Back in my childhood days, there was only one computer and my big brother played it the most and so me and my little brother silently watched him play Doom, Warcraft, Fallout (listening along with The Verve’s Bitter Symphony) among other early 1990′s games.
It turns out to enhance my brother’s gaming abilities according to research by Nicholas Bowman (West Virginia University), Rene Weber (University of California – Santa Barbara), Ron Tamborini & John Sherry (Michigan State University). This article published in Media Psychology conducted a study in the vein of an established social psychological phenomenon called social facilitation, proposed by Robert Zajonc in the 1960′s.
Abstract
The current study implements the drive theory of social facilitation to explain the influence of audience presence in video game play. This integration is an important one for research aiming to understand the experience of video game play, as the social aspect of video game play is a relevant dimension of the technology often ignored in research on gaming experiences. The study finds a significant positive association between non-gaming cognitive abilities (such as hand?eye coordination and mental rotation ability) and performance at a first-person shooter. Data also support the social facilitation hypothesis: Game play in the presence of a physical audience significantly predicts increased game performance. Social facilitation effects are only found for low-challenge games where the drive-inducing capacity of task challenge is minimized. Resultant influences on game enjoyment are less clear.
The International Communication Association’s conference has started at London, but I was not invited. If I was, I would have been live blogging the events. Continue reading



