What makes male gamers angry, sad, amused, and enthusiastic while playing violent video games?

Authors:

• Maciej Behnke,
• Patrycja Chwiłkowska,
• Łukasz Dominik Kaczmarek

Abstract

Gaming elicits strong emotional responses. However, little is known about which situations within the gameplay elicit specific emotions. Thus, we aimed to identify which gaming situations elicit positive and negative emotions. We asked Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gamers (N = 652) to recall and write about a situation when they felt amused, angry, enthusiastic, or sad. In our analysis, we used semantic coding and affective words analysis using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). We found that gamers described emotional situations (e.g., clutch, victory, or hacking) that we clustered into 12 broader categories (e.g., positive performance outcomes, underperforming, and technical issues). Gamers reported similar (rather than specific) situations for anger and sadness and similar for amusement and enthusiasm. We documented a wider than usually considered range of positive and negative emotions related to gaming along with specific gaming themes that produce these emotions. These findings contribute to a broader and more specific (events-based) understanding of the emotional aspects of video gaming.