Examining Video Games’ Power to Inspire Prosociality through Self-Transcendent Emotions

• In Event: Mass Communicating With Power: Exploring Media’s Capacity to Promote Moral Emotions and Inspire Prosociality

Abstract

Self-transcendent emotions play a vital role in movies' capacity to provide a “meaningful” entertainment experience and inspire prosociality (Oliver, Hartmann & Wooley, 2012; Lai, Haidt & Nosek, 2013). Video games can also elicit feelings of appreciation (Oliver et al., 2015), but due to games’ interactivity and competition focused design, the importance of the disinterested emotions—awe, admiration, and elevation—is questionable. On the one hand, video games' immersive potential should increase players' experienced intensity of emotional elicitors (e.g., first-hand witnessing virtues due to identification). Thus, games may be even more capable of evoking self-transcendent emotions than non-interactive media. On the other hand, elicitors could be perceived as meaningless due to games’ simulational character (e.g., exceptional skills of a character equals cheating). In this presentation, I will discuss the significance of awe, admiration, and elevation in video games and the resulting implications for video games’ power to inspire prosociality.

Author

• Daniel Possler, Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media