Effects of Motion Speed on the Impressions of Monster Characters Appearing in the Video Game Dragon Quest

Dragon Quest is one of the most popular series of video games. In this series, a player travels the fantasy world, battling with various cute and unique monsters in the itinerary. Not only the appearance of the monsters is designed as cute, but also the motions of them are designated to be perceived as cute in recent titles. The present study focuses on the attacking motions of the monsters. The attacking motions included downward swinging of the sword, downward punching motion, filling the power in their body, and so on. The attacking motions of 21 monsters that appeared in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince were selected, and their speed were varied in seven steps; the speed multiplied by 0.5 to the original speed (x0.5), x0.63, x0.8, 1.0(original speed), x1.26, x1.58 and x2.0, and in total 147 motion stimuli were prepared. Ten participants watched each stimulus displayed on a screen and were requested to rate the impressions using semantic differential method. The mean values for the 24 seven-step bipolar scales were analyzed by factor analysis. The results of the analysis showed that the impression space for the motions were spanned by quickness, powerfulness and pleasantness with the cumulative contribution rate of 0.78. The results showed that the quickness did not increased but the powerfulness and pleasantness largely declined when the speed was faster than the original for most of the monsters. The quickness decreased largely but powerfulness and pleasantness did not change largely when the speed was slower than the original. The powerfulness was largely determined by the size of the monsters and the pleasantness was determined by the appearance of the monsters, regardless of the motion speed. Moreover, multiple-regression analyses were performed using the degrees of cuteness, preferability and coolness as dependent variables and the factor scores of the stimuli in the quickness, powerfulness and pleasantness as independent valuables. The results of the analyses showed that the pleasant stimuli were perceived as cute and preferable. Both a large monster with a slow motion and a small monster with a fast motion were perceived as cool. It was concluded that the speed of the motions was set at the fastest level where the monsters were perceived as pleasant and powerful in the game.