The Effects of Social Exclusion on Play Experience and Hostile Cognitions in
Digital Games
Players' Motivations in Games
/
Birk, Max V.
/
Buttlar, Benjamin
/
Bowey, Jason T.
/
Poeller, Susanne
/
Thomson, Shelby C.
/
Baumann, Nicola
/
Mandryk, Regan L.
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.3007-3019
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: The social nature of multiplayer games provides compelling play experiences
that are dynamic, unpredictable, and satisfying; however, playing digital games
with others can result in feeling socially excluded. There are several known
harmful effects of ostracism, including on cognition and the interpretation of
social information. To investigate the effects of social exclusion in the
context of a multiplayer game, we developed and validated a social exclusion
paradigm that we embedded in an online game. Called Operator Challenge, our
paradigm influenced feelings of social exclusion and access to hostile
cognitions (measured through a word-completion task). In addition, the degree
of experienced belonging predicted player enjoyment, effort, and the number of
hostile words completed; however, the experience measures did not mediate the
relationship between belonging and access to hostile cognitions. Our work
facilitates understanding the causes and effects of exclusion, which is
important for the study of player experience in multiplayer games.
