Narrative impact and narrative engagement in players of violent video games

As a contribution to the debate on narratives in video game, this paper investigates the influence of the narrative in video games on a cognitive and emotional level; more specifically the study concentrated on aggression and violent video games. Thus, the paper assesses if the information from the narrative in a video games has any impact on the player’s feelings about their moral conduct. Additionally, the study checked the properties of the narrative engagement scale (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2008). The empirical investigation was a one-factor experimental design, manipulation the narrative complexity (complex/simple). Results show a mean difference for guilt and negative affect between the narrative conditions, suggesting that narratives are meaningful beside the ludological factors of a video game. Narrative engagement showed ambiguous results for the dependent variables, but was stable in its use in video game research. The media independence of narrative engagement was demonstrated.