Virtual world, real emotions

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I provide another example for the real emotions computer game players experience while playing a game.

The emotions we experience when we play a computer game alone or together with friends are, aside from being in the state of flow, the most motivating as well as rewarding elements that keep us playing the game. Furthermore, those emotions are the reason why experiences we make in a virtual world are a real thing that can even affect our real world.

Although I already discussed this topic quite a lot, I like to provide another example of experiencing positive emotions and social connections by playing a computer game.

Last Sunday, the fourth season of the Conelanders Assetto Corsa Racing League has ended and resulted in a few emotional moments for some of the players participating in this league. In contrast to the previous seasons, the fourth season offered the opportunity to the players to form teams in order help each other and to experience another competitive aspect of playing a racing simulation.

Depending on the motivation of a team, the members met for practice sessions, discussed race strategies and supported each other to overcome a bad result. As a result of this, team members not only shared important moments but also developed friendships among each other throughout the 6-race long season. Naturally, after having worked together as a team over such a significant amount of time, participating in the last race was an emotional moment for some of the participants and can even have resulted in the shared goal of continuing to play together.

Of course, this is just a small example of the broad variety of different ways how computer games can connect players from all over the world and allow them to share emotions as well as special moments. The exciting thing about this phenomenon is that the emotions and friendships caused by events taking place in a virtual world are real for the players. In the end, the virtual world becomes an extension of the real world and stops being just game that is played for entertaining purposes.