Prosocial rewards in competitive games

Abstract

The video game industry is large, and millions of individuals and groups play competitive games every month. However, through previous research which has shown competitive games to encourage antisocial behaviour in players, an antisocial stigma has been applied to competition in games, while cooperation in games has been shown to encourage prosocial behaviour.

This research aims to find links between competitive games and prosocial rewards and show that cooperation is not the only way that games can encourage prosocial rewards. Two competitive games are developed as part of practise-led research and self-evaluated to see whether prosocial rewards were attained by players through engagement with the games, and if so, how they were attained. The intent of this research is to show that prosocial behaviour has a relationship with prosocial rewards, and to suggest how future research can improve the understanding of this relationship.