CC4262 Emotional Engineering: Influencing Emotion Task
Hello everyone. This is 4th task for our Emotional Engineering module. We were given a task, in a group of 2, select a game that none of us ever played before. Then, by using Yerkes-Dodson Law and Csikszentmihalyi Theory model explain on how the game has successfully helped to increase your performance, whether it was able to create a state of flow and to what extent did it damage your performance.
So for this game me, Aiman, and my friend, Izzat Jo, chose a mobile game called Survivor.io developed by Habby.
Survivor.io is a mobile zombie survival game. In the game, the player moves the character to dodge the incoming zombie waves in a random pattern, while the character automatically attacks the zombie waves using their weapons and other gadgets until they defeat the three bosses in every chapter.
The duration of each stage of the game is 15 minutes. Every 5 minutes, the bosses will spawn, and the final boss will spawn once the time reaches 15 minutes. So before that, Players need to upgrade their weapons fast.
Gadgets are separated into two categories, that are weapons and supplies. Weapons are the things that are used to either protect the player’s character or kill the zombies. Supplies are used to improve the player’s stats and weapons. Each weapon and supply can be obtained and upgraded when the player fills up the bar to full with gems that are dropped when defeating the zombies and they will appear at random. Supplies are also used to evolve the weapons to their final form, e.g. Force Field will evolve to My Domain.
There are also sections where players can choose clothes and weapons to equip before starting the game, and another section where players can use the game money to increase their character's parameters. This is for the player's character's base stats.
The game have stages. Other stages will only be available once players clear the current stage.
Based on Yerkes Dodson Law and Csikszentmihalyi Theory Models
The game was advertised on Instagram almost everyday whenever I, Aiman, browsed through the stories. It kept on showing specific gadgets called Guardians and Force Field, and it aroused his interest. I recommended this game for this task. The first time I and Izzat played the game, it was quite difficult because we still don’t know the mechanics of the game. The game is quite addictive because of how the gadgets are upgraded to defeat the zombies.
Based on Yerkes Dodson Law, the game arouses us to play because of the way they defeat the zombies.
Based on Csikszentmihalyi’s Theory, our boredom and anxiety create a flow that we played the game anytime and anywhere, without noticing our surroundings, and it made us happy whenever we cleared the stage and move to the next round. When fighting the Bosses, it made us focus on controlling our character and gives us a sense of anxiety whenever the Bosses chases us.
After getting used to the game mechanics, we now know how to dodge the zombies’ attacks and choose which weapons and supplies we want to acquire and upgrade.
Damaging our performance:
1. Overtime after we already know what to do, what effects each upgrade can do, or links to the other gadgets, it becomes frustrating sometimes because the upgrades appear at random.
2. Over the time period, our performances became slower and tiring.
3. The game has a gacha system, where players can get much stronger equipment to increase stats, but it's hard because there are so many to choose from but no instruction on how to use them, leading to frustration and anxiety.
4. Too much playing the game will cause us to forget our surroundings.
5. The flow was created when we felt bored, anxiety and in order to get out of it, we played the game. Because of that, the game is very addictive, and we keep on playing it until we forget our problems.
Disclaimer: All of this is for educational purposes only
