Next time you feel your fragging skills are below par, crank up the saturation on your screen. According to researchers at University of Gävle and Malmö University in Sweden, the colour of the gameplay environment has an impact on gamers' play performance. Igor Knez and Simon Niedenthal ran a digital game with two hues on two groups and found that players with the red condition fared better. They reported their findings in CyberPsychology and Behavior last April.
From the abstract:
As a means of extending the significance of findings in experimental psychology and nonvisual psychological lighting research to digital game research, the present study was designed to investigate the impact of warm (reddish) and cool (bluish) simulated illumination in digital game worlds on game users' affect and play performance. In line with some previous findings, we predicted that lighting in a digital game world might, as in the real world, differently influence the nonvisual psychological mechanisms of affect, which in turn might enhance or impair the players' performance. It was shown that the players performed best and fastest in a game world lit with a warm (reddish) as compared to a cool (bluish) lighting. The former color of lighting also induced the highest level of pleasantness in game users. A regression analysis indicated tentatively that it was the level of pleasantness induced by the warm lighting that enhanced the players' better performance in that digital game world. It was also shown that high- as opposed to medium- or low-skilled players engage almost 2.5 times more per week in game playing. Given their skill, they performed significantly faster and felt significantly calmer and more relaxed in doing so.
Ironically, many competitive shooters have the steely blue of spaceship innards. Just imagine the pwnage if the artists chose a red palate instead?
