Entertainment

1
Entertainment

• The main motivation

2
Study of media entertainment

• Only in the last 15 years or so has entertainment
  as a media experience received much academic
  attention
• Zillmanns work in the 1990s and 2000s is the
  main source of knowledge

3
What is entertainment?

• The general idea is that entertainment relates to
  intrinsic satisfaction of media exposure
• Enjoyment of some sort
• May be affective (liking)
• May be cognitive (gain pleasure from learning,
  fantasizing, etc.)

4
Enjoyment

• The main idea here is that some form of positive
  feeling is generated by exposure to media content
• Even in the case of negative content, release
  from the negative feelings through a happy ending
  is considered a source of enjoyment

5
What is enjoyable?

• Transportation into narrative worlds
• (Green, Brock Kaufman)
• Loss of attention to the here and now concurrent
  with an increase in the feeling that one is in
  another place and time
• Transportation is a desired state
• Disappointment when audience member just
  couldnt get into it
• Anger when someone is talking during the movie

6
Transportation

• People are drawn to scary worlds and situations
  and not just happy ones
• Stories enable recipients to identify and mingle
  with risk takersto live life even more fully.
  Just as more story heroes survive risks, the
  story recipient can see herself as similarly
  invulnerable. Even if the story protagonists are
  doomed, the audience member is safe.
• Sensation seeking?

7

• Transportation may have advantages as it allows
  the audience member to think about past selves or
  to construct possible futures.
• It also may reflect the need to understand others

8

• Transportation allows people to leave their
  real-world worries behind
• Especially valuable to those who focus on their
  own shortcomings or discrepancies from an ideal
  self
• Study showed that those who had just received
  feedback saying they had failed watched more
  television

9

• Transportation allows people to expand their
  horizons
• Creates an openness to new information
• Identity play
• Vicarious experience without associated risk
• Learning

10

• Enjoyment through connections with characters
• Transportation into a narrative world may be a
  prerequisite for identification with fictional
  characters. Central to the process of
  identification is the adoption of a characters
  thoughts, goals emotions, and behaviors, and such
  vicarious experience requires the reader or
  viewer to leave his or her physical, social, and
  psychological reality behind in favor of the
  world of the narrative and its inhabitants.
• Parasocial interaction (illusion of intimacy)
• Disposition theory (just world)
• Mood management (discussed before)

11
Influences on enjoyment

• Craftsmanship
• Detail
• Situational influences
• Distraction
• Experimentally instructing viewers to focus on
  surface detail of a narrative
• Fact v. fiction
• Ambiguous findingsmay be that narrative
  plausibility is the most important
• Interactivity
• May enhance flow

12
Emotional stimulation

• Emotion management
• Emotional stimulation or relaxation can be
  actively regulated by varying the strength and
  target of dispositional alignments based on the
  distance between characters and the self
  (Zillmann, 1994). In this perspective, pleasure
  and pain, as well as arousal and relaxation, are
  neither mutually exclusive nor polar opposites.
  Instead, enjoyment is seen as relief from
  overstimulation (through relaxation) or
  understimulation (through arousal).

13
Flow

• Csikszentmihalyis study of artists and the
  intense pleasure of their immersion in their
  tasks led to the concept of flow and its
  application in media contexts.

14
Flow

• Flow is a self-motivating experience
  characterized by
• Intense and focused concentration on what one is
  doing in the present moment,
• Merging of action and awareness,
• Loss of reflective self-consciousness (i.e., loss
  of awareness of oneself as a social actor),
• A sense that one can control ones actions that
  is a sense that one can, in principle, deal with
  the situation because one knows how to respond to
  whatever happens next,

15

• Distortion of temporal experience (typically, a
  sense that time has passed faster than normal),
  and
• Experience of the activity as intrinsically
  rewarding, such that often the end goal is just
  an excuse for the process.
• (Nakamura Csikszentmihalyi, 2002, p. 90 quoted
  in Sherry, 2004)

16

• Anxiety Flow
  Boredom

Difficulty of the medium
Skill in medium use