Playing for the thrill and skill. Quiz games as means for mood and competence repair

ABSTRACT

Recent studies have found that digital games can be used to improve the players’ mood, especially after emotionally unpleasant experiences. We introduce competence repair as an extension of previous work on mood repair. To investigate the effects of digital games on both mood and competence repair, we conducted 3 studies using quiz games. In the quasi-experimental Study 1 (N = 143), we manipulated the necessity for repair via a false feedback task (positive vs. negative), and looked at the impact of in-game success (victory vs. defeat). In the experimental Studies 2 (N = 91) and 3 (N = 109), we aimed at conceptually replicating and extending the findings on the impact of in-game success by varying participants’ success over a series of 4 matches (Study 2: close game outcomes, Study 3: clear victory/defeat). The results of these studies indicate that the efficacy of digital games for mood repair, as well as competence repair, depends on the necessity for repair, as well as success in the game. However, competence repair occurred even after participants were defeated repeatedly in a series of close matches. These results are discussed in light of the potential of digital games for fulfilling (previously thwarted) psychological needs.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr Benny Liebold for creating the prototype version of the Quizclash replica used in Study 2 and 3. We also thank our research students who helped us during data collection: Emma Bosler, Kati Cruyt, Elena Grün, Brigitte Helmes-Weber, Sarah Joos, Jesse Khala, Alexander Müschen, Lisa Scharer, Mike Schreiber, and Eva Spexard.

Notes

1. In the original draft manuscript, we formulated and tested two research questions, asking “how participants’ mood and perceived competence change after playing a quiz game depending on whether players previously received positive or negative feedback,” as well as “how success in the game influences changes in mood and perceived competence.” Based on a convincing argument from one of the reviewers about the importance of semantic affinity in MMT, which we completely agreed with, we decided to extend our theoretical framing for Study 1, resulting in this set of hypotheses.

2. Aside from these measures, some additional constructs (e.g., participants’ enjoyment or their motivation to continue solving similar and dissimilar tasks for an alleged other study) were assessed and analyzed during each experiment. Because these additional constructs were not the main focus of our studies, we decided to report our rationale for including them, the employed measures, as well as results from statistical analyses in Supplemental Material B.

3. The full scales and the respective descriptive statistics for all relevant measures can be found in Supplemental Material A.

4. In the original draft, we conducted a 2 × 2 MANCOVA with feedback type and in-game success as between-subjects factors. As one of the reviewers correctly pointed out, this analysis was not suited to properly test the assumptions of MMT. The major issue with this analysis was that it was impossible to assess the effect of semantic affinity as the interaction effects according to MMT predictions cancel each other out. However, as game outcome is also part of the grouping variable semantic affinity, the multivariate results for the interaction effect between those two are identical to those for the main effect of feedback type.

5. The samples differed by age, F(2,340) = 19.56, p < .001, η_p² = .10, and biological sex, χ²(2, N = 343) = 8.88, p = .012, Cramer’s V = .16, as participants in Study 1 were older and the sample was more equally distributed in terms of sex compared to Studies 2 and 3.

Additional information

Funding

The first author, Kevin Koban, was supported by the German Research Foundation [GRK 1780/1].