposed that those who won the tournament would
Acknowledgement
This research is supported by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation under the WCU (World Class University) program funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, South Korea (Grant No. R31-2008-000-10062-0).
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