Playing with power: Power poses affect enjoyment, presence, controller responsiveness, and arousal when playing natural motion-controlled video games

Though playing with natural versus traditional game controllers affects game experiences, studies have not investigated how power poses affect the experience of playing natural controlled video games. Participants keeping powerful poses experienced increased enjoyment, presence, and controller responsiveness compared with those holding powerless poses. Congruent with self-perception and automatic activation models, mediation analyses uncovered direct effects of power poses and also indirect effects in which power poses increased power feelings, which in turn were associated with higher enjoyment, presence, and controller responsiveness but reduced arousal. This provides initial evidence for how physical poses affect people's experiences with natural game interfaces, and highlight basic self-perception and automatic activation mechanisms behind the effect.